Brazen serpents for Students of Literature (General Sources for Literary Study)

Moses erects the brazen serpent
to heal the snake-bitten Israelites

Students of literature need to have clear, familiar, and occasionally miraculous sources for help. They need brazen serpents to which to turn. Do you have yours?

Numbers 21:6-9 tells the story of the Israelites getting bitten by fiery serpents. Their cure: a serpent made of brass that Moses affixed to a pole. The bitten could simply look toward the brazen serpent and they would be healed.

I didn't know that story, nor how it could apply to literary study, until I was slogging my way through Shakespeare for the first time in my 9th grade English class at Brighton High School. The teacher, Richard McAllister, had us read Julius Caesar aloud in class. We'd come across a word, like "carrion" and give him that blank stare that only a 14-year old can give.

"Where is your brazen serpent?" he would intone, maybe even looking upward.

We had no idea what he meant. So he would sigh and open the dictionary, read to us that "carrion" meant "dead carcass" and back we'd go to Shakespeare. We'd hit another word like "betimes." Again, the blank stare from us, and again Mr. McAllister sighing and looking up woefully to ask, "Where is your brazen serpent?"

Finally, one of us got brave enough actually to get up, go to the back of the room and consult the huge dictionary from the shelf. "Betimes" meant "at once." Over time, we got better at being "betimes" in seeking the brazen serpents we needed. Going to the effort to consult a worthy source would earn the student what Mr. McAllister called "anti-philistine points." We had to look up "Philistine" to realize getting anti-philistine points was actually a good thing. But we could, now, because we knew at least one reliable brazen serpent to which to turn--the dictionary.

The dictionary is a core source for literary study, but certainly not the only "brazen serpent" to which one may turn. I'd like to introduce just a few.

Nine Ways of Developing a Literary Analysis

As my literature students are grappling with drafting their analyses of various literary works, I want to help them do so by suggesting some concrete ways by which they can develop an analysis. In a finished essay, the analysis portion should be tightly ordered in support of a central argument. However, during the drafting process, analysis really has to be less organized. The clearest expression of ideas often emerges from a critical mass of meaningful mess.

What follows are directions for making that mess (and making it meaningful). It may seem strange to emphasize messiness, but I want my students to feel comfortable in letting their provisional writing be much less ordered and clear than their finished literary arguments. I am not at all pulling back from the need to move from fuzzy ideas to clear claims. I strongly believe students should arrive quickly at a working thesis statement and circulate that claim for early feedback (as described in my previous post).

But a working thesis statement does not a finished paper make. And even though a good thesis statement provides a kind of outline for developing one's complete argument, that outline can at first feel pretty sparse.  A working thesis works if it does work -- and often that work is a meaningful return to the texts so that one can support and improve that claim.

A messy mass is needed during drafting because you need stuff through which your thesis can take its evolving shape. You need something that you can revise and order into a more detailed outline for a finished paper. You need some meaningful accumulation of relevant material. Here, then, are some starting places for the student who is already into his or her topic, but who still needs to do the heavy lifting of coming up with stuff to say in their evolving analysis.