657

WRITING WORKSHOP

There are a lot of different expectations for you as a student writer. In any given week, you may be asked to write up a lab report in science, write a research paper in history, and even compose a poem in your English class. Each of these writing demands has a different purpose and structure. In this Workshop, you’ll focus on writing an interpretation of a piece of literature, focusing on how the characters reveal a theme of the work.

While the “literary analysis paper” is a typical school assignment in high school and college, it is not one regularly seen in the real world outside of school. Unlike argumentative writing or personal narrative, you don’t normally read poetry analyses, for example, except in very specialized journals. So, why do your teachers regularly assign this type of writing that could be considered “inauthentic”? One reason to consider is that good writing can be a way to make your clear thinking visible. When writing about literature, you are making an argument that your interpretation is a reasonable and valuable one, and you are supporting your argument with evidence from the text. More than anything else, a literary analysis assignment is a way for you and your teachers to assess the ways that you think and for you to demonstrate your understanding.

This type of essay is very common in literature classes at all levels—high school and college—and is almost always a type of writing asked of you on the AP Literature exam. Take a look at these prompts from past exams, noting how they connect character and theme:

2011. In a novel by William Styron, a father tells his son that life “is a search for justice.” Choose a character from a novel or play who responds in some significant way to justice or injustice. Then write a well-developed essay in which you analyze the character’s understanding of justice, the degree to which the character’s search for justice is successful, and the significance of this search for the work as a whole.

2014. It has often been said that what we value can be determined by what we sacrifice. Consider how this statement applies to a character from a novel or play. Select a character that has deliberately sacrificed, surrendered, or forfeited something in a way that highlights that character’s values. Then write a well-organized essay in which you analyze how the particular sacrifice illuminates the character’s values and provides a deeper understanding of the meaning of the work as a whole.

Notice that these prompts ask the student to draw a connection between the character’s behavior and some larger idea in the story. So, the first prompt asks about the “search for justice [. . .] and the significance of this search for the work as a whole,” while the second asks “how the particular sacrifice illuminates the character’s values and provides a deeper understanding of the meaning of the work as a whole.” In both of these, “meaning” is another word for “theme.” It is important to see that the prompts do not stop at asking you to analyze a character, but ask you to go further by connecting the character to the “meaning of the work as a whole.”