An Introduction to the Analysis of Fiction

by Michael K. Walonen

To Lorien and JR, for making home just that.

A Note to the Instructor (or Potential Instructor)

This textbook offers students a practical introduction to the close reading-based analysis of prose narrative (fiction). It takes as its audience a broad range of undergraduate students of different cultural backgrounds, different levels of readings proficiency, and different levels of past exposure to and fundamental intellectual interest in reading and analyzing works of fiction, particularly of the non-popular variety. These students—our students—represent a society that is becoming increasingly what some sociologists term “post-literate,” which is to say not deeply invested in the written word, particularly in its more complex manifestations, as a means of information transmission and idea exploration. But this is not the same thing as illiterate, and we humanists certainly have a vital role to play in this society in helping to cultivate in our students a capacity to slow down and analyze how things (in the present case a particular form of expressive cultural production) operate in all of their nuanced complexity. And in doing so we cannot take for granted that our students of today are bringing to the proverbial table the same forms of cultural capital as earlier generations – in this case, a “basic” sense of some of the ways that narrative communicates. So if this textbook errs at times, it will be on the side of stating what to you or I might be obvious and it will for the most part eschew the realms of somewhat esoteric “high theory,” from Formalism through Deconstruction on into today’s various branches of ‘area studies.” that has predominated within our academic discipline of English over the past decades (interested students will tackle these when they enroll in the Introduction to Textual Analysis-type class that serves as the “gateway” to most English major programs of study).

So this textbook is not for the would-be specialist – it is practical and general, for use in a common core sort of course on fiction. It is also not a literary anthology. It is an attempt to address the high cost of college textbooks by providing a free introduction to the analysis of fiction, but because of the nature of copyright law, it includes no works of fiction itself. However, it does not need to: there is an abundance of incredible works of fiction available for free online: public domain works from the earlier 20th century or before, works from periodicals like The New Yorker made available for free online, and works that various academic institutions have reproduced online through fair academic use (not to mention what you could put on reserve physically or electronically through your own institution’s library). So obviously a course in fiction needs to use works of fiction—go use whatever texts you prefer online and use this textbook to provide the methodological content that is generally not available anywhere for free. At the end of most chapters I will make some suggestions regarding fictional texts I’ve found particularly useful when it comes to exploring to topic(s) at hand, but you are obviously free to take or leave those recommendations as you like.

As a final note, I want to suggest why genre-based introduction to “literature” courses of the kind this textbook is written to accompany continue to be invaluable for the undergraduate student, even as they have been largely replaced in the common core curricula of some institutions (mistakenly, I feel) by survey courses on national literatures. 1) Genre-based courses encourage more formal, close reading-based analysis of texts because they don’t have to be as concerned with covering cultural movements (like Romanticism or Modernism) and national histories. This is particularly useful for students coming to college without a strong background in textual analysis and the study of literature in general. 2) The nation state as an imagined community (c.f. Benedict Anderson) allows us to see some cultural trends and blinds us to others. As an organizing principle of academic study, it can be particularly stifling and limiting in an era of increasing transnationalness. The national literature surveys tend to reinforce the myopic curricular focus on British and U.S. American cultures and lead to the exclusion of invaluable authors from other parts of the world like Abdelrahman Munif and Arundhati Roy – and even authors “closer to home” who fall between the cracks of national traditions, authors like Claude McKay (is he a Jamaican, British, or U.S. American author?) or Margaret Atwood (Canada doesn’t generally get its own literature survey). And of course many of the best contemporary authors have identities and interests that are intrinsically transnational—authors like Amitav Ghosh, Chimamanda Adichie, Junot Diaz, and Marlon James. In a genre-based approach to common core literary study, one doesn’t have to parcel out curricular turf along the lines of its geographical equivalent.

But enough prefatory musings – on with the textbook!