To do literary analysis, you need to break a text into what you see as its most important parts—quotes, summaries of paragraphs or scenes or actions in the plot, and descriptions of the text’s formal properties such as meter and rhyme—in order to show the reader possible meanings of the whole text. Then you build a case in your essay using the parts as evidence to prove your insights about the meaning.
You need a balance of both to do literary analysis. If you devote too much space in your essay to presenting evidence and too little discussing the possible meaning, the reader gets bored, as you are just describing or retelling the text. If you offer too little evidence and too much discussion of the possible meaning, you will likely not persuade the reader that your insights are valid. If you veer way too far from the evidence, you will slip into speculation, which convinces you, but only you, that the meaning is there. In literary analysis, you also want to avoid offering your personal opinions about the text—liking or disliking a character or the author’s writing style does not help us understand the message of the text.
Look at each example below from an essay about “The Bridegroom” and identify if there is evidence, insight about meaning, speculation, or opinion. Explain why you think this. Remember, the goal in your own writing is a balance of evidence and insight into meaning (which we call literary analysis). You are not responding to their idea, but saying what type of writing it is from the choices above in bold.
Choose an example of student writing to reply to (I chose Ex. 8)
8. The narrators in “The Bridegroom” and “Bartleby” are similar: they both try to help a less powerful person whom they are trying to understand. But in the end, both do not fully help because they selfishly want to protect their own positions as powerful member of society.