Abstract

This essay offers new ways of understanding the connection between literary studies and community engagement by focusing not just on the content of literary study, but on one of the central methods. I argue that the practice of “close reading” a literary text—Katherine Mansfield’s The Garden Party in particular—can illustrate the integral relationship between a discipline’s content, its methods, and its relationship to community engagement. Close reading pushes students to appreciate more than a literary text’s stories and themes; it impels them to be systematic about the ways in which they arrive at meanings, self-awareness, and social insights, and to recognize the cultural practices, assumptions, and rhetorical structures in which these emerge.

Journal
Reflections: A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric
Published
2018-04-01
DOI
10.59236/rjv18i1pp132-157
CompPile
Open Access
OA PDF Gold
Topics
Export

Citation Context

Cited by in this index (0)

No articles in this index cite this work.

References (25) · 2 in this index

  1. The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy
  2. Higher Learning in the Nation's Service
  3. Philosophy of Literary Form
  4. Literature and Service-Learning: Not Strange Bedfellows
  5. Learning in the Plural: Essays on the Humanities and Public Life
Show all 25 →
  1. Virtuous Arguments
  2. Katherine Mansfield's World
    Journal of New Zealand Literature
  3. The Humanities and the Public Soul
    Antipode  
  4. The Close and the Concrete: Aesthetic Formalism in Context
    New Literary History  
  5. College Composition and Communication
  6. Is There a Place for Service Learning in Literary Studies?
    Profession  
  7. Service Learning and Literary Studies in English
  8. Pedagogy
  9. Toxic Charity: How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help (And How to Reverse it)
  10. The Garden Party
  11. The Evolution of College English: From the Puritans to the Postmoderns
  12. Conjectures on World Literature
    New Left Review  
  13. Morrison, Toni. 1973. Sula. New York: Vintage.
  14. The Irony of Service: Charity, Project and Social Change in Service-Learning
    Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning
  15. Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities
  16. Against Close Reading
  17. There Is No Case for the Humanities
    Chronicle of Higher Education
  18. Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in the Age of World Literature
  19. Interview with Bill Moyer
  20. A Room of One's Own