ENG 160: Global Literature & Human Experience (Bushy)

Literary contextualization goes beyond summarizing lots of factual information about an author, a text, or an author's idea(s).  While you want to find biographical information about your author; read book reviews and critical responses to the work you've chosen; compare literary elements such as, character, plot, setting, theme, point of view, etc., to other writing of the time period; and even review historical studies or artifacts; it's important to remember that high-quality contextualization doesn't mean simply dumping this data onto your reader.  The library research you do into your author and their text needs to be synthesized in a way that helps your reader understand the broad-scale situation, circumstance(s), or relationships that surround an issue, a text, and/or the genre in which the text fits.  In other words, the context that you learn about through library research provides information that helps the message of the text that you've selected make sense.