Evolving Analysis Patterns

When imagining how my literature analysis skills have changed over the course of the semester, I thought it would be a slope or a curve that increased as time went by. After going back through my blog posts, however, I realized that I got worse before I got better. I started with a more formal analysis, but then went into a less formal, thematic analysis. I got caught in the things I did and did not like.

At the beginning of this course, my literary analysis skills were to the point where I could point out something that was happening and how I thought it helped the story progress. I can really see this when I look at my analysis on Hamlet's soliloquy.

When we got to our assignment to watch a play, I began to mesh more of my personal opinion into my analysis, making it less formal. In my attempt to analyze the two-man version of Macbeth, I tended to describe some of the scenes that stood out to me and how they were affected by the setting, audience, and other tools the actors had on hand.

The least formal analysis I did was on Kafka’s "A Hunger Artist." It was here that I basically went all out opinion and summary. I knew what bugged me about the short story and I wanted to express that. I wanted to make sure the reader of my analysis knew that I did not enjoy and was even a little disturbed by the story.

My BYU’s English Symposium analysis was literally just a summery about what happened at the events I participated in. At this point, I was sitting in my “low” as far as literary analysis goes. I needed to start looking at literature through a different set of eyes.

Calvin Carpenter, another student on “The Council” always seemed to be able to do well and understand our assignments. As I worked on the smaller assignments that were to help us prepare for our final Literary Analysis, I struggled to understand what format we needed to use and just in general how it was supposed to be done. I took a look at Calvin’s post “Breaking Down Billy Collins” to help me figure out how to annotate my poem and what kinds of things to look for.

Working through my Final Literary Analysis is where I feel like I was able to show more understanding on how to analyze a work of literature. I looked at the poem I was given and was able to find a form of poetry in it that I normally associate with scriptures. The form is a chiasmus and finding it in the poem helped me take a deeper look into what the poem was trying to convey. My main focus in that analysis was the chiasmus and how it shifted what we would normally see as the climax or most important part of the poem to a different section of the poem.