Literature: Claims, evidence, and the limits of paraphrase

You argue that a novel "is about isolation" and your friend asks for proof—literary discussion turns on claims tethered to textual evidence: diction, metaphor, pacing, point of view. Paraphrase summarizes; evidence points to specific language that could not be swapped without loss. So the move is not collecting quotes but showing why this line, in this order, earns the interpretation.

Practical use: essays, book clubs, and reviews. Edge case: unreliable narrators make naive quotation risky; you weigh speaker bias against structure. Purdue OWL models argument + textual integration [1]; the MLA handbook hub supports clean citation habits [2].