Literary Analysis

Submitted by alice on Sun, 2006-08-06 20:46.

Literary Criticism Research

Determining Credibility and Reliability in Sources

Rhetorical Triangle

Using the Ideas of Others

Primary vs. Secondary Sources

Becoming a Critical Thinker, Reader, and Researcher

Purdue's Library

Online Databases by Subject

Online Databases by Title

Literature Resource Center

MLA International Bibliography

Academic Search Premier (for this and the following, choose Peer Reviewed!)

Lexis Nexis

Proquest

E-journals

Interlibrary Loan

Purdue's Online Writing Lab (OWL)

MLA Formatting and Style Guide/Research Documentation

Other sources

Google Scholar

Ejournals in Education (some Lit stuff here!)

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Literary Analysis

When asked to analyze or explicate (commit exegesis!) a literary piece, you should focus on why and how the text was constructed. A text can be any piece of writing, art, speech, or political statement that can be analyzed. When composing your argument, you should always use direct quotes from and paraphrases of the text to support your analysis, which may be an original argument or a response to another critic's/scholar's writing (i.e. secondary sources). Various methods of analyzing a literary work include but are not limited to:

--analyzing a very small portion of the work, such as a chapter or paragraph, and doing what is called "a close reading" of the text; here, you might focus on a specific image in the text, such as the use of a symbol or metaphor throughout the text

ex. The use of "whiteness" in Moby-Dick illustrates the uncertainty about the meaning of life that Ishmael expresses throughout the novel or The use of "light" in Henry James's The American demonstrates how "in the dark" the protagonist really is.

--determining how the various components of an individual work relate to each other

--discussing how two separate literary works deal with similar concepts or forms

--writing about how concepts and forms in literary works relate to larger aesthetic, political, social, economic, or religious contexts

Here are some tools to help:

Theme - the statement a text makes about a subject (i.e. a moral, a lesson)

Motif - a unifying element in an artistic work (i.e. recurring image, symbol, character type, subject, theme, or narrative detail)

Allegory - the presentation of an abstract idea through more concrete means (i.e. narrative with two levels of meaning) (ex. Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" and John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress)

Plot/Sub-plot - the arrangement and interrelation of events in a narrative work, chosen and designed to engage the reader's attention

Rising Action

Climax (Crisis) - the point of greatest tension or emotional intensity in a plot or the moment or turning point in a plot when the conflict has intensified to a level at which the protagonist's lot will change decisively, either for the better or the worse (vs. Anticlimax - a rhetorical lapse, usually sudden, that inovlves a descent from a higher to a lower emotional point)

Falling Action (Denouement/Catastrophe) - resolution of conflict

Setting - time, place, and social milieu providing background for plot and characters

Narration/Point of View - the vantage point from which a narrative is told

First Person - I (narrative)

Second Person - You (instructive)

Third Person

Omniscient - all-knowing narrator (may enter mind of all characters)

Limited - single character narrator recounting story

Genre

prose, poem, fiction, drama, lyric

comedy (reversal of fortune for the better), tragedy (reversal of fortune for the worse), lyric, pastoral, epic, satire (uses irony, wit, and sometimes sarcasm to expose humanity's vices and foibles, giving impetus to change or reform through ridicule)

bildungsroman (recounts development of an individual from childhood to maturity), romance, satire, Gothic, picaresque, horror, science fiction, historical, apocalyptic

Character (Protagonist/Antagonist/Flat Character)

Protagonist - the most important or "leading" character in a text

Antagonist - character pitted against the protagonist, generally issuing a conflict (a confrontation or struggle between opposing characters or forces in the plot of a narrative work, from which the action emanates and around which it revolves)

Heroine/Hero - often considered synonymous with protagonist, a term referring to the chief character of the work

Antiheroine/Antihero - a protagonist in a modern work who does not exhibit the qualities of the traditional hero (ex. Willy Loman in "The Death of a Salesman")

Stock Character - a type of character who regularly appears in certain literary forms by convention (ex. wicked stepmother)

Flat Character - defined by a single idea or quality

Round Character - defined by three-dimensional complexity of real people

Physical - flesh history (scars, etc.), appearance, clothing

Behavioral/Emotional - mannerism, voice/dialogisms, strengths/weaknesses, dominant/submissive, personality alteration/change

Spiritual - religion(?)

Moral - morality (right vs. wrong)

Identity - who is the character at the beginning of the story? who does the character 'become?' why is this important to the function of the story?

Context

Sociological - culture, racism, sexism, gender/class/race

Historical - war, political, religious

Economical - class, hierarchies

Psychological - trauma (war, racial, gender, familial)

Autobiographical - authorial influence(?)

Language

Diction - author's word choice

Literal (Denotative) - direct language

Figurative (Connotative) - language that employs one or more figures of speech to supplement and modify the literal, denotative meanings of words with additional connotations and richness

Allusion - an indirect reference to a person, event, statement, or theme found in literature or the other arts

Imagery - refers to the actual language a writer uses to convey a visual picture or a sensory experience and the use of figures of speech to express abstract ideas in a vivid and innovative way

Simile - a figure of speech (trope) that compares two essentially unlike things using "like" or "as"

Metaphor - a figure of speech (trope) that associates two unlike things

Cliche' - an expression used ad nauseum (ex. drive me up a wall)

Personification - a figure of speech (trope) that bestows human characteristics upon anything non-human

Pathetic Fallacy - human emotions are attributed only to inanimate nature

Metonymy - a figure of speech (trope) in which one thing is represented by another that is commonly and often physically associated with it (ex. the British monarchy referred to as "the crown")

Symbol - something that stands for or suggests something larger and more complex and often abstract - often an idea or a range of interrelated ideas, attitudes, and practices (ex. country's flag or Olympic rings)

Archetype - those images, figures, character types, settings, and story patterns that are universally shared by people across cultures, embedded in humanity's "collective unconscious"

Ambiguity - the result of something being stated in such a way that its meaning cannot be definitely determined. Creates multiple meanings in literary works.

Irony - a contradiction or incongruity between appearance or expectation and reality (between what someone says and what she/he actually means; between what someone expects to happen and what really happens; or between what appears to be true and what actually is true). May be applied to events, situations, and even structural elements of a work.

Stream of Consciousness - literary technique that approximates the flow (or jumble) of thoughts and sensory impressions that pass through the minde each instant

Alliteration/Consonance - the repetition of sounds in a sequence of words (generally, repeated consonant sounds)

Assonance - the repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds

Hyperbole - overstatement

Oxymoron - a figure of speech (trope) that juxtaposes two opposite or apparently contradictory words to present an emphatic and dramatic paradox for a rhetorical purpose or effect (ex. "extreme moderation)

Paradox - a statement that seems self-contradictory or nonsensical on the surface but that, upon closer examination, may be seen to contain an underlying truth

Anachronism - something that is not placed in its proper historical time period

Other Terms:

Ideology - a set of belives underlying the customs, habits, and practices common to a given social group

Binary Oppositions/Binaries - the habit of Western culture to think and express thoughts in terms of contrary pairs (ex. good/bad, white/black, young/old, fat/thin)

Hegemony - one nation's dominance or dominant influence over another

Hermeneutics - the theory of interpretation in general (that is, how to determine textual meaning)

Palimpsest - refers to the multiple meanings of any word and the multiple layers or levels of meaning in any text

Anagnorisis (Recognition) - in classical drama the protagonist 'discovers' something that either leads to or explains a reversal of fortune.

Catharsis (Release) - the emotional effect a tragic drama has on its AUDIENCE (not the character)

Hubris (Insolence) - in classical drama overwhelming pride that leads to the fall of the tragic hero

Hamartia (Error) - an error in judgment made by the a tragic hero, whether resulting from a lack of knowledge or a moral flaw, that brings about suffering, downfall, and often death of the hero

Epiphany (Manifestation) - used to describe the insight or revelation gained when one suddenly understands the essence of a generally commonplace object, gesture, statement, situation, moment, or mentality--that is, when one "sees" the commonplace for what it really is beneath the sruface and perceives its inner workings, its nature

Pathos (Emotion) - a quality in a work or a portion thereof that makes the READER (not the character) experience pity, sorrow, or tenderness

Affective Fallacy - the erroneous practice of interpreting texts according to psychological responses of readers

Intentional Fallacy - confusing the meaning of a work with the author's expressly 'intended' meaning

Utopia ("good" world) vs. Dystopia ("bad" world)

Criticism (a critic's view of a work, generally filtered through accepted theory) and Theory (a set of principles and assumptions used in certain situations to explain or make predictions about particular phenomena)

Romanticism - early 1800s - emphasis on subjective experience, innovation, imagination, and the individual

Realism - mid-1800s - Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce - a literary movement developed in response to Romanticism; writers associated this movement with trying to write "reality"

Impressionism - mid-1800s - Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, and Edgar Degas - seeks to capture fleeting impressions of characters, settings, and events, depicted subjectively as they appear through the filter of the writer's mood s and personal perceptions

Expressionism - late 1800s - Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Kafka - involves analyzing the purposeful distortion of reality; "objective" depictions of circumstances and thoughts (external viewpoints) cannot accurately render an individual's "subjective" or emotional experience of these things

Modernism - late 1800s - Sigmund Freud, Karl Jung, Viriginia Woolf, and T.S. Eliot - post-WWI movement where authors sought to break away from traditions and conventions, through experimentation with new literary forms, devices and styles

Formalism - 1920s - analyzes the intrinsic nature (rather than to external matters), concetrating on the interlay and relationships between a text's essential verbal elements)

Archetypal/Myth Criticism - 1930s - Carl Jung - focuses on those patterns in a particular literary work that commonly recur in other literary works (see "collective unconscious" - persistent images, figures, and story patterns shared by people across diverse cultures). (ex. Cinderella on several continents)

New Criticism - 1940s - Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, and - a type of formalist criticism where literary art is treated as if it was a self-contained, self-referential object; rather than basing interpretations of a text on the reader's response, the author's stated intentions, or parallels between the text and historical contexts (such as the author's life), New Critics perform close readings, concentrating on the relationships within the text that give it its own distinctive character or form

Post-Modernism - 1940s - post-WWI school of thought that reveals and highlights the alienation of individuals and the meaningless of human existence

Existentialism - 1940s - Jean-Paul Sartre - post-WWII philosophical school whose proponents maintain that existence precedes essence (man has free will and is concerned with humanity's very being, with its perpetual, anguished struggle to exist)

Marxist Criticism - 1940s - Karl Marx, Louis Althusser, and Terry Eagleton - a type of criticism in which literary works are viewed as the product of work and whose practitioners emphasize the role of class and ideology as they reflect, propagate, and even challenge the prevailing social order

Absurdism - 1950s - Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus - depicts the absuridty of the modern human condition, often with implicit reference to humanity's loss or lack of religious, philosophical, or cultural roots

Structuralism - 1950s - Roland Barthes, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Ferdinand de Saussure - heavily influenced by linguistics, it follows the thought that signs that govern all human communication are arbitrary (ex. green/red lights); it posits the possibility of approaching a text or other signifying system systematically, even scientifically, and of revealing the "grammar" behind its form and meaning

Poststructuralism - 1960s - Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault - the general attempt to contest and subvert structuralism and to formulate new theories regarding interpretation and meaning

Cultural Criticism - 1960s - Stuart Hall and Richard Hoggart - examines how literature emerges from, influences, and competes with other forms of discourse (such as religion, science, or advertising) within a given culture

Reader-Response Criticism - 1970s - Stanley Fish - raises theoretical questions about whether our responses to a work are the same as its meaning(s), whether a work can have as many meanings as we have responses to it, and whether some responses are more valid than others

Deconstruction - 1970s - Jacques Derrida and J. Hillis Miller - involves a close reading of texts in order to demonstrate that any given text has irreconcilably contradicotry meanings, rather than being a unified, logical whole; the text can and does have intertwined yet opposite discourses, multiple and conflicting strands of narrative, threads of meaning that cross and contradict one another

Feminist Criticism - 1970s - Simone de Beauvoir and Julia Kristeva - movement seeking to expose the phallocentric (male-centered) nature of literary works; seeks to analyze how women characters are portrayed, exposing the patriarchal ideology implicit in the so-called classics and demonstrating that attitudes and traditions reinforcing systematic masculine dominance are inscribed in the literary canon

Black Feminist Criticism - 1980s - Elaine Showalter, Patricia Hill Collins, and bell hooks - springing from feminist criticism, which mostly focused on the elevation of the white woman above the white patriarch, Black Feminist criticism seeks to read social and hegemonic constructs in texts that denigrate or celebrate Black women

New Historicisim - 1980s - Louis Montrose and Stephen Greenblatt - a type of literary criticism created in reaction to the text-only approach pursued by formalist New Critics and the critics who challenged the New Criticism in the 1970s; new historicists acknowledge the importance of the literary text, but they also analyze the text with an eye to a work's historical content and base their interpretations on the interplay between the text and historical contexts (such as the author's life or intentions in writing the book)

Gender Critcisim - 1980s - a type of literary criticism that focuses on--and critiques--gender as it is commonly conceived, seeking to expose its insufficiency as a categorizing device (critique of masculine/feminine binaries)

Gynocriticism - 1980s - Elaine Showalter - refers to a type of feminist criticism that focuses on literary works writtey by women, rather than critiquing male-authored works or studying women as readers who must resist predominantly patriarchal ideology that traditional texts reinforce

Queery Criticism - 1980s - Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Judith Butler - forms of gender criticism focused on textual represntations of and readings responsive to issues of homo- (and hetero-) sexuality

Postcolonial Criticism - 1990s - Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Edward Said, and Homi BhaBha - a type of cultural criticism that usually involves the analysis of literary texts produced in countries and cultures that have come under the control of European and American colonial powers at some point in their history; alternatively, it can refer to the analysis of texts written about colonized places by writers hailing from the colonizing culture

Personal Criticism - 1990s - Jane Thompkins and Nancy K. Miller - a type of feminist associated with urging women to include their personal reactions and even histories in their readings of literary texts

Periods of Literature

Colonial

Revolutionary

Early National

Romantic

Realistic

Naturalistic

Modern

Postmodern

Posthuman??