Nine Ways of Developing a Literary Analysis

As my literature students are grappling with drafting their analyses of various literary works, I want to help them do so by suggesting some concrete ways by which they can develop an analysis. In a finished essay, the analysis portion should be tightly ordered in support of a central argument. However, during the drafting process, analysis really has to be less organized. The clearest expression of ideas often emerges from a critical mass of meaningful mess.

What follows are directions for making that mess (and making it meaningful). It may seem strange to emphasize messiness, but I want my students to feel comfortable in letting their provisional writing be much less ordered and clear than their finished literary arguments. I am not at all pulling back from the need to move from fuzzy ideas to clear claims. I strongly believe students should arrive quickly at a working thesis statement and circulate that claim for early feedback (as described in my previous post).

But a working thesis statement does not a finished paper make. And even though a good thesis statement provides a kind of outline for developing one's complete argument, that outline can at first feel pretty sparse.  A working thesis works if it does work -- and often that work is a meaningful return to the texts so that one can support and improve that claim.

A messy mass is needed during drafting because you need stuff through which your thesis can take its evolving shape. You need something that you can revise and order into a more detailed outline for a finished paper. You need some meaningful accumulation of relevant material. Here, then, are some starting places for the student who is already into his or her topic, but who still needs to do the heavy lifting of coming up with stuff to say in their evolving analysis.

Annotating a Poem for Analysis

How can annotating a poem lead to interesting literary criticism?

I recently required my literature students to analyze a pair of poems for an exam. They were to write out the poems by hand and then annotate these as a step in their analysis. Those annotations typically took one of two forms:

1. Simple identification of ideas or formal elements
2. Attempts at interpreting or synthesizing

The first of these is a very primary level of analysis and reflects one's ability to understand and represent the content (paraphrase) or to identify basic components of literary form (character, setting, diction, rhythm, rhyme, imagery, metaphor, repetition, figures of speech, etc.). The trick is to move from the first to the second of these levels (on the way to more developed literary arguments). Here are some examples.

Emerging Genres of Video Poetry

As poetry intersects with online video, we are seeing the emergence of new hybrid genres. Here is an attempt at surveying those genres. But before I get to my categories, I invite you to dive in and watch a video poem. Later on, at the end, I will come back to it for analysis. If you don't watch the rest of the sample video poetry in this post, watch this one. It matters. And it's done so very well. It's called "To This Day" and it is by Shane Koyczan:

To This Day from To This Day on Vimeo.

Without any analysis, I think it fair to say that a video like this proves that poetry is more than alive and well online in video form today. It's actually quite amazing. What did you think made it work so well?