Why literary analysis is important

The most important things to consider when writing a literary analysis paper are: what is your argument? Are you expressing it correctly via a well-placed thesis statement? Do you support your argument well throughout your essay?

Often this also involves reading, analyzing, and using outside research to support what you are arguing. Learning the basic structure of literary analysis will be helpful for writing many different kinds of essays. Setting When and where the work takes place.

Elements of setting include location, time period, time of day, weather, social atmosphere, and economic conditions. Narrator The person telling the story. The narrator may straightforwardly report what happens, convey the subjective opinions and perceptions of one or more characters, or provide commentary and opinion in his or her own voice.

Themes The main ideas or messages of the work—usually abstract ideas about people, society, or life in general. A work may have many themes, which may be in tension with one another. Elements of Style These are the hows —how the characters speak, how the story is constructed, and how language is used throughout the work.

Structure and organization How the parts of the work are assembled. Some novels are narrated in a linear, chronological fashion, while others skip around in time. Some plays follow a traditional three-or five-act structure, while others are a series of loosely connected scenes.

Some authors deliberately leave gaps in their works, leaving readers to puzzle out the missing information. Point of view The perspective from which a story is told. In first-person point of view , the narrator involves him or herself in the story.

In third-person point of view , the narrator does not participate in the story. Omniscient narrators see and know all: they can witness any event in any time or place and are privy to the inner thoughts and feelings of all characters. Remember that the narrator and the author are not the same thing! Diction Word choice. Whether a character uses dry, clinical language or flowery prose with lots of exclamation points can tell you a lot about his or her attitude and personality.

Syntax Word order and sentence construction. Ernest Hemingway, for example, is known for writing in very short, straightforward sentences, while James Joyce characteristically wrote in long, incredibly complicated lines.

Tone The mood or feeling of the text. Diction and syntax often contribute to the tone of a work. A novel written in short, clipped sentences that use small, simple words might feel brusque, cold, or matter-of-fact. Imagery Language that appeals to the senses, representing things that can be seen, smelled, heard, tasted, or touched.

Figurative language Language that is not meant to be interpreted literally. A good thesis will be: Arguable. Provable through textual evidence. Trace Choose an image—for example, birds, knives, or eyes—and trace that image throughout Macbeth. Debate Is the society depicted in good for its citizens?

However long it is, your introduction needs to: Provide any necessary context. Present your thesis. This usually happens at or very near the end of your introduction. Indicate the shape of the essay to come. Your introduction should not: Be vague. Open with any grandiose assertions. Wildly praise the work. Go off-topic. The organization of this middle section of your essay will largely be determined by the argumentative strategy you use, but no matter how you arrange your thoughts, your body paragraphs need to do the following: Begin with a strong topic sentence.

But the second? I'm not so sure that's as important. I think it's become a large part of the English curriculum just because teachers are looking for ways to teach kids to write, and writing about what you've just read might seem to be the easiest way to find a topic. But a lot of kids don't see the point of writing such essays because they can't come up with anything new to say about the piece of literature. If they can't come up with anything original, then they know they're just parroting back what they were told, and a lot of kids balk at that.

Or, if they do come up with something original, they're afraid the teacher won't appreciate it because it's not one of the "accepted" interpretations. Or it may only be a small idea that doesn't support a full blown five paragraph essay, which makes the whole endeavor very painful write the original idea and have an essay that will get a bad grade because it's too short?

Or parrot an idea the teacher fed you and get the full five paragraphs? So I think that while literary analysis is a fine thing to cover, I've never really obsessed about the literary analysis essay. We've done a few, when the kids came up with enough to write about, but we haven't done nearly as many as they probably "ought" to have done. It was kind of nice to hear this sort of validation. I've always thought the classic five paragraph form was a bit clunky and didn't adapt to what was being said.

It's also really hard to write one that isn't just flat out boring -- and repetitive. He was trying to get them to find their own voice, and to write in a way that was best for their ideas, rather than to cram it all into the standard form they'd been taught in high school. I have always been a reader and was told in high school that I ought to take the literature class. Fortunately for me, I realised that class was not about reading, but writing. And I knew that Rosies don't like to write essays about how the wind moving through the trees meant the heroine had a restless spirit.

Literary analysis in the most narrow sense is a subset of the larger field of rhetoric. You can confine it to the structural analysis of a special "literary" group of texts -- particularly short stories, poetry, longer fiction, drama -- and think of it as how language works in these particular texts, how the texts are structured.

Or you can open it up, as "revisionists" do, to other kinds of texts or even other forms of media; to historical context; to issues of gender, class, and race; to the history of canon formation; to the history of print culture and the publishing industry; to continuations or spin-offs of the original; to letters between the author and readers of the time; to a wide variety of other approaches and contexts.

None of these approaches mean that formal analysis is necessarily tossed by the wayside, that all revisionist analysis necessarily becomes personal or misguided or takes isolated bits of text and warps them to fit political agendas. In fact, the best of these practices use formal analysis to understand how meaning is produced through language in specific historical and political contexts.

They can combine literary history with the analysis of literary forms, style, and structure. Literary analysis of the narrower, formalist kind, dealing exclusively with conventional literary categories, can be very intellectually satisfying for those of us who are that way inclined. I learned to love poetic analysis, for instance, and now it seems to me a geeky kind of fascination, along the lines of a logician's playing with a Rubik's cube.

Poetry is a compressed puzzle; you take it apart and see what all the formal bits are and how they go together, then you put it back together for an intellectual buzz as the pieces almost audibly click. You see how the poetic elements construct and carry the meaning -- how the poetry works to make its meaning through formal aspects like tone, the choice of speaker, stanza form, inverted phrasing, enjambment, imagery, etc. It can be spectacularly satisfying to see how novels and drama work in much the same fashion, like the "Aha!

Even though I have a PhD in literature, however, I would never claim that literary analysis in the most narrow sense, dealing only with "literary" texts, is something all kids must necessarily know how to do, much less to spend years practicing.

Pause for shock and horror. As Anna Quindlen argues eloquently in her essays on reading, people come to literary texts for a number of reasons, most of which have to do with meaning -- whether that meaning is a platform for escape, for seeking solace, for widening one's world, for finding kindred spirits, for enjoying eloquent language.

For some of these readers, learning the fine points of literary analysis will greatly enhance their pleasure and understanding. For others, it will not; that is not what they are looking for. Even some high school students might be better served by a history of philosophical thought, by putting a particular poem or novel in the context of a history of ideas.

They might be better served by a discussion of character, by the fascinating questions of a character's sanity, or discontent, or ethical choices. Again, this does not mean that they should eschew issues of form and content; the meaning of a literary text is constructed and conveyed through its formal characteristics. But neither should they have to be restricted to only those formal characteristics.

Rhetorical analysis has been largely limited to literary analysis and to literary texts within the framework of schools and curricula -- for a number of reasons, including the fact that writing by and large has been delegated to the realm of "English," and English teachers usually become English teachers because they love novels, poetry, and memoirs to judge from what crops up most often in curricula.

I think it needs to be opened up again to a much wider range of texts and contexts. I'd argue for a larger understanding of a rhetorical approach to all kinds of text, from opinion pieces to blogs to articles in science magazines, from political speeches to advertising to how movies are put together, from novels and poems to persuasive articles and journalism.

Kids DO need to know how language can be used and abused; how it can manipulate, cover over, expose, reveal; why some people are offended by specific words think of the recent edition of Huckleberry Finn which replaced the "n" word with "slave". They need to understand that playing around with how a sentence is constructed can change its emotional impact on readers, that people can be convinced of an argument's truth simply because of how it is worded or ordered, and a host of other things.

They need to understand these things because they will live in a world in which fiction and non-fiction writers, advertisers, zealots, journalists, politicians, and a host of others bombard them with words aimed at seducing their opinions, their money, their votes, their allegiance Literary fanatics and I include myself here; it's not derogatory may prefer one kind of analysis or approach over the others, naturally. But to claim that the way one individual prefers is The Great Right Way and that every other approach is misguided or downright wrong strikes me as the same as claiming one individual has exclusive access to historical truth, and that every historian who disagrees with him or her is politically motivated or intellectually dishonest or just inferior.

It also grossly lumps together and mischaracterizes what revisionist literary analysts and historians actually do. So -- traditional, formalist literary analysis can be a lot of intellectual fun and a tremendous intellectual discipline; but so can other approaches. Literary analysis can help kids understand how texts are put together; but it needn't be confined to "literary" genres to have that effect.

Literary analysis can be confined to the structural and linguistic aspects of a text; or it can be used to explore how meaning is created, clarified, obscured, or otherwise manipulated through structure and style.

It can be used as a kind of microscope to look into the literary world, or as a telescope to look out into the wider textual world. All these things are useful, all can be challenging and satisfying. The question the OP asked is a great one, and I've tried to give one answer that distinguishes between "literary" vs. I make no claims that one is truer, higher, more sophisticated, or somehow better than another -- my post on the high school writing thread deals specifically with conventional formalist literary analysis of a poem.

I do think that people interested in education should be exposed to both, think about both, and come to their own conclusions about what approach, or what mix of approaches, will best serve the interests and needs of the kids they teach.

Edited to add: I toss this out there for the purposes of opening up discussion for anyone interested. I am not going to be responding or further engaging. If you have a question, you can PM me. This analogy cracked me up : , but yes, it is in a way similar to that and it serves beautifully those of us who are, like Nan said, more "engineer-minded".

I agree that various people come to texts for various different reasons, might profit from various ways of reading those texts and might naturally be inclined to focus on different aspects. But then - and here Karen and I most likely differ - I go back to the context of dealing with those texts which is general education, language-and-literature classes and conclude that, in spite of those things, there still is an approach to be preferred: the one which emphasizes formal qualities of the work in question, interwoven with a bit of historical context.

This is not necessarily to rule out other possible approaches The same literary work may be used multiple times for multiple goals in mind - I can use Crime and Punishment for a literature class, a psychology class, a sociology or politics class, and each of those times my reading will be different.

My preference is a result of the context in which reading takes place: I do not believe the focus on "psychology" or "sociology" I should also note that I do not use those as derogatory terms, but simply referring to the sphere of a whole different discipline should occur in language-and-literature lessons, even if preceded by the formalist considerations. A focus on Raskolnikov as a character, as a complex psychology, the study of the development of his guilt and "illness", etc.

For having "misplaced" the focus onto something which is under the scrutiny of a different discipline And I grew to agree with it. Thus my insistence on a particular approach in high school language-and-literature classes. These things are related to language and in my view are valid concerns in language classes, though many people I among them tend to group formal and informal logic with philosophy usually as a "prelude" and address these issues within those disciplines.

I see some of these issues differently too. Many people, I among them, happen not to have a "relative" view of certain things Both are fundamentally ideological stances and, in reality, there is little difference between them. I also do not find that people who disagree with me necessarily do so because of an agenda, inferior scholarship, intellectual dishonesty But note that I still have a right to restrict my view of things and my view of validity of approaches to a more narrow definition, just like Karen has a right to broaden it, as much as it will look like "walking out of discipline" to me.

I am not even sure I agree with Karen's examples of history revisionism, for example. Here Karen seems to take a multiplicity of possible options, while I define it in a rather narrow sense. Finally, I agree with Karen too here - that books should be read in many ways, and that many ways of thinking about them and their various elements should be fostered throughout education. I just disagree they should be read in all those ways in a language-and-literature context where I put high school English, as I find some of those ways to be fundamentally belonging to other disciplines Or a homeschool classroom, in our case.

I do, and unabashedly so, consider it a "wrong" approach in that context. I am so glad you brought the conversation back toward a broader look at how to use literary analysis in a homeschool setting.

I plan to print out your professional : ideas to give me more ways to approach literature. I'm glad some folks are inspired by your ideas, and that you've provided just the thing for them to relate to literature study again.

However, I would hate for others to be intimidated into forcing their children through dry-as-dust terms and essays that, as one of the first posters pointed out, might only be useful to the small group of folks who end up in literary analysis as a career. And as Karen Anne mentioned, even those students might not limited their lit study to such a narrow focus. Or did they develop passions in their youth by following their own ideas and enthusiasms?

I can't think of any great master of the English language who followed such a precise course as you have outlined. Even in my oldest son's engineering school, it was looked upon unfavorably when students had spent their entire lives on academics and books, as followers in a narrow scope of thinking. Also in his actual employment as an engineer, communication and flexibility and new ideas are very important for promotion.

I think English class is where students have an opportunity to practice that kind of communication. And literature gives students something to communicate about, as well as a common cultural experience to use in communicating ideas. Fostering that type of experience and shared understanding, getting students to think deeper than just noticing surface events, is the main point of "literary analysis and essays" in my homeschool. And no amount of strict instruction is going to result in my particular children improving their communication skills and literary base by writing an essay entitled, "The organizational relationship between short stories and a unity of a novel in Don Quijote".

If a student is fortunate, I think a teacher will introduce formal components in any course, but will allow the student to develop their thoughts and ideas further than a straightjacket of formal study. Sure, a student ideally will study the basics until they are mastered.

But alongside of that, their interests can be nurtured through encouragement to observe, to notice, to look more deeply. I beg to differ. My oldest might be your type of student, since he is an academic rule-follower, and finds a certain amount of satisfaction in that. But my youngest is better served by approaching math from many angles.

He did a rigorous basic facts study, to be sure. But alongside of that, he was exploring math in its natural setting, such as store owners giving discounts Singapore math , math tricks and definitions Math U See , and math challenges that were way beyond his level math team and math competition. If I had restricted him to only doing the basics until they were mastered, and had shrugged when he said he hated math, then where would he be now?

Hating math, no doubt at all in my mind. And yes, his older, rule-following brother is quite successful in math. But my youngest can run circles around him in some areas, such as solving complex multi-step problems in his head. For the OP or anyone who felt chastised by the strong criticisms earlier in the thread, I hope folks are encouraged to give their kids diverse ways to grow in their "English" studies. Literature analysis in the strictest sense, including all those terms that do bore me as well metaphors, symbolism , are simply tools or basic skills.

To me, a true "English" course uses many tools to give students a way to accurately communicate. But to accomplish this goal, they must also jump in and explore ideas and attempt communicating them -- long before they are good at it. Did the student make the correct incisions? Are the parts properly labeled? IMHO, to say that the study of literature within an English class must be limited to formal, technical analysis and must at all costs avoid discussions of meaning or personal engagement with the work, misses the point of art.

To me, art is a conversation between the artist and the reader or viewer; artists make art as a way of transferring their thoughts and feelings and beliefs to others.

Oh, but some of us do care. For some people, personal response, historical background, cultural context, contemporary relevance, etc. Most of the really interesting courses I had in college and grad school were interdisciplinary courses or seminars, and I always appreciated the new insights and ideas that can be gleaned from approaching a topic from new perspectives.

I think interdisciplinary studies can provide a cross-pollination of ideas that keeps disciplines from becoming stagnant and fossilized. Analysis is important in all its aspects. A habit of analysis - whether it's a critical reading of original documents in history, an investigation of the assumptions underlying an experiment, or an appreciation of sound in Keats - is a large part of later school education.

I generally do not find the two - "dry books" and creativity - to be mutually exclusive ; every time when we get to these discussions it seems like such a false dichotomy to me. I simply believe that there is a time and a place for everything, and that "a classroom" in the narrow sense - the time and the place where you do the formal aspect of your schooling is not for some of those. I view classroom as a time and a place for some of that "rigidity" in terms of getting to know the discipline "on its terms", in its development I do not think that formalism in a classroom does not allow for any of the other things we talked about personal connection, approaches from other disciplines, etc.

I often find that one can viscerally enjoy art even more after an experience of a formal analysis and a historical approach to it any art, I apply this also to music, visual arts, etc. In fact, I am often surprised why literature , of all things, seems to be that one which is exluded from such an approach. I doubt anyone would argue against a "formalist" music or art education, focusing on technique and its historical development, or a "formalist" approach to science and the emphasis of a certain method, but literature seems to be that area which everyone wishes to "beseige", by introducing approaches which fundamentally stem from other disciplines or just by going "personal" with it.

Literature education, from what I gather, used to be a lot more "technical" in the previous centuries as well. I do not forbid my daughters to do whatever they wish with literature or math, or any other field in their free time. I do not even, as some might think, imply that other approaches are "lesser" and not do be done ever. The only thing I require , when we sit down "formally" to "do school", is that a certain approach be favored.

Outside of the school "boundaries" invisible ones in our case , they are not "restricted" even within school boundaries they would not be restricted if they could successfully elaborate on why their particular approach is literary, or is scientific, even if not my first idea on how to do something. At this age, I assume they will have maturity needed to mentally separate the two, not to equal "school" with the totality of one's learning. And then, I am always willing to sit down with a child who is interested in more than they are required, in different than they are required, to work with them, discuss with them or oversee their progress Like I said, a time and a place for everything, and this is what worked for me as a child, and what works beautifully for my children now.

Some of you might be shocked upon learning what things I did discuss with them Some of them might well outside of my comfort zone and that made it interesting conversations. But again, that is not "school" in our house, those are rabbit traits that "do not count" in the formal sense of course they "count" educationally , for one's personal culture and broadening of their horizons, but not as formal school , those are not literary points of view.

We may tie them to some other study area, if applicable, or we may not and simply consider it an elegant way to beguile some time. I am not sure Firstly, it is very problematic to talk of "points" of art in the first place not that you are doing so, mind you, you are stating a purely personal view - I am talking generally now. I am not even sure I would agree with a view which primarily emphasizes communication I view art as a skill , as a craft , if you wish think of history of arts and how the status of the artist changed , and an art education as something which is , in its nature, rather "technical".

But if something is "technical", it does not necessarily foster a black-and-white way of thinking, it is "technical" in a different sense of the word, technical in a sense that there are some underlying formal principles and a type of talking about that, which might even allow for a great flexibility within that.

For example, that paper on DQ could be written in a plethora of ways, all of which are formalist and satisfy my criteria, but which accentuate such different things or make such different parallels. It is not a correct-and-wrong type of thinking, but more a type of thinking that if something can be said about art "scientifically", from the point of view of theory, it focuses on certain aspects of the work.

There is still a variety, we have only narrowed down what we talk about. I see this differently. I see being moved as a personal reaction, not a subject of an analysis. The same way I may faint in front of some of Caravaggio's paintings as a purely visceral reaction and the same way I may enjoy nature on a field trip, "communicating" with the landscape, flowers, resting my eyes on the lake, and just living the moment.

But if I am to talk formally about art, or scientifically about nature, I need to change the focus. I need to get back to myself, first, switch off some of the feeling , and turn on my ratio - then I can only begin an analysis of a kind. All of theory, in any camp, is essentially "inserting" ratio there where ratio originally was not the primary mode of communication, be it science think of how science emerges from philosophy, which is already a different way of communication with the world and explanation of it than a myth or art.

I believe that too much emphasis is put, in the school system, on personal connections, not because I find those inherently less valuable, but because I find them not belonging to that milieu. A time and a place for everything None of which is a purely personal communication where engagement is primary. I do not speak against that engagement, but against an emphasis on that engagement in a formal academic setting.

But, barring personal response, all of those are components of literature classes. And that is fine, too - but if formally it is acknowledged. If we do not call it "native language and literature" classes, but if we accentuate that we are talking about an interdisciplinary course, with a probably different title, a seminar which is "out of box".

And, like you point out, those are exactly university type of things more than something in a high school. I find it important to learn disciplines separately before one mixes and matches and "finds oneself". To break off in finding your voice, you need to have something to break off from. First one learns the "grammar" and the "logic" of each discipline, then proceeds onto learning the 'inner' "rhetoric", learning to communicate about it while staying within it, and then one, as a part of one's higher academic formation, studying what they are interested in, mixes and matches and dialogues with one's previous education and 'destroys' it to build on it and handle the pieces differently, finds what they wish to do about it.

University, in my opinion, is exactly a time and a place for that : , but in order for that to be truly successful, I find there must be a pre-established basis. That basis is hard to systematically make up for later When the only thing one has to break off in the first places are bits and pieces without a structure, if one wishes to build a structure, it must be very, very difficult.

On the other hand, a structure if flexible, adaptable, it does not require a building-anew of everything, making an order inside a "chaos". I am a heretic in many aspects, as much as some of you will find it hard to believe.

For one, I greatly prefer analytical philosophy to the continental tradition, yet I was educated within the latter. But to make those switches was easy: I had the historical context down, the "logic" of the discipline down, it was only the matter of "upgrading" of a kind.

Likewise, when one learns literature in a historical context with a formalist bent, switching to gender and class readings is merely an issue of a switch of perspective - the context is there. It gets broadened , of course, but one has the initial tools to start with. But if one has seminar-style classes in high school and wishes to build a coherent structure later, I am not sure how smoothly that goes.

What I do know is that I have met a lot of people who regret not having had that "compartmentalized", "rigid" education within each discipline as children, while surprisingly little people who regret having had that.

Sure, one breaks off and disagrees with some of that tradition, but I still find an inherent value in teaching that tradition in such a structured way. I cannot help it, Jackie and Julie : - I do have very definite views of how things should be done.

I cannot emphasize those each and every time I write, I have to assume that people will be able to emotionally disassociate, not feeling "attacked" when I write about how I believe literary analysis or anything, for that matter should be done and then be able to filter through things in accordance with their own views and goals And I can totally separate those two in my mind : , still not consider what you do formally 'valid' from my point of view in this particular context, high school language and literature classes , but be content that you are happy with it.

So, peace. I am always willing to sit down with a child who is interested in more than they are required, in different than they are required, to work with them, discuss with them or oversee their progress For some of us, though, this is a false dichotomy — that only the most formal, technical aspects of education, divorced from personal engagement and joy, count as "school.

I think the fact that most US students have to wait until college to take these sorts of courses is primarily the result of a public education system that is obsessed with standardized lists of testable factoids and oblivious to the importance of connections and context. Interesting — I've had the opposite experience. I've found that people who had a rigid, compartmentalized education sometimes had difficulty getting out of those boxes in interdisciplinary seminars.

Critical thinking is important because it encourages students to connect ideas, examine for inconsistencies in reasoning, solve problems, and reflect on their own beliefs. Literary analysis demands that students strengthen their critical thinking muscles. While this point could be easily cased within critical thinking, it is important enough to stand alone.

Literary analysis asks students to form claims and offer relevant and rooted support in defense of the claim. Studies continue to emerge proving that close reading of literature increases the ability to focus. A multi-disciplinary study out of Stanford shows the relation between analyzing literature and the ability to focus.

Literary analysis encourages students to branch beyond their own experiences and beliefs, and in doing so it allows students to build empathy. As you can imagine, empathy is important in relationships, job settings, and beyond. Because we are naturally inclined to look inward and tie truth to our own experiences, it is incredibly important to be exposed to other perspectives.

This helps solidify or change when necessary our own beliefs as well as helps build healthy relationships.