Literature Reviews: Surveying the Scholarly Landscape Marie pruitt, university of Louisville, fall 2025

Follow Along During This Presentation

Three Key Skills for Writing a Strong Literature Review:

• Categorizing the Literature
• Identifying the Relationship Between Central Texts
• Organizing your Literature Review

Research Project Trifecta

"Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress."

-Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, pp. 110-111

Identifying the Relationship Between Central Texts

Five Ways to “Do Things with Texts” (from Harris, "Rewriting"):

1. Coming to Terms: Re-presenting the work
2. Forwarding: Applying the work to other texts or situations
3. Countering: Going against the grain of the work
4. Taking an Approach: Extending and reworking the text
5. Revising: Returning to and revising your own text

Organizing Your Literature Review

(Note: in this article, the literature review is part of the introduction)