adapted from Erec TosoFREY 101
2nd Essay Assignment Sheet – Literacy Narrative Analysis
Goal: You will have to read and reread your chosen text to comprehend it’s meaning, and then go further to make an interpretive claim about how that text does what you see it doing, conveying some message to readers.To frame your claim, listen to how the essay speaks to you, how it evokes some strong response in you. As a place to start, look for passages you find particularly puzzling or disturbing: this is where the text is calling you to figure something out.You will then support your claim by citing a strategy, strategies, and/or literary devices that the writer incorporates. You will illustrate how these devices work using textual evidence and independent analysis to show how these literary devices, and evidence, support your claim.
What: For this unit you will write an interpretive textual analysis of one of the five literacy narratives we read in Unit 1(the 5 essays: Baca, Kincaid, Tan, Alexie, Nicholson).
In a self-titled, 4-5 double-spaced pages, 12-point Times New Roman font, 1” margins all around with a heading and a ½” header, your essay should be clearly structured, have sufficient textual support to “show” your features, and should be governed by your thoughts and analysis. You will be graded on content, development, organization, and expression.
Purpose:Meaning in literary analysis essays is more implied than it is explicit. A big difference between an argument and a literary text is the role the reader plays in making meaning. In a literary text, readers “interpret” more. That is, rather than simply reading the writer’s thesis, we fill in gaps of the text to make meaning. You will discover a deeper meaning in your chosen text through your interpretation.
Strategy:There is no right or wrong interpretation, but some interpretations are harder to support than others. To arrive at a solid, complex, original claim you will need to comprehend the text you are considering and be able to identify literary devicessuch as story line, character, theme, setting, and literary devicessuch as imagery, irony, or other stylistic pattern. You might consider diction, syntax, style, tone, format, etcetera. Then you should look at how suchliterary devicescontribute to an overall effect, or message, or purpose you see in the piece. You will explore the literary devices of your chosen text.
Focus:In the paper, you will explain how you see the literary devices doing what they do. In other words, you will analyze the text and make a case for how you see the text functioning. Go beyond merely restating what you see in the text; fleshout your thoughts and speculations on how these elements work. Much of the paper will come from you, from your impressions of the text, how you see it put together, constructed. The more precise you can make your claim– your interpretive statement – the more importance you can give that claim, and the better your paper will work.