What is your portfolio?It begins with a richly-linked blog entry that introduces your reader to blog entries that you have created, and discussions from your peers' blogs in which you have participated, as part of a reflective statement on your progress so far.
Without a doubt, literary criticism is not a subject that is for the faint of heart. While not the strongest of literary bloggers out there, I've been accepting the challenge of formalism, authorial intent, aesthetics, and canonicity through Contexts for Criticism edited by Donald Keesey.
In order to be a good literary critic, you've got to have a literary background, to accomplish this, I looked at Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno," Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," and William Shakespeare's The Tempest.
In the context of literary criticism, for example, in aesthetics and canonicity, I began by looking at Keesey's Introduction and then moved onto the works of Eagleton and T.S. Elliot.
Authorial intent in literary criticism was the topic that I found to be the most confusing up to this point, but, in addition to Keesey's summary, the essays of Hirsch, Kaplan, Watson, Yachnin, and Austin helped out a lot.
Formalism is, by far, (thus far at least) my favorite of the types of literary criticism. Keesey's introduction and Brooks essay, "Irony as a Principle of Structure" helped to achieve this happiness in conection with formalism.
I'll admit it, I don't always know every literary term when it came up in the text, so Ross Murfin's and Supryia M. Ray's The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms was extraordinarily useful.
And what kind of blogging review would be complete without a little carnival flair?
Speaking of blog carnivals, I'm not the only one who has been hard at work looking into literary criticism, so check these out!