Chapter 9-Literary Analysis
Literary analysis is a writing genre that many students are unfamiliar with, but don’t be scared. For example, have you ever seen an article on social media and immediately knew it was “fake news”? Perhaps you looked at the title and the source and skimmed the article. You paired all of the information with your background knowledge (what you already knew about the topic) and deduced (or determined) that the article was fake.
What is literary analysis? Writing literary analysis involves multiple steps, but the major ones are summarizing theme and analyzing content. Although literary analysis involves looking at a literary work and summarizing it, it does go much deeper than that. When analyzing, writers often interpret, apply, compare and contrast, and make judgments as a means of evaluating the literary work.
Some instructors may require analysis to be written in third person (although this is not a “rule”), but your personal opinion and experiences will undoubtedly be present in your overall analysis, even if you don’t phrase them as “I believe” or “I think” statements. (As a matter of fact, AVOID using those statements.)
So, how, exactly, do you write literary analysis? Well, here are the steps:
- Critically read the literary work assigned to you. This may require you to read the same text multiple times.
- Take notes as you read.
- Engage with the written discourse (article) critically instead of finding fault. Try not to think, “Well, I disagree,” or “This is right on!” Instead, be open-minded and consider the author’s point of view.
- Next, prewrite–list the main ideas, key features, and examples from the text. Most important, focus on the theme!
- When writing, pretend as if your audience hasn’t read the article (because chances are they haven’t).
- Then, you will move on to your analysis of the author’s themes or ideas. Compare and contrast your background knowledge, experience, and research with that of the author. Do you agree or disagree with the article’s POV? Please, don’t directly state your analysis in that manner. Provide evidence (examples and research) as a basis for your evaluation.
- Focus on themes, character traits, symbols, and other literary devices when analyzing the text.
Here is a possible organizational format you might use for a literary analysis essay.
Paragraph 1-Introduction; give a brief summary of the literary work. Make sure to include the title and author. Provide any important background information here.
Paragraph 2-Summary of first main point/theme from the literary work
Paragraph 3-Analysis of the first main point/theme mentioned in P2
Paragraph 4-Summary of second main point/theme from the literary work
Paragraph 5-Analysis of the second main point/theme mentioned in P4
Paragraph 6-Summary of third main point/theme from the literary work
Paragraph 7-Analysis of the third main point/theme mentioned in P6
Paragraph 8-Conclusion
Points to Remember:
Summary
Don’t just write a gene