Hello, and welcome to a course on writing a literary analysis. And before you write, you need to think and read critically. And that's what I'm going to teach you in this particular section. You need to be able to examine literature with a critical eye. And the things that you should consider are the author, the audience, the plots, the theme, some literary devices, I did not give you all of them. Oxford, for example, has like a 300 page, dictionary and just literary terms, so I'm not going to give you that many, but I'll give you a few to focus on.

And I'll explain as I go through each of them why this is an important piece to writing. I find that in my reading classroom, it's impossible to to separate reading from writing. If you want to be a better reader, you must be a better Writer. If you want to be a better writer, you must be a better reader. And that is what I'm going to show you. First, let's examine an author.

And I want you to think about a few questions. What do you know about their life? I'm going to give you Edgar Allan Poe as an example. He's a pretty popular author. And the places that I went to find out about him are places like poets.org biography.com was another one. They had some excellent things written about it.

But his life like both of his parents died when he was only three years old, and he was taken in by foster parents and his mother. His foster mother loved him. His foster father was he was drunk. He put them in a boarding school, and Edgar thrived they He was a literary genius, as we can tell from his writing, but this foster father, his name is Francis Allen. He refused to pay his gambling debts, and therefore could not afford to continue to send Edgar to school. So he was kicked out.

In fact, his relationship with Francis Allen was not a good one. It was rough. When he was when Edgar was 18 years old, he signed up for the army and was eventually accepted into the Academy. But again, he couldn't finish it because of a lack of financial support. So then he moved in with his Amery claim, and he fell in love with her daughter, and Virginia was her name. It was his first cousin.

It's an odd part of his story, but it is part of his story. She did get married when she was only 13 years old. Can you believe that? This was in the late 1800s. So perhaps it wasn't all that uncommon then, but she ended up dying. And so the entirety of you tired of his life, he was an avid reader and an avid writer.

And it's obvious that he was losing important people in his life or he struggled with people in his life, when you read his writing, especially the Raven. In fact, I often think that he wrote that about his wife, because the sorrow will leave him never. So I could write I could write a whole literary analysis based on that argument. But he struggled through jobs here and there and he also struggled With an alcohol problem, but the entirety of his life was pretty unstable and full of tragedy. So knowing these things about his life will help you to analyze his literature. And like I said, The Raven and it will help you develop a valid argument about how the raven could be representative of sadness.

It will never leave him. So think about what you know about the author of the particular piece you want to analyze and how does knowing what you know help you gain insight into their mind? Because what is in their mind is what they put on paper. The next one is the author's purpose and audience what was the author's reason for writing the book? Gregor the Overlander this picture in the background is of my bookshelf. This is one of my favorite books.

It's a child series, but it's excellent. I preferred it over the Hunger Games and I love the Hunger Games. So that tells you how highly I recommend greater the Overlander by Suzanne Collins. But I love also the reason why she wrote it. Her father was an Air Force officer who taught history at the college level. And most of Suzanne's memories revolved around her father's military experiences and taking his children to battlefields and war monuments and teaching them about what occurred in those places.

So the whole reason she wrote Gregor the Overlander was because they traveled to a lot of different places, her father being in the military, and she was curious what it would be like if she was Alice, the home said Alice the Wonderland. Now, it completely left my brain, but if she was Alice Woody's Wonderland for some reason they overland in the Wonderland in this mess with my brain. So she moved around a lot. And one of her stops is in New York and she wondered what would happen if you fell into a hole in New York like Alice in Wonderland fell into a hole in this beautiful place, but what if it was New York what it would, what would it be like? And voila, you have Gregor the Overlander. I also want you to think about their target audience for Suzanne Collins and Gregor to Finland.

It's young people. And I, as an adult, I, I really enjoyed it. For Edgar Allan Poe, he was trying to make money and he was submitting his poetry and his work into newspapers, and all kinds of places and it was quite popular. Alright, plot analysis. I get all kinds of getting when I start talking about what the story looks like, I try to give you a visual form. I've seen one that's like a roller coaster, and I'll attach it to your project piece.

So you can kind of see this really creative way of writing what a story looks like. But think of it, this one in particular is like a witch's hat. You have the beginning the exposition, or you have the characters, you have the setting of the point of view, you're introduced to the protagonist. And of course the antagonists that character you're just going to hate the setting the two pieces that when in the where the point of view who's telling the story, and then you are. You begin the story with the opening scene. That's where the action takes place.

And then you have conflicts throughout your story. What keeps the protagonist from getting What he or she wants, there's a lot of conflicts that could take place like character versus character, character versus self or character versus environment. And then you hit the climax where the point of the story you know, will never ever be the same. And there may still be some conflicts in the following action. But this is where they're starting to be resolved. And then of course, you have your resolution.

And I like to tell my students that it's your solution, it's the end, helps break the story apart. And doing that will help you think about it critically, with a critical eye. So I also have a graphic organizer attached to your project page that has this witch's hat that you can just write in a brief explanation of what occurred in each piece, just so it's, you can use it even as a bookmark if you want to, I usually fold mine in half and put it in my paper in my book, and then I just pick up Before I left off the literary devices, remember I told you that the that Oxford has a dictionary of like 300 pages one I have them has over 1000 literary terms. And these are just a few of them. alliteration is one of my favorite ones. It's where you just have the same first letter in a sentence or phrase.

And we could go on and on and on forever and talking about each one of these. But spoonerism I added to the example because that one always makes me laugh. I pull out spoonerisms throughout my date, and accidentally. My mom always exports up. So she would say things like Moulin de which you might say His name was Melissa and my other sister's name was Mandy, and she would come up with Moulin de combination, or you mix things together. She was doing it all the time.

And she would even say things like, our cat tiger. My Tigger doesn't call when I calm instead of ticker doesn't come when I call, kind of used as a joke in writing, but it's one that I could pull out. If I were to write about my family quite frequently. I have a lot of examples. The theme what was the author's purpose in writing this piece? And you can read through each one of those questions, but finding an overall arching theme will occur when you start seeing literary devices.

When you start pulling out the important events in the story or piece and Any words or devices, if they're repeated over and over and over again, you're looking for those kinds of things. And usually I'll give you a big hint an author gives clues or revelations to in their introduction, in their dedication, sometimes in the author's note, and in the app blocks, don't skip those pieces. I have learned more about a book by reading those pieces than I have anywhere else. For example, the book the potato peel pie in Literary Society, I know that's not the exact title, but it is super long. It's all about an island during World War Two that was taken over by the Nazi regime, and this group of people that stayed sane in the midst of it because they created a Book Club. And then this it's it's letter correspondence is how it's written.

And at first I really struggled to get into it, but now it's one of my favorites. And the whole reason is because of the author's note at the end. It is so cool this story and how it unfolded, but it's also really tragic. This real life drama unfolding, and your heart aches for the author and then her niece, who had to finish the book. And I will leave it at that in case you want to read it, but I highly recommend it.