English 102-D1: Literary Analysis Assignment
Word requirement: ~800 words
Format requirements: MLA (If you are unclear on MLA formatting, please see the “Citation Information” link on our course Moodle.)
Prompt: Compose a literary analysis of a poem, work of fiction, drama, graphic novel, literary essay, or work of creative non-fiction using two academic sources that enacts the skill sets asked for in both the critique and synthesis badges assigned in this unit. Your sources should be primarily taking up the same work that you are analyzing in your essay and should be retrieved from an academic database like JStor, Academic Search Premier, Google Scholar, etc.
As you compose your analysis of any literary work, you’ll want to select a portion to examine closely, looking for patterns in words and images and their possible meanings. For fiction, you might consider how a setting or characters are described, what words are spoken or thought, what objects or actions are described, and how the patterns you find point to underlying meanings. As you choose a literary text to analyze, I suggest that you proceed as your textbook has by selecting a section that seems significant and representative and focusing closely on that section to see what you can discover. As you compose your analysis, you might return to textbook’s selection of The Circle, exploring in greater depth the patterns you began to consider in your informal writing and class discussion.
After choosing your text, you’ll want to move through several common analytical steps:
Finding a focus
Begin by generating some ideas to explore. Then reread your selection with one or two of those ideas in mind, identifying textual elements and key passages that relate to that avenue of exploration.
Gathering data
In a literary analysis, the words of the text serve as your data and offer the examples you’ll draw on in exploring your key ideas. Reread the text. As you note the words that contribute to your understanding of how the work reflects the idea you’re exploring—of description, of dialogue and of a character’s reflections and observations—you are effectively gathering the data you’ll need to support the understanding you’ll come to and to share it with others. Glossing and annotating the text is a particularly important tool here.
Identifying Patterns
Looking back at the places you’ve marked and the words you’ve found to be significant, what patterns do you find? How do words and objects and images line up with characters, for example? What differences do you find between/among characters, at different points in a character’s development, or in different settings? What do you discover about how the text works?
Considering Larger Meanings
Once you’ve found some patterns, you can begin to consider their meanings. How do these patterns reflect and contribute to the idea you set out to explore? How do they relate to any larger meanings the writer might be exploring?
As you prepare a literary analysis for readers, you’ll need to consider a reader’s likely shared knowledge of the text, as well as the ideas and meanings you want to explore. A typical pattern is to introduce readers to the work, with a brief summary, assuming no prior shared knowledge of the text itself (but some knowledge of the larger social contexts). The convention (the commonly shared expectations of writers and readers) for essays involving literary analysis is to assume that your readers have not read the work in question, and to provide a brief overview of the work.
The challenge here is to provide enough background knowledge for your readers without writing a long summary of the work rather than an analysis.
Structuring and Drafting
As you begin to structure your literary analysis essay, you’ll need to bring together several elements: the shared knowledge about the text that you’ll need to create or evoke, the patterns and meanings you’ve found to be significant, and the textual details that show those patterns.
A common structure for literary analysis is to introduce readers to the work, then move step by step through the text, highlighting key elements and patterns, and concluding with your larger observations of the patterns that have emerged and the meanings they point to.
Another common structure is to begin with a larger statement of meaning and key points about the text, then provide background knowledge, and then go on to discuss examples and patterns that support those points.
An alternative structure might involve taking the reader into one very small key passage at the beginning, and building out from there to provide shared knowledge, point to other examples, and show larger patterns and meanings.
In each case, using strong textual evidence is an important part of a literary analysis, and you’ll want to bring significant bits of the text you’re analyzing into the one you’re creating. (Doing this also gives your reader the “flavor” of the text, a sense of its style, and helps to create further shared knowledge.)
As always, creating a working outline is likely to be a useful part of your process. As you draft this material, or peer review it (see below), you might decide to change your original structure, to add or delete textual examples, to modify the amount of background knowledge you provide about the text. Again, it’s helpful both to have a plan and to stay flexible until your final revision.
