Literary Analysis
This session, you are working on a Literary Analysis. However, there are multiple ways to analyze writing. Here are some hints for reading analytically.

It’s amazing – once you learn how to analyze, you’ll also be able to critically think about what you are reading on much deeper levels than you were able to before. You can ask critical questions that reveal certain biases, holes in the argument, and perhaps even reveal fallacies in someone’s writing. So, let’s begin. Use the following steps to begin your analysis:

Read the story you have selected all the way through one time. Note the title, author, and date of publication.
Read the story a second time.
Mark the text
Underline key words or unknown words.
Look for repetition.
Circle key ideas that point to the author’s purpose.
Look for a main point or theme. What does the story teach you about life?
Identify literary techniques imagery, conflict, characterization, etc.
Ask the following questions of the text
What is the literal meaning?
What are the facts presented?
What are the main points made by the author?
What does this piece suggest about human nature?
Does the author create a believable story?
How does it make you feel? Why?
Write an essay interpreting one or more aspects of a literary work you select from the list in the reading assignments. If there is another you would like to use, you may do so, but you must get it approved by your instructor.

After careful analysis of the literary work, you will become the expert critic, explaining the meaning you discern, supporting your interpretation with evidence from the work, and evaluating the effectiveness of the literary elements used by the author and the significance of the theme. Your purpose is to deepen the understanding of the work for your classmates. Even if they, too, have studied the work carefully, you will try to convince them that your interpretation is valid.

This paper requires you to document the use of an outside sourcethe source of the literary work itself. You will use parenthetical references to identify the exact location of evidence in the literary work that supports your ideas. You will name the author and title of the literary work and the date of its publication in your opening paragraph. Any specific reference to the work itself in your paper will require a parenthetical reference with the page number and paragraph number. Look at the student essays included in your assigned reading this week. Notice that in the opening paragraphs, the essays authors include the name of the literary works and the name of the authors being analyzed, but publication dates are not included. If these writers were writing papers in APA style, they would put the storys publication date in parentheses immediately after the title of the work. Length: 3-5 pages. Please be sure to use APA formatting.

Select one of the following short stories to read for your literary analysis:

The Monkey’s Paw or
The Necklace or
The Gift of the Magi