Courtesy | Hillsdale College Press
Two English professors co-authored a book on literary analysis and released it in May.
Professor of English Justin Jackson and Associate Professor of English Dutton Kearney wrote “The Elements of Analysis” with the intention of leading students, and potentially teachers, to actual literary analysis. They wrote it using techniques that they use in their own teaching.
“Too often, I’ve found that many students think analysis is there to destroy literature, to simply pull it all apart, and then to leave a mess,” Jackson said in an email to The Collegian. “I think the opposite is true: A work’s beauty is found through the analytical process. One doesn’t show one’s contempt of literature through analysis. Rather, one shows one’s admiration and even love. To love something is to engage with it at the highest and most honest level. Analysis, at its best, does precisely that.”
Kearney said he saw the brilliance of Jackson’s approach to teaching analysis soon after Kearney arrived as a professor at Hillsdale.
“For about a decade, we would sit on my porch with cigars and bourbon and talk about how we wanted to teach writing,” Kearney said. “And so, after kind of hashing through it, we thought, ‘Well, we reinvent the wheel every semester. Why don’t we write a book?’”
The book is useful to point students to a specific section in order to explain to them where they went wrong with their own analysis, according to Kearney.
“It’s practical, but it’s not a Mad Lib. It does not connect the dots or fill in the blank. You have to do the work,” Kearney said. “But, you’re not out in the wilderness.”
Because methods in the book have been tested for years in Jackson’s and Kearney’s classrooms, Jackson said he is confident it will be useful for students and teachers brave enough to try it.
“Reading literature is an act of entering a conversation with history’s greats. To enter that conversation, one has to know not simply what the author is saying but how he or she is saying it,” Jackson said. “Analysis is an act of human logic, imagination, and creativity and thus a preeminent way of human understanding. Humans are analytical creatures, and think language is a magnificent playground (as is music and art).”
Many students do not understand how to properly analyze literature and end up summarizing the text in their papers instead, according to Kearney.
“This is all tilted toward analysis, not in a way that says, ‘This is the only way to write about literature,’ but it’s the piece that students are most deficient in, and that’s why there’s such an emphasis on it,” Kearney said.
After a period of time collecting notes, the pair went to Hillsdale’s Blake Center for Faith and Freedom in 2024 for one week and drafted the book. Over the next year, they adjusted it as they used it.
“Think of it like a document that things keep getting added to, and so then we would just kind of discuss, ‘What has been working for you?’ and, ‘I find that this works. Wouldn’t it be great if we talked about introductions in this way, and body paragraphs like this, and what about conclusions?’” Kearney said.
The title echoes “The Elements of Style” by William Strunk and E.B. White, according to Kearney.
Patrick Timmis, assistant professor of English, has all of his Great Books students buy the book and is considering having all students in his classes buy it.
“I actually do think it’s a good thing, a quick thing, to just read straight through it, and it reads well that way,” Timmis said. “So even if it’s outside of being told by your professor, go read this section, go read this chapter, you will actually become a better writer just by taking the couple of hours it would take you to read it from cover to cover.”
