You know how to read, but reading, like any act, can be performed in a multitude of ways. Sometimes literature is presented as a kind of riddle wherein texts are separated into two levels:

The plot, which contains the literal events in the narrative
A secret, coded meaning that the author attempts to communicate to smart people through abstruse symbols

This is a limited way to frame reading, and it's not our approach in this class. (It's also a bit of a straw man of how literary analysis is taught.) In this class (and hopefully beyond), we will engage with our reading by viewing each text as a kind of artifact. If one day you found something that you didn't recognize, how might you learn more about it?

You could figure out what it does.
You could see if it's unique or if there are others like it.
You could find out if it's in some category (or categories) of things.
You could see how it interacts with other stuff.
You could take it apart and find out how it works.
You could evaluate and compare what others have said about it.
You could ascertain something about the people who made and use it, and gain insight into their lives and culture.
etc.

We can do this with texts just as we could with any object. This is being engaged by exploring not just what a text says but what it does, how it does it, and what that might mean. To do this, we can look at things inside the text itself:

plot
characters
themes
settings
language
structure
etc.

We also can look at things outside of the text:

other texts that seem to connect with it
what others have said about the text
the author
the historical and cultural circumstances present when the text was produced
etc.

By looking thoroughly, we can start to see patterns and contrasts. We can find out more about how the text is a result of some things and a cause of others. We can learn about the many ways it functions. This practice is called literary analysis. Notice that this is a different kind of criticism than watching a movie (or going to a restaurant, or hearing a song, or reading a book) and stating an opinion about whether you enjoyed it or not. As we can see, that would be a very different task.

Luckily, we're not starting from scratch when we do literary analysis. We already know lots of stuff, and we've been exposed to countless texts. We'll also explicitly and implicitly hone our ability to engage. Additionally, people have already done explorations into our and other texts. This means that we can evaluate what they have said, which will help us determine how we want to add to the conversation. We also can see the methods others have used to look at texts, and learn from their processes.

When you do literary analysis extensively, the kinds of questions you tend to ask about texts start to fit into groups. These different categories can be called critical approaches or schools of criticism. For example, if you tend to ask questions about how gender was represented in texts, you might be interested in Feminist Criticism. If you find yourself curious about how texts reflect the author's or a culture's state of mind, you might be interested in Psychoanalytic Criticism. If you are drawn to how financial or political issues show up in texts or how they surround their production, you might be interested in Marxist Criticism. If you're interested in the different ways texts use language to make meaning, you might be interested in Rhetoric, Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, or Semiotics. There are many, many other approaches. You can get a general overview of some historically significant ones from Purdue University's Online Writing Lab (OWL) or from English professor Dr. Samantha Blackmon.

Ultimately, approaches are tool chests or heuristics; they are bundles of relevant questions and ways to answer them that can be classified into categories, but they are not magical nor written in stone. All approaches provide certain ways to examine texts and certain lines of thought to pursue, but no approach is objectively correct or true. This seems weird, because shouldn't there ultimately be a right answer? At the end, can't we say what a text is really about? Perhaps not, but that seems to be the case about everything.

Imagine if everyone were observing the same building from different perspectives: tourists walking around it in winter; employees working inside it in spring; a cartographer looking down at it through a camera in an airplane at night; a city planer examining its blueprints; a developer looking up its costs and revenues in a spreadsheet; a skateboarder finding the best lines through its outdoor plaza; a burglar casing points of ingress; birds seeking the best spot to build a nest; rain running down its surface; a homeless person seeking a warm, hidden spot by its HVAC exhaust. Ask yourself: which of these perspectives is the real, "true" one? They all give us valid information, but no single one, or even all of them together, can really claim to capture the whole building.

That's the catch: there doesn't seem to be a way to shift outside of the universe and view things in any wholly comprehensive, authentically true way. We're always standing somewhere, looking with something and through something. We always have our own subjectivities that may not be universally shared. So, we do our best to present evidence showing that our perspectives are valid, knowing that other perspectives, even ones that contradict us, might be equally valid. This doesn't mean that all observations are equivalent. Without evidence, we wouldn't believe someone who claimed that the building was really a tree, or that it was made of cheese, or that it was in a different city, or that is was put there by aliens.

So it is with texts. There will always be multiple, even conflicting, results from our acts of analysis. Remember that there is not a single real, true, hidden answer to uncover; there is an infinite amount of relevant data that can be found. However, this doesn't mean that all perspectives on things are equally valuable; BS and shower thoughts aren't what we seek. What we want are the strongest, most evidenced cases we can assemble. These will give us productive insight. We want to be able to prove that what we claim about a text is valid. Assertions with good, concrete, specific evidence are stronger than those without it.

In this course, we will work toward strong, evidenced positions about texts. We'll take them apart and see how they work; we'll connect them with other texts, people, and cultures. That's our goal with engaged reading.