Literary Analysis
Why do we read literature? Many times in high school, our teachers want us to close read literature to better understand its meaning. The way to figure out this meaning is to use that close reading to do a literary analysis. A literary analysis is not just a summary of the work. Instead, it is an argument that expresses a writer’s interpretation, judgment, perspective, or critical evaluation of the work. By learning details of the author's life, close reading and analyzing a piece of their writing, and personally responding, a reader can enhance their understanding and experience with literature.
Author Biography
Joyce Carol Oates was born and raised in Lockport, New York in 1938 on a small farm during hard economic times (Lewis, 2014). Even though her family did not have much money, she said she had a “happy, close-knit and unextraordinary family for the time, place, and era” (Academy, 2012). Her grandmother Blanche lived with them and in many ways inspired Joyce to start writing. She first became interested in writing when her grandmother have her the book Alice In Wonderland, which she said was the great treasure of her childhood and the most profound literary influence in her life. She then began writing at the age of fourteen when her grandmother gave her a typewriter. When her grandmother died, Joyce found out that Blanche’s father had killed himself and Blanche had then hid her Jewish heritage after that. Joyce drew on aspects like this of her grandmother’s life to write the novel “The Gravediggers Daughter”.
While Joyce was in high school, she began reading stories by William Faulkner, Henry David Thoreau, Ernest Hemmingway, and many others. She said these people influence her greatly, and stil...
... middle of paper ...
...acrifice her life. I like to think that if I were in her situation, I would do the same thing. I think this is overall a great story that can teach young girls a good lesson about thinking they are better than other people in their family. It can teach them how important their family really is and how much they will rely on them when they get older and in times of need.
By learning about the author's life, close reading and analyzing a piece of their writing, and responding on a personal level, a reader can better understand literature while experiencing it in new ways. This is the reason people read literature. By close reading and doing a literary analysis, readers can develop a deeper meaning of the piece and experience the story in a new way. This can open up new doors and make them grow into better people because they have a new type of understanding.
reader is reading literature that they can relate to. An example of this is coming of age stories.
I think that the good novelist tries to provide his reader with vivid depictions of certain crucial and abiding patterns of human existence. This he attempts to do by reducing the chaos of human experience to artistic form. And when successful he provides the reader with a fresh vision of reality. For then through the symbolic action of his characters and plot he enables the reader to share forms of experience not immediately his own. And thus the reader is able to recognize the meaning and value of the presented experience as a whole. (Kostelanetz 10)
1). The student will adapt part of a novel into a dramatic reading makes students more intimate with the author's intentions and craft.
When I first read some of Miss Porter’s work, I came away feeling depressed, empty and wondering why she even wrote. Her stories seemed unfinished, incomplete and pointless. However, I find myself thinking about those works, discovering new things and realizing a deeper meaning in the stories.
Joyce’s peculiar inspirations lead many to believe that she was looking for some sort of coping mechanism or some one who could relate to what she has experienced in her life. (1) Her inspirations included Edger Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Williams Faulkner, and lastly Flannery O’Conner. These authors wrote about the dark emotional feelings that arose with death a...
...rtant to look for the deeper meaning of characters in the text because that will lead to a deeper and also more profound understanding of the novel. Without having a deeper understanding of a novel that is all that it is which is a novel; but if people have a deeper understanding of the text then that novel will live forever in the mind of at least one person.
Lilly Barels never thought she would be a writer. As a UCLA graduate who double majored in Neuroscience and Dance, her relationship with creative writing ended in High School. However, almost fifteen years later, in the midst of a broken marriage and lost in the fog of un-fulfillment, Barels discovered the creative channel that would transform her from a high school physics teacher to a soon-to-be published writer. After a passionate and healing love affair with poetry, she was accepted into the MFA program at Antioch Los Angeles. In 2012, Barels received her Masters in Creative Writing with a focus in fiction. Barels just finished her second novel, and she is a regular contributor to Huffington Post.
James Joyce was born in Ireland to a borderline destitute/middle-class family. After his graduation from the University College, he moved to Paris to study medicine only to be called back to Dublin to care for his mother during her last days (O’Conner). He remained in his home country for a year, publishing short stories in “The Irish Homestead” newspaper (O’Conner). Joyce was a failure at many different occupations: teaching, journalism, and accounting; however, he is one of the few authors to have known success in his own lifetime (Bulson 17). Living in the 1910s era, which found pride in formal diction and savvy language, Joyce found many publishers were wary of his work, which pushed the social limits with bitter language and brash subjects (Bulson 18). Bulson quotes Joyce’s argument with publishers as he refused to grant their wishes of revision, “I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilization in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished mirror” (33). This was his attitude towards the eventually published collection of short stories, Dubliners, confirming the beginning of modern literature.
uses throughout a piece of literature can determine how a reader reflects on a theme presented in
Her theme has often been the dilemmas of the adolescent girl coming to terms with family and a small town. Her more recent work has addressed the problems of middle age, of women alone, and of the elderly. The characteristic of her style is the search for some revelatory gesture by which an event is illuminated and given personal significance. (The Canadian Encyclopedia Plus 1995)
On September 25, 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi, a son was born to Murry Cuthbert and Maud Butler Faulkner. This baby, born into a proud, genteel Southern family, would become a mischievous boy, an indifferent student, and drop out of school; yet “his mother’s faith in him was absolutely unshakable. When so many others easily and confidently pronounced her son a failure, she insisted that he was a genius and that the world would come to recognize that fact” (Zane). And she was right. Her son would become one of the most exalted American writers of the 20th century, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature and two Pulitzers during his lifetime. Her son was William Faulkner.
In all honesty, I chose to read The Country Girls Trilogy by Edna O’Brien because it was the only text that I could get my hands on. After reading it though, I’m glad I had the luck of choosing it. I realized, while reading the trilogy, that throughout my course of study, I have not read very many female authors. I may have read a few short stories along the way, but most books that I have read for classes and for pleasure have been written by men. I saw the difference in writing styles as I read the first paragraph of the book and immediately liked the change of pace and detail-oriented style. I also found that I really connected with the main characters, Caithleen and Baba, whose real name is Bridget. I found it interesting that I invested such interest in two characters whose personalities are so different from my own. Caithleen was the narrator in the first two books, and I found that I connected with her most because of her details and innocence. The trilogy represents three phases of these women’s lives from their girlhood, to losing loves and the trials of marriage. Through it all, their interesting friendship changes according to the events in their lives until a sad and untimely end. I’m not sure that that I would want a friendship like Caithleen and Baba’s, but at least that had each other in the end, when the rest of the world seemed to have forgotten them. The excerpt in Colm Toibin’s anthology, The Penguin book of Irish Fiction, is from the first book in O’Brien’s trilogy called The Country Girls. For purposes of this paper, I will discuss the excerpt itself, and then the rest of the first book of O’Brien’s trilogy.
Oates, Joyce Carol. Foreword to: The Complete Stories & Parables. Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, n.d.
We read about characters confronting life experiences in some way like our own and sometimes find ourselves caught up with the struggles of a character. Each reader gets a new and unique event and the words speak to us now, telling us the truths about human life which are relevant to all times. Literature enriches us by putting words to feelings.
Literature is rarely, if ever, merely a story that the author is trying to tell. It is imperative that the reader digs deep within the story to accurately analyze and understand the message the author is trying to portray. Authors tend to hide themselves in their stories. The reader can learn about the author through literary elements such as symbolism, diction, and structure. A good example of this is Robert Frost’s poems The Road Not Taken and Nothing Gold can Stay in which he uses ordinary language unlike many other poets that became more experimental (Frost, Robert. “1.”).