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Hello. I'm Eric Gardner, and I'm a Professor of English at Saginaw Valley State University.
My area of specialization is American Literature and within that, Nineteenth Century African
American Literature. I've always believed that one of the core functions of literature
is to get us thinking and talking about the problems and the potential of both the world
around us and our individual selves. Thus, writing is not simply the object of our study,
but it's also a key tool in participating in those conversations. Because of that, students
in literary studies do a wide range of different kinds of writing: they do proposals; they
do lesson plans; they do correspondence; they do personal statements; they do responses:
a host of different kinds of texts. But I want to talk to you today about the
kind of writing that is really at the core of the enterprise of literary studies, and
that's interpretive writing. Interpretive writing is simply writing that is designed
to help us understand the possible meanings of an object. In literary studies, the object
is the text, and so interpretive writing in literary studies is designed to help us understand
the possible meanings of a piece of text. Now, you've probably noticed that I've used
the term twice now"possible meanings." That's because the goal of literary studies and the
goal of interpretive writing is not simply to force us into, to make us all bow down
to one true meaning of a text. We don't necessarily accept that there is such; rather, interpretive
writing in literary studies is part of a long conversation, and that conversation is designed
to get us thinking about stronger interpretations. This means interpretive writing allows for
a real wide range of creativity, but with that creativity comes a deep responsibility
for helping readers really understand the kinds of things that you see happening in
a text, the kinds of things you see a text possibly meaning. Do clarity and grace in
your prose are of course essential, because you want folks to really understand what you
see happening in a text, so that you can engage in that conversation, so that they can follow
up on the kinds of points that you raise.