Equipped with an understanding of terminology and a grasp of some basic literary critical and theoretical concepts, you’re ready to begin reading works of literary criticism with appreciation and enjoyment. You’ve already learned that there are helpful strategies for approaching the reading of fiction, poetry, and drama with maximum intelligence and effectiveness. Thus, you won’t be surprised to hear that there are likewise intelligent strategies for reading literary criticism.

1. Survey the terrain. This is the same good advice that you should use for approaching anything you read, but it takes on a special significance when you read technical academic texts such as literary criticism. Don’t just dive in and start reading an article or essay on the first line. First get familiar with it. Read the title. Note who the author is. Iif there’s an accompanying author bio, read it to get a sense of who’s talking to you. Note the year of publication. Also note the place where the article or essay was published. Was it a journal or website with a specialized literary critical focus for a specialized audience? If so, that can help you understand why it’s written the way it is (e.g., it may represent a certain school of literary theory). Next, scan the piece and read any section headings, paying attention to what they tell you about the topics the article will talk about and the train of thought it will follow. Glance at any footnotes or endnotes, as well as the works cited or references list, if the author provided one. Note how long the article is and how long its sections are, so that you can pace yourself as you read.
2. Zero in on the high points. Before reading the full article or essay, search the introduction and conclusion to locate the writer’s central claim about the literary work(s) under examination. What exactly is the author’s main point about the literary work? Identifying this ahead of time will help you stay focused and follow the argument as it unfolds. Also skim through the article to note what kind of evidence the writer uses to support this central claim. Does the author present quotations from the literary text(s) under consideration? Does the author bring in ideas from other critics and readers? Does the author focus on aspects of the literary work that cross over with your own areas of interest?
3. Dive in and read. Read the piece start to finish. Annotate it with highlights, underlinings, marginal notes, or anything else that will help you fully engage with it. As you’re reading, notice where you agree with the author’s points about the literary work, where you disagree, where you’re surprised or learn something new that you didn’t know or hadn’t thought of, and where you’re confused. If it helps, devise a system of marks to track these reactions (e.g., a plus sign for agreement, a minus sign for disagreement, an exclamation point for surprise or learning, and a question mark for confusion).
4. Use the footnotes, references, and index. When you’re done reading, make sure you read any footnotes or endnotes that you may have skipped, and also carefully examine the works cited or references or bibliography at the end. These can serve as an invaluable resource for guiding you to still more critical writings about the same story, novel, poem, or play. We’ll say more about that in the next section.

Incorporating Literary Criticism

To incorporate literary criticism into your own writing about literature, you have to do three things: First, find it. Second, evaluate it. Third, use it. We’ll take these in order.

Finding Literary Criticism

Your first stop in your search for literary critical studies of a text that you’re reading should be your college or school library and/or library website. Consider asking a librarian to help you identify appropriate online databases containing literary criticism. Then use carefully selected search terms that you’ve drawn from your reading of your chosen story, novel, poem, or play, plus your knowledge of literary theory. Are you interested in applying the lens of critical race theory to the short stories of H. P. Lovecraft? Then do a search for “Lovecraft” plus “critical race theory” plus the title of the story or stories that interest you. Are you interested in using psychological criticism to compare and contrast the use of dreamlike imagery in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland? Then use those titles and words as search terms.

Remember, you’re looking for high-quality academic sources. Your librarian or instructor can help make sure you don’t get sidetracked by deceptive lower-quality sources. Just remember that, in general, when you look for articles to write college papers, you’re looking for peer-reviewed articles. These are found in academic journals that only publish articles after they’ve first been evaluated by other scholars. Your library’s online academic search system will probably have the ability to limit your searches to peer-reviewed articles only.

Evaluating Literary Criticism

Cull Your Search Results

Sometimes your search attempts may turn up a veritable embarrassment of riches, providing such a long list of results that you hardly know which ones to choose. What you should not do in these cases is try to read each and every article or book in the search results. Instead, for academic articles, first read their abstracts (summaries). These are often included at the start of articles published in academic journals, and you can save a lot of time by reading or skimming them to determine which articles need a further look based on your needs and interests. Then, once you’ve shortened your list, apply steps 1 and 2 of the strategy provided in the previous section (survey the article to map out its central claim and supporting details and evidence) to decide which of the remaining search results really serve your present need.

Follow the Source Trail

Other times, you may discover that you have a hard time finding relevant books or articles. Not to worry: This is when you need to recall our strategic recommendation in the previous section to read the footnotes and references that accompany most books and articles featuring literary criticism. As we said, these can serve as an invaluable resource for guiding you to still more critical writings about the same story, novel, poem, or play. Scholars and critics typically draw on a host of secondary sources, especially in articles for academic journals, and these can provide a veritable roadmap for your own further research. If you’re working on an assignment to write a literary critical essay or paper, and you find even a single relevant article that contains well-developed footnotes and references, you might find that this single article leads you to most or all of the additional sources you’ll need, because the author of the article has already, in essence, done a lot your research for you.

Additionally, if the source you’ve found is not an article but a full book, make solid use of its index to help you locate the parts that are most relevant to your own concerns. Focus on the key terms and ideas that you’re looking for, and use the index to find where the author talks about them. Note the author’s ideas and argument. Annotate them as appropriate. Then use any source citations in those parts to expand your research.

Using Literary Criticism

Having found a good set of books and/or articles to aid and inform your literary critical efforts, it’s now time to read them and then use them to inform your own thinking and writing. The key to success here is to keep that very thing in mind as your goal in using such sources: They’re meant to inform and enrich your thinking. To say the same thing differently, always take care to avoid the trap of letting them do your thinking for you.

When you go to write about a work of literature using secondary sources, always fully digest the arguments and interpretations in those sources. Never write a paper in which you just parrot what other people have said by assembling a collection of quotations or paraphrases. Instead, use those resources to help you say what you want to say.

This means you should never, for example, use a quote from another author as your thesis statement or a major supporting detail. Everything you learn from your secondary sources should only be used to illustrate, inform, and add depth and texture to your own thoughts. These sources can help you learn to think better. They can show you depths and angles of meaning in a story, novel, poem, or play that you might not have recognized on your own. They can stimulate your thoughts by presenting viewpoints that you disagree with. They can enrich your vocabulary and help strengthen and develop your mental muscles for talking and thinking about literature. What they can’t do is state your personal understanding of the work in question, your insight, your perspective, your unique personal take or reading. Only you can do that.

On a practical note, whenever you use information from a secondary source in one of your papers, be sure to cite it correctly. Give credit where credit is due. After all, you wouldn’t want anyone stealing your thoughts and trying to pass them off as their own. Show others the same courtesy.