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 the 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.
The major challenge that writers face when analyzing a literary work is to state and support a thesis that takes a stand. If you simply explain the literal meaning of the work — retelling the story or summing up the topic of an essay or a poem — your readers will be disappointed. Instead, they expect a clear thesis that presents your specific interpretation. They want to see how you analyze the work and which features of the work you use to support your position about it. For instance, your thesis might identify a theme — an insight, main idea, or observation about life — developed in the work. Then your essay would show how selected features of the work express, develop, or illustrate this theme. On the other hand, your thesis might present your analysis of how a story, poem, or play works. Then your essay might discuss how several elements — such as the mood established by the setting, the figurative language used to describe events, and the arc of the plot — work together to develop its meaning. Whatever the case that you argue, your thesis needs to be clearly focused and your supporting evidence needs to come from the words and expressions of the work itself.