Interactive tools for close reading practice, critical theory application, and literary history — drawn from MIT OCW and UT Austin curricula.
Paste a paragraph of fiction and receive guided prompts to identify narrative voice, point of view, figurative language, and what the passage reveals about character or theme.
Pick a text and a critical lens — Marxist, psychoanalytic, feminist, postcolonial — and see what questions each approach would ask of the same passage.
Select a canonical text — Conrad, Kipling, Forster — and trace what a postcolonial reading reveals: Orientalism, the civilizing mission, the subaltern perspective absent from the narrative.
Read an excerpt and identify genre markers — Gothic, Bildungsroman, modernist stream of consciousness — explaining what conventions the text uses and how they operate.
Pick a canonical text and trace how feminist critics have read it differently — what was ignored, what was recovered, whose perspective was centered.
