The Assignment: Analyzing a Literary Work

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For this assignment, you are to be a literary critic—analyzing, interpreting, and evaluating a literary selection for your classmates. Your purpose is to deepen their understanding because you will have devoted time and effort to digging out the work’s meaning. Even if they too have studied the work carefully, you will try to convince them that your interpretation is valid.

Choose a literary work that intrigues you or expresses a worthwhile meaning. Your selection might be a short story, a poem, a play, or a novel. (Follow directions if your instructor wants to approve your choice, assign the literary work, or limit your options to several works read by your class.) After careful analysis of the work, write an essay as the expert critic, explaining the meaning you discern, supporting your interpretation with evidence from the work, and evaluating the effectiveness of literary elements used by the author and the significance of theme.

You cannot include everything about the work in your paper, so you should focus on one element (such as character, setting, or theme) or the interrelationship of two or three elements (such as characterization and symbolism). Although a summary, or synopsis, of the plot is a good beginning point, retelling the story is not a satisfactory literary analysis.

These college writers successfully responded to such an assignment:

One showed how the rhythm, rhymes, and images of Adrienne Rich’s poem “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” mesh to convey the poem’s theme of tension between a woman’s artistic urge and societal constraints.

Another, a drummer, read James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” and established Sonny’s credibility as a musician—based on attitudes, actions, struggles, and his relationship with his instrument and with other musicians.

A psychology major concluded that the relationship between Hamlet and Claudius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet represents tension, jealousy, and misunderstanding between stepsons and stepfathers.

Generating Ideas

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Read several literary works from the course options to find two or three you like. Next, reread those that interest you. Select one that strikes you as especially significant—realistic or universal, moving or disturbing, believable or shocking—with a meaning you wish to share with classmates.

Analyzing a literary work is the first step in interpreting meaning and evaluating literary quality. As you read the work, identify its elements and analyze them. Then focus on one significant element or a cluster of related elements. As you write, restrict your discussion to that focus.

We provide three checklists to guide you in analyzing different types of literature. Each of these is an aid to understanding, not an organizational outline for writing about literature. The first checklist focuses on short stories and novels, but some of its questions can help you analyze setting, character, theme, or your reactions as a reader for almost any kind of literary work.

When looking at a poem, consider the elements specific to poetry and those shared with other genres, as the following checklist suggests.

A play is written to be seen and heard, not read. You may analyze what kind it is and how it would appear onstage, as this checklist suggests.

Planning, Drafting, and Developing

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When you write your analysis, your purpose is to explain the work’s deeper meaning. Don’t try to impress readers with your brilliance. Instead, regard them as friends in whose company you are discussing something familiar to all, though they may not have studied the work as carefully as you have. This assumption will help you decide how much evidence from the work to include and will reduce summarizing.

Identify Your Support. After you have determined the major element or cluster of elements that you intend to focus on, go through the work again to find all the passages that relate to your main point. Mark them as you find them, or put them on note cards or in a computer file, along with the page references. If you use any quotations, quote exactly.

Develop Your Main Idea or Thesis. Begin by trying to express your point in a thesis statement that identifies the literary work and the author.

But this statement is too vague, so you rewrite it to be more precise:

This thesis is better but still doesn’t state theme clearly or precisely. You try other ways of expressing what Jackson implies about tradition:

Adding one of shows that this is not the story’s only theme, but the rest is vague. What does outmoded mean? How are traditions harmful?

This thesis is better but may change as you write. For instance, you might go beyond interpretation of Jackson’s ideas by adding tragic to convey your evaluation of her observation of the human condition:

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Or you might say this, alerting readers to your main points:

Focus on analyzing ideas, not retelling events. Maintain that focus by analyzing your thesis: divide it into parts, and then develop each part in turn. thesis just presented could be divided into (1) use of symbolism to reveal theme and (2) use of irony to reveal theme. Similarly, you might divide a thesis about character change into the character’s original traits, the events that cause change, and the character’s new traits.

Introduce Your Essay. Tie your beginning to your main idea, or thesis. If you are uncertain how to begin, try one of these openings:

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Support Your Interpretation. As you develop your analysis, include supporting evidence—descriptions of setting and character, summaries of events, quotations of dialogue, and other specifics. Cite page numbers (for prose) or line numbers (for poetry) where the details can be found in the work. Integrate evidence from the story with your comments and ideas.

Keep the focus on ideas, not events, by using transition markers that refer to character traits and personality change, not to time. Say “Although Mr. Summers was . . .” instead of “At the beginning of the story Mr. Summers was . . .” Write “Tessie became . . .” instead of “After that Tessie was . . .” State “The villagers in ‘The Lottery’ changed . . .,” not “On the next page . . .”

Conclude Your Essay. When you reach the end, don’t just stop. Close as you might open—with a personal experience, a comment on technique, a quotation—to provide a sense of finality. Refer to or reaffirm your thesis. Often an effective conclusion ties in directly with the introduction.

Use the Take Action chart to help you figure out how to improve your draft. Skim the left-hand column to identify questions you might ask about your literary analysis. When you answer a question with “Yes” or “Maybe,” move straight across to Locate Specifics for that question. Use the activities there to pinpoint gaps, problems, or weaknesses. Then move straight across to Take Action. Use the advice that suits your problem as you revise.

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Revising and Editing

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As you read over your draft, keep in mind your thesis and the evidence that supports it.

After you have revised your literary analysis, check the grammar, word choice, punctuation, and mechanics—and then correct any problems you find. Make sure that you smoothly introduce all of your quotations and references to the work and weave them into your own discussion.