Professor Rita Barnard

About the Professor

Rita Barnard, who received her Ph.D. from Duke University, is professor of English and Comparative Literature at Penn. She holds a secondary position as Professor Extraordinaire at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa. In 2005, she received Penn’s most prestigious teaching prize, the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching. With the exception of one co-written essay, her academic writing is all individual, but she also does a great deal of editorial work. Professor Barnard considers herself a "political formalist," in that she seeks to connect the literary and cultural with the social. She writes literary criticism as well as creative nonfiction and translates poetry. She suggests that students write to clarify rather than obscure, and that they pay careful attention to the structure of paragraphs.

Personal Writing Process

1. Reads primary texts
2. Gathers a list of quotes from text and other relevant quotes from critics and historians
3. Often writes up to 60 pages (single-spaced!) of notes before beginning to write an essay
4. Creates a bibliography, a working title, and a structure for the piece
5. Prefers to have a sense of the issue, the problem, and the flow of the argument, rather than a so-called “thesis”
6. Drafts and revises the piece. And revises. And revises.

Other Great Writers in Comparative Literature

In order to improve their writing, Professor Barnard advises students to read for style: to find models of the kind of voice and approach they would like to emulate. She suggests that students study the work of the professors they like and find particularly compelling and articulate. The great scholars in the field of Comparative Literature—people like Fredric Jameson and Roland Barthes—are not really imitable: they have very individual and eccentric styles. Better examples might be Rita Felski, James F. English, Jed Esty, Richard Begam, John T. Matthews, and Dana Phillips, who are all snappy and eloquent, or in other fields, James Ferguson, Deborah Posel, and John Hyslop.

Examples of Professional Writing