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The ouroborus
As you can tell from a glance at the Contents, An Introduction to Literature includes practical advice about reading and responding to literature and writing analytical papers, advice that comes directly from our experience not only as readers and writers but also as teachers. This experience derives from classrooms, from conferences with students, and from assignments we have given, read, responded to, and graded. We have learned from our experiences and have done our best to give you the tools that will help you make yourself a more perceptive reader and a more careful, cogent writer. An Introduction to Literature. Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Second Printing. SYLVAN BARNET. Tufts University…
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Truth is the aim
What are the aims of the writers of literature? Well, one of our authors, Jamaica Kincaid in various interviews mentions her “insistence on truth,” even if—especially if—the truth is painful. It is not unusual for writers to insist that in their fictions they present truths, they tell it as it is, they wake us up, they seek to make us take off our rose-colored glasses, and to make us see and feel reality. Joseph Conrad, for example, said: “My task . . . is by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see.” An Introduction to Literature.…
