Essay of Literary Analysis
Texts Read During this Section:
Lopez, Landscape and Narrative
Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
Alexie, What You Pawn, I Will Redeem
Chopin, The Story of an Hour
Chopin, A Respectable Woman
Achebe, Dead Mens Path
OConnor, A Good Man is Hard to Find
Oates, Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?
Marquez, Balthazars Marvelous Afternoon
OBrien, The Things They Carried
Our introduction to argumentation is employed in writing about literature. We read a number of classic short stories in this section. You are to choose one or more stories we read and make a claim about the text/s. Your claim can concern either the storys form, for example, How does using first person narration function in Alexies story? Or your claim can focus on content, What does the OConnor story tell us about redemption? You can even use some of the language from essay #2 to analyze a text, How does imperialism affect the characters in Achebes story? You can use two stories, How are the lead female characters similar in Chopins stories?
Once you have your research question (like those above), you comb through sources finding pertinent information that will help you answer your question. Essentially, you are analyzing the text to collect information. Once you have all that information, from all the text, you need to synthesize the information into a thesis that will answer your research question and organize your essay.
Here are nine steps towards writing an essay of literary analysis:
1. Read the story with an eye toward a good topic.
2. Choose a topic–about any aspect of the story’s form or content. Note that a topic is a general subject–you will need to turn that into a thesis later on in this process. Turn the topic into a question. For example, if your topic is characterization in “Where Are You Going Where Have You Been,” turn the topic into the question: “How does Oates portray Arnold Friend?” Once you have turned the topic into a question, the rest of the steps will become easier.
3. Re-read the story with your topic as a filter. In this way, you will be uncovering passages from the story that relate to your topic. In other words, find passages that help you answer your research question.
4. Mark passages in the story that relate to your topic (and it would be helpful to, afterward, type these into a word processing file).
5. Analyze these passages and develop a thesis from them (the thesis is your arguable proposition about your topic).
6. Organize the passages in order to most effectively support your thesis (don’t feel you need to follow the same order that they appear in the story).
7. Properly introduce, present, and interpret each passage. When you introduce a passage you are preparing your reader for it–giving them an idea of what to read it for. The presentation properly uses MLA citation format. The interpretation relates how that passage supports your thesis. Thus, all three elements of argument–CLAIM, WARRANT, SUPPORT, are included. The claim is your thesis. The support is each passage. The warrant (which connects support to claim) is how you read or interpret the passage so that it is used as evidence for your thesis.
8. Link your passages with proper transitions (each analyzing one or two passages) and write your introduction (see directions below) and conclusion
9. Revise.
The Introduction:
In your first paragraph you must include–the author of the story (this means that all your textual citations will only need a page # in parentheses), the title of the story (titles of short stories should be enclosed in quotation marks), and a one or two sentence synopsis of the story (a synopsis is a summary of the story), and your thesis. For example, The story, Everything that Rises Must Converge, by Flannery O’Connor [author/title], chronicles the conflicted relationship between a son and mother on a hot day in the civil rights-tense South [synopsis]. O’Connor uses the historical situation to send a dark message about sorrow and redemption [thesis].
Essay requirements:
– MLA format
– 4 pages in length
– proper quotes and citations must be incorporated from the text
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