This session will explore literary analysis, argumentation, and the process of thinking, both through evidence and through writing.

Professors Wesley Yu and Nigel Alderman will explore the ways in which the literature classroom remains an exemplary place of thinking slowly and deeply about the complexity of the past and present through analyzing that most distinctively human attribute: language. By looking at one of the earliest, extant human similes comparing mortal humans to falling leaves, from Homer to the present Poet Laureate, Ada Limón, they will show how argumentation emerges from reading textual evidence closely.