Literary Methods and Community Engagement: The Case of Katherine Mansfield’s “The Garden Party”

This essay offers new ways of understanding the connection between literary studies and community engagement by focusing not just on the content of literary study, but on one of the central methods. I argue that the practice of “close reading” a literary text—Katherine Mansfield’s “The Garden Party” in particular—can illustrate the integral relationship between a discipline’s content, its methods, and its relationship to community engagement. Close reading pushes students to appreciate more than a literary text’s stories and themes; it impels them to be systematic about the ways in which they arrive at meanings, self-awareness, and social insights, and to recognize the cultural practices, assumptions, and rhetorical structures in which these emerge.