Literary Analysis Paper. If you were assigned to analyze a poem or a book, you should also complete a kind of a critical analysis paper. To be precise, you need to find and study a good literary analysis paper example. Overall, this academic paper is often performed to discuss the main idea of a literary work Writing a Literary Analysis Paper--Dos and Don'ts DO • have a clear thesis that expresses an idea or opinion about the meaning and/or form of the text. Go beyond the obvious: "'Eveline' is about a woman who must decide whether to leave home" is not a good thesis Writing a Literary Analysis Paper The Purpose of a Literary Analysis: A literary analysis is not merely a summary of a literary work. Instead, it is an argument about the work that expresses a writer’s personal perspective, interpretation, judgment, or critical evaluation of the work
Literary Analysis Essay - A Complete Guide With Example
When your teachers or professors ask you to analyze a literary text, they often look for something frequently called close reading. Close reading is deep analysis of how a literary text works; it is both a reading process and something you include in a literary analysis paper, though in a refined form.
Fiction writers and poets build texts out of many central components, including subject, form, and specific word choices, writing a literary analysis paper. Literary analysis involves examining these components, which allows us to find in small parts of the text clues to help us understand the whole.
The process of close reading should produce a lot of questions. It is when you begin to answer these questions that you are ready to participate thoughtfully in class discussion or write a literary analysis paper that makes the most of your close reading work. Close reading is a process of finding as much information as you can in order to form as many questions as you can.
When it is time to write your paper and formalize your close reading, you will sort through your work to figure out what is most convincing and helpful to the argument you hope to make and, conversely, what seems like a stretch. This guide imagines you are sitting down to read a text for the first time on your way to developing an argument about a text and writing a paper.
If you want even more information about approaching poems specifically, take a look at our guide: How to Read a Poem. As our guide to reading poetry suggests, have a pencil out when you read a text. Make notes in the margins, underline important words, place question marks where you are confused by something. Of course, if you are reading in a library book, you should keep all your notes on a separate piece of paper. If you are not making marks directly on, in, and beside the text, be sure to note line numbers or even quote portions of the text so you have enough context to remember what you found interesting.
What had that flower to do with being white, The wayside blue writing a literary analysis paper innocent heal-all? What brought the kindred spider to that height, Then steered the white moth thither in the night? What but design of darkness to appall? The subject of writing a literary analysis paper literary text is simply what the text is about.
Writing a literary analysis paper is its plot? What is its most important topic? What image does it describe? When you examine the subject of a text, you want to develop some preliminary ideas about the text and make sure you understand its major concerns before you dig deeper.
The flower is a heal-all, the blooms of which are usually violet-blue. This heal-all is unusual. The speaker then poses a series of questions, asking why this heal-all is white instead of blue and how the spider and moth found this particular flower. How did this situation arise? We can use them as a guide for our own as we go forward with our close reading. Form is how a text is put together. When you look at a text, observe how the author has arranged it. If it is a novel, is it written in the first person?
How is the novel divided? If it is a short story, why writing a literary analysis paper the author choose to write short-form fiction instead of a novel or novella? Examining the form of a text can help you develop a starting set of questions in your reading, which then may guide further questions stemming from even closer attention to the specific words writing a literary analysis paper author chooses. We will focus on rhyme scheme and stanza structure rather than meter for the purposes of this guide.
A typical Italian sonnet has a specific rhyme scheme for the octave:. Conventionally, the octave introduces a problem or question which the sestet then resolves. Note that we are speaking only in generalities here; there is a great deal of variation. Italian sonnets have a long tradition; many careful readers recognize the form and know what to expect from his octave, volta, and sestet. Frost seems to do something fairly standard in the octave in presenting a situation; however, the turn Frost makes is not to resolution, but to questions and uncertainty.
A white spider sitting on a white flower has killed a white moth. Looking even more closely at the text will help us refine our observations and guesses.
If you are reading something longer, are there certain words that come up again and again? Are there words that stand out? While you are going through this process, it is best for you to assume that every word is important—again, you can decide whether something is really important later, writing a literary analysis paper. Even when you read prose, our guide for reading poetry offers good advice: read with a pencil and make notes. Mark the words that stand out, and perhaps write the questions you have in the margins or on a separate piece of paper.
If you have writing a literary analysis paper that may possibly answer your questions, write those down, writing a literary analysis paper, too.
The poem starts with something unpleasant: a spider. Then, as we look more closely at the adjectives describing the spider, we may see connotations of something that sounds unhealthy or unnatural.
When we imagine spiders, we do not generally picture them dimpled and white; it is an uncommon and decidedly creepy image. There is dissonance between the spider and its descriptors, i. Already we have a question: what is going on with this spider? We should look for additional clues further on in the text. The next two lines develop the image of the unusual, unpleasant-sounding spider:. On a white heal-all, holding up a moth Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth—.
Writing a literary analysis paper we have a white flower a heal-all, which usually has a violet-blue flower and a white moth in addition to our white spider. Heal-alls have medicinal properties, as their name suggests, but this one seems to have a genetic mutation—perhaps like the spider?
We might think for a moment of a shroud or the lining of a coffin, but even that is awry, for neither should be stiff with death. From three lines alone, we have a number of questions:. Put simply, themes are major ideas in a text. Many texts, especially longer forms like novels and plays, have multiple themes.
Discovering a concept or idea that links multiple questions or observations you have made is the beginning of a discovery of theme. What point is Frost making? Observations about other elements in the text help you address the idea of disruption in more depth. Here is where we look back at the work we have already done: What is the text about? What is notable about the form, and how does it support or undermine what the words say? Does the specific language of the text highlight, or redirect, certain ideas?
In this example, writing a literary analysis paper are looking to determine what kind s of disruption the poem contains or describes. After you make notes, formulate questions, and set tentative hypotheses, you must analyze the subject of your close reading. Literary analysis is another process of reading and writing! that allows you to make a claim about the text. By commenting on the different elements of close reading writing a literary analysis paper have discussed, it takes the results of our close reading to offer one particular way into the text.
In case you were thinking about using this sample as your own, be warned: it has no thesis and it is easily discoverable on the web. These lines are almost singsong in meter and it is easy to imagine them set to a radio jingle. The volta offers no resolution for our unsettled expectations. Having observed the scene and detailed its elements in all their unpleasantness, the speaker turns to questions rather than answers.
Was the moth, then, also searching for camouflage, only to meet its end? Such a design appalls, writing a literary analysis paper, or horrifies. We might also consider the speaker asking what other force but dark design could use something as simple as appalling in its other sense making pale or white to effect death, writing a literary analysis paper.
However, writing a literary analysis paper poem does not close with a question, but with a statement. Behind the speaker and the disturbing scene, we have Frost and his defiance of our expectations for a Petrarchan sonnet. Design surely governs in a poem, however small; does Frost also have a dark design?
Can we compare a scene in nature to a carefully constructed sonnet? Your goal in a paper about literature is to communicate your best and most interesting ideas to your reader. Depending on the type of paper you have been assigned, your ideas may need to be organized in service of a thesis to which everything should link back. It is best to ask your instructor about the expectations for your paper. Knowing how to organize these papers can be tricky, in part because there is no single right answer—only more and less effective answers.
You may decide to organize your paper thematically, or by tackling each idea sequentially; you may choose to order your ideas by their importance to your argument or to the poem. If you are comparing and contrasting two texts, you might work thematically or by addressing first one text and then the other, writing a literary analysis paper.
One way to approach a text may be to start with the beginning of the novel, story, play, or poem, and work your way toward its end. For example, here is the rough structure of the example above: The author of the sample decided to use the poem itself as an organizational guide, at least for this part of the analysis.
You will have to decide for yourself the best way to communicate your ideas to your reader, writing a literary analysis paper. Is it easier to follow your points when you write about each part of the text in detail before moving on?
Or is your work clearer when you work through each big idea—the significance of whiteness, the effect of an altered sonnet form, and so on—sequentially? We suggest you write your paper however is easiest for you then move things around during revision if you need to. If you really want to master the practice of reading and writing about literature, we recommend Sylvan Barnet and William E.
Barnet and Cain offer not only definitions and descriptions of processes, but examples of explications and analyses, writing a literary analysis paper, as well as checklists for you, the author of the paper. The Short Guide is certainly not the only available reference for writing about literature, but it is an excellent guide and reminder for new writers and veterans alike. This is an accordion element with a series of buttons that open and close related content panels.
Literary Analysis Essay
, time: 6:32How to Write a Literary Analysis Essay | A Step-by-Step Guide
· A literary analysis paper is a kind of essay where you need to provide arguments that relate to your vision of a piece of literature. You need to choose any literary work, analyze the writing style, rhythm, tone, characters, plot, idea, enshrined by the author Writing a Literary Analysis Paper--Dos and Don'ts DO • have a clear thesis that expresses an idea or opinion about the meaning and/or form of the text. Go beyond the obvious: "'Eveline' is about a woman who must decide whether to leave home" is not a good thesis · Writing a literary analysis essay is an exciting yet time-consuming process. It’s necessary to read the piece of literature carefully to notice all the essential details. Composing a thesis statement, outlining an essay, and writing a meaningful paper are the next steps
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