Reception Analysis (20% of final grade)

Due

  • Come to class on Thursday, Feb 20 ready to discuss which text you have selected for this assignment and why.
  • Friday, Feb 28 by the end of the day

Requirements

  • ~1250 words (5 pages double-spaced), not including Works Cited or Bibliography.
  • MLA or Chicago citation style.
  • Turn in via Canvas; doc, docx, or pdf.
  • If you use AI writing or research tools for any part of the writing process, a statement about how you used these tools and why. See the “Course Info & Policies” page under “Academic Integrity and AI Writing Tools” for more information about what this statement should look like.

A reception analysis is an analysis of how a literary work was received and assessed at the time of its publication (and subsequently, if applicable). You will discuss whether the work was received favorably, criticized harshly, etc. by professional reviewers and/or critics and by the general reading public, and you will analyze the meaning or import of this reception. For this assignment, you should choose 1 literary text to write about. You may choose any of our course literary texts (including those we haven’t yet read in class) or another literary text from outside of class (perhaps one you are considering writing about for your final project in this class).

What is a Reception Analysis and How Do You Do It?

Your reception analysis should seek to answer the following questions:

  1. When your selected text was first published, how was it received by professional critics? If applicable, you may also wish to consider how this reception has changed over time.
  2. How was it received by general readers? If applicable, you may also wish to consider how this reception has changed over time.
  3. What does this reception history indicate about the text itself and/or about contemporary culture?

The first question asks you to consider your text’s reception history from the perspective of professional reviewers (including academics) and/or the publishing industry. To answer this question, you should investigate where your selected text was reviewed (which specific publications, the relative prestige and/or popularity of those publications, their role or place in the publishing industry) and who reviewed it. You might also think about whether your selected text has been included in literary anthologies or on course syllabi, whether it appears on “best of” lists, whether it has won any literary awards, whether it is or was a bestseller, whether it has been banned in any schools, etc.

The second question asks you to consider your text’s reception history from the perspective of general readers (i.e., those who aren’t paid to review or evaluate literary texts). To answer this question, you can investigate what discussion of your book online looks like. You might explore its Goodreads and/or Amazon reviews, reviews written by book bloggers or folks on YouTube (i.e., BookTube), and/or any discussion of the text on X, Bluesky, Reddit, Instagram, TikTok, etc. Of course, readers don’t only discuss books on social media, and readers have been discussing books since long before there was social media (e.g., in book clubs, via printed newsletters and editorials, in classrooms, etc.) But one advantage of turning to social media for this assignment is that reader reviews and responses are easier to find and to track than those that occur offline.

The third question asks you to consider what this reception history means. To answer this question, you might consider how it illuminates specific aspects of your selected literary text in new ways, or what it tells us about how people read today, or what it tells us about specific aspects of contemporary literary culture or of social media, etc. There are many different ways to approach this portion of the assignment, and they may involve zeroing in on one part of your selected text via literary analysis; or considering how the reception of your text has changed over time; or comparing the “professional” reception of your text to its “general” reception; or reading scholarship or other writing about the publishing industry, online literary cultures and/or particular social media platforms and applying it to your selected text. There are many other options. What you decide to focus on will depend in large part on the literary text you select and the information you are able to find about its reception. You won’t have much space to answer this question in your essay, so this portion of your essay should be narrowly focused, specific, and tackle-able in ~1-2 double-spaced pages.

In general, it is fine (even good!) if you end up raising more questions in this essay than you are able to answer. Some of the questions you are unable to answer may help you in formulating your research question for your final project. You may also decide to expand on the work you do in this essay for your final project.

Selecting Your Literary Text

You should select 1 literary text (i.e., generally speaking, a work of fiction or poetry) to write about for this assignment. You may select any literary text we are reading in this class for this assignment, or you may select a literary text from outside of this class. However, you should carefully consider which text you select, as you want to make sure to select a text with a reception history that is rich enough to be useful in completing this assignment.

In general, a good candidate literary text for this assignment has the following characteristics:

  • It was published long enough ago or it is well-known enough that at least a handful of professional reviews of it exist (generally speaking, books published in the last year or two may not be great candidates for this assignment for this reason, but it really depends on the text);
  • You can find substantial discussion of this text online by general readers;
  • Bonus (not required but certainly helpful): The text is well-known or has become well-known, or it was or remains a bestseller, or it has won literary awards, etc.

Conducting Research

You will need to be able to find and access both professional and “amateur” reviews and discussion of your selected literary text to complete this assignment. Simply typing the title of your text with the word review after it into Google (e.g., “no one is talking about this” review) can sometimes turn up a lot. But you may also need to dig deeper, especially if your text is less well-known, newer or older, or if you want to access scholarly articles or reviews.

Resources:

  • The Additional Readings page on this course site includes selected reviews of our course texts.
  • Library of Congress Sources for General Book Reviews: https://guides.loc.gov/finding-book-reviews/online-sources-and-databases#s-lib-ctab-22895147-0
    • The “Free Web Resources” tab is especially useful. The “Historical Book Review Databases” tab is also useful if your literary text was published prior to the late-20th century.
    • You can access some of the databases listed on the various tabs on this page via the Cornell Library website, but not all. To see if Cornell has access to a particular database, go to the Cornell Library Page, select “Databases,” and select the letter corresponding to the first letter of the database’s title to browse by title.
  • MLA International Bibliography: Go to the Cornell Library Page, select “Databases” > “M” > “MLA International Bibliography”. If you are not on campus, you will need to sign in with your Cornell ID and password.
    • A good resource for discovering scholarship about your selected literary text. In some cases, you can use this scholarship to find more reviews of your text and/or to track its reception.
  • The Cornell Library provides access to many newspapers and magazines that regularly publish reviews, such as The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Publisher’s Weekly, the London Review of Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and many more. If you hit a paywall while looking for reviews of your text, check to see if you can access this review via the library.
  • American Literary Magazines in Olin Library: https://guides.library.cornell.edu/litmag
    • A finding guide put together by the English subject librarian Fred Muratori that includes contemporary US fiction and poetry magazines to which the Cornell Library currently subscribes. Often these magazines will publish reviews as well.
  • Fred Muratori (fmm1@cornell.edu) is the Literatures in English subject librarian in Olin Library. You can reach out to him with specific questions about sources and/or contact him to set up an individual meeting to discuss where you might find sources relevant to your essay.

Revising

You may revise your reception analysis and re-submit it to me for re-grading. Re-grading means that I will read, comment on, and grade your essay again as if from scratch, without taking your previous grade into account. This revision will be due two weeks after you receive feedback and your grade from me. I strongly recommend you come to office hours or make an appointment to talk with me about the feedback I gave you if you plan to revise.