Let’s call it titulophobia, the fear of writing titles—holding off until the last minute to slap one on, succumbing to writing “Untitled,” or just slinking your paper to your professor with a blank space on top. But a title is a name, a heading, a header, a lead, an identity for your work. It is a greeting and invitation, not only to the reader—a door, a guide, a here-I-am and come-with-me—but to you, as the writer, as well. I love writing titles: they initiate my writing process—they focus, inspire, and anchor me. They give me direction and dispel my anxiety.
Writing titles for essays on literature is the easiest of all titlings. There are three components to a title on literary essays, all meant to also help you enter the great conversation about literature. (1) The Snippet; (2) The Approach; (3) The Title; and (4) The Author. These components will also enable those who are searching for inspiration, as for example on the Modern Language Association search engine, to find your essay once it’s published.
(1) The Snippet
To title this post, for which I Shakespeare’s “The Rape of Lucrece” for my illustrations, I went to an online Shakespeare Concordance site and searched his use of the word “title.” I chose an early one on the list, from All’s Well That Ends Well, “To be a great part of your title.” To wit, a great part of a title for an essay on literature—and the first—is a snippet from the work on which you are writing. And don’t stress about it. Here, I started with a subject—writing titles. In most cases, you can start with a catchy snippet that fascinates you from the literary work. Whether you start with the snippet or start with an idea and find a snippet that reflects it—make it brief and catchy:
Here are some more examples from Shakespeare’s “The Rape of Lucrece”:
“His falchion on a flint”
“the grim lion fawneth”
“Have done, quoth he”
“men have marble, women waxen minds”
“Tarquin’s everlasting banishment”
(2) The Approach
In other posts, we will consider in more depth how to identify critical approaches and themes you want to assume. For now, the snippet might be enough to spark your point of view.
After the closed quote marks of the snippet, insert a colon: which points to the second part of your title. In as few words as possible, embody your approach. In my title above, I wrote “"To be a great part of your title": Headings into Shakespeare.” To include your approach is to make your point of view—you—literally, “a great part of your title.” The snippet you choose already speaks for you—but writing your theme/approach makes it explicit. This is the place you might write something clever, play on words, pun, as I attempted to do in my title. Here are the approaches for the Shakespeare snippets from “The Rape of Lucrece”:
“Beauty itself doth of itself persuade”: Blaming the Victim in…
“His falchion on a flint”: Military Violence and Bonding in…
“the grim lion fawneth”: Bestial Imagery in…
“Have done, quoth he”: Silencing the Woman…
“men have marble, women waxen minds”: Belenky’s Ways of Knowing and…
“Tarquin’s everlasting banishment”: A Queer Eye on…
Since the word “Rape” will be referenced in Shakespeare’s title, it would be redundant to insert it in the approach segment of your title.
(3) The Title
Identify the title of the literary work. To the examples above, append
“The Rape of Lucrece”
(4) The Author
Since only Shakespeare wrote a major work entitled “The Rape of Lucrece,” it is not necessary to insert his name in these titles. Nevertheless, if someone were searching broadly for “Shakespeare” in a database, they might not access your work. So, you might include his name as in this example from above:
“Tarquin’s everlasting banishment”: A Queer Eye on Shakespeare’s
“The Rape of Lucrece”
Works Cited
Cover Art: Catchy Titles
Texts
Belenky, Mary Field, et al, Eds. Women's Ways of Knowing. New York: Basic, 1986.
Shakespeare, William. “The Rape of Lucrece.”
Because I Can Teach
