Literary Analysis

Literary analysis is the process of critical thinking and understanding literature. Literary analysis is a vital stage in the development of your critical thinking skills. Being able to understand and describe the text before  analyzing its elements is key. It's very important to understand that literary analysis is indeed a process where there is no right or wrong answer. This empowers you to be passionate about your topic and, most importantly, encourages you to look beyond the words on the page. 

Key Ideas and Details:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.8.1
Cite the textual evidence that most strongly supports an analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text.CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.8.2
Determine a theme or central idea of a text and analyze its development over the course of the text, including its relationship to the characters, setting, and plot; provide an objective summary of the text.

Your task is to choose any piece of literature and create your own literary analysis using all literary elements, where possible, connecting to the theme of our current unit of study of identity.

1. Breaking down the elements

 Topics can be divided into the main literary elements:

• Characters
• Literary devices
• Setting
• Narrative  

2.Focus the Topic

You will do a lot of brainstorming, outlining, and specific thinking about the element on which they would like to focus.

• The brainstorming process involves mapping out the different aspects of the chosen element.
• Make a choice by narrowing down the selection and focusing the ideas.
• Come up with a question to answer (thesis statement): What do you want to explore about the topic? Why does it stand out to you?
• Answer the "why" question.

3. Gather Textual Evidence

Collecting material to answer or support your anaysis is often a time-consuming stage, 

Identify common themes, repetitions, and patterns. Categorize elements, tone, and narrative style Highlight characterization, setting, and foreshadowing. Label character types, symbols, and metaphors.

4. Introduce, Evidence, Analyze

Introduce

Students should introduce their point in one or two clear topic sentences. Next, it's important to provide evidence that supports the main topic in order to convince the reader of the stated point of view. There are a few ways students can add their evidence.

Evidence

• Quotation: When providing evidence word for word from a primary or secondary source, students should be reminded to use quotation marks only if the words have not been altered.
• Summary: Students summarize a piece of evidence by restating it in a shorter form using their own words.
• Paraphrase: Students explain a piece of evidence using their own words.

Analyze

Analytical writing, answers to the "why" question. Consider the question, "Why is this point important?", it goes beyond description into ideas that are convincing, argumentative, and defend a position.

5. Conclusion

A strong conclusion outlines the main ideas of the essay, but it also works to provide a solution to a real-life problem. Students can focus on concluding with what they hope to get out of their analysis, or provide closure to the topic. Most importantly, students should seize the conclusion as an opportunity to provide their own opinion and reflection about their process of analyzing the text. 

Students will review the rubric and self reflect on the components of the rubric.

What did I do effectively?

What do I still need to work on?

https://www.edutopia.org/pdfs/stw/edutopia-stw-yesprep-rubric-literary-…

After completing this webquest, you will be able to effective analyze a piece of literature and develop your critical thinking skills