Writing About Literature

Course Features

• Assignments: written (no examples)

Course Description

Students, scholars, bloggers, reviewers, fans, and book-group members write about literature, but so do authors themselves. Through the ways they engage with their own texts and those of other artists, sampling, remixing, and rethinking texts and genres, writers reflect on and inspire questions about the creative process. We will examine Mary Shelley's reshaping of Milton's Paradise Lost, German fairy tales, tales of scientific discovery, and her husband's poems to make Frankenstein (1818, 1831); Melville's redesign of a travel narrative into a Gothic novella in Benito Cereno (1856); and Alison Bechdel's rewriting of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) in her graphic novel Fun Home (2006). Showings of film versions of some of these works will allow us to project forward in the remixing process as well.

Other OCW Versions

OCW has published multiple versions of this subject.

• 21L.000J Writing About Literature: Writing About Love (Fall 2015)

Archived versions:

• 21L.000J Writing About Literature (Fall 2006)
• 21L.010 Writing About Literature (Fall 2002)

Course Collections

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Find Courses by Topic

• Literature
• Literature > Criticism