Beyond Literary Analysis with Allison Marchetti and Rebekah O’Dell

In your daily life, would you voluntarily sit down to write an analytical essay on The Odyssey? Or on Catcher in the Rye? Probably not. Would you like to read and grade more than one hundred identical essays about these novels instead? Probably not. So, why do we ask our students to this year after year?

Today on the Heinemann Podcast, authors Allison Marchetti & Rebekah O’Dell explore alternatives to the dreaded literary analysis essays in their new book, Beyond Literary Analysis. Allison and Rebekah explore the meaning of analysis from an entirely new perspective, in hopes of challenging traditional notions of what students should be analyzing and how they should write about. They want student writing to be where passion and analysis meet by redefining the meaning of the word “text.”

We began our conversation discussing how this new understanding of analysis came to be.