Literary Responses

You will be required to write two, one-page Literary Responses to a piece of literature that we cover this semester. Anything text covered in class or covered in the handouts for this class is available for you to respond to.
What is a Literary Response?
Imagine you are placing a filter or lens over your eyes as you review a piece of literature. For instance, I may read Sharon Old’s “The Promise” and respond to it with a “feminist” lens or a “psychoanalytic” lens or a “structuralist” lens. At its most basic level, a literary response considers readers’ reactions to literature as vital to interpreting the meaning of the text. I want to experience your response to a text to see how you are arriving at your conclusions about the text itself.
Your literary response is brief, only a one-page, single spaced response to a text; therefore, you will use a basic three-to-five paragraph essay structure (Introduction, Body Evidence 1, Body Evidence 2 (and so on), Conclusion). I’m not looking for a summary of the text and I’m not looking for a deep analysis of the piece. I’m looking for you to gain insight into how readers will receive this piece and why.
Typical questions to get you started:
• How does the interaction of text and reader create meaning?
• What does a phrase-by-phrase analysis of a short literary text, or a key portion of a longer text, tell us about the reading experience prestructured by (built into) that text?
• Do the sounds/shapes of the words as they appear on the page or how they are spoken by the reader enhance or change the meaning of the word/work?
• How might we interpret a literary text to show that the reader’s response is, or is analogous to, the topic of the story?

THE PROMISE

by Sharon Olds

With the second drink, at the restaurant,
holding hands on the bare table,
we are at it again, renewing our promise
to kill each other. You are drinking gin,
night-blue juniper berry
dissolving in your body, I am drinking Fume
chewing its fragrant dirt and smoke, we are
taking on earth, we are part soil already,
and wherever we are, we are also in our
bed, fitted, naked, closely
along each other, half passed out,
after love, drifting back
and forth across the border of consciousness,
our bodies buoyant, clasped. Your hand
tightens on the table. You’re a little afraid
I’ll chicken out. What you do not want
is to lie in a hospital bed for a year
after a stroke, without being able
to think or die, you do not want
to be tied to a chair like your prim grandmother,
cursing. The room is dim around us,
ivory globes, pink curtains
bound at the waist- and outside,
a weightless, luminous, lifted-up
summer twilight. I tell you you do not
know me if you think I will not
kill you. Think how we have floated together
eye to eye, nipple to nipple,
sex to sex, the halves of a creature
drifting up to the lip of matter
and over it-you know me from the bright, blood-
flecked delivery room, if a lion
had you in its jaws I would attack it, if the ropes
binding your soul are your own wrists, I will cut them.
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