Literary analysis of the story "The feeling of power" issac asimov"

What is Analysis?

There are many types of analysis. In this document, we will focus most examples on LITERARY ANALYSIS, but some basic definitions will be provided as well.

Consider the three statements about Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet below. As you read, think about what makes each of these statements different.

Example 1: William Shakespeare tells the story of ill-fated love story of two teenagers from rival families in his play Romeo and Juliet.

Example 2: I enjoyed Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet because the play had a smart sense of humor.

Example 3: William Shakespeare repeatedly uses imagery of lightness and darkness to illustrate the transience of the title characters’ love in Romeo and Juliet.

If you consider these three examples, you’ll see that the writer has three very different goals in each one. Let’s look at them in more depth below:

Example 1	Example 2	Example 3
William Shakespeare tells the story of ill-fated love story of two teenagers from rival families in his play Romeo and Juliet.	I enjoyed Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet because the play had a smart sense of humor.	William Shakespeare repeatedly uses imagery of lightness and darkness to illustrate the transience of the title characters’ love in Romeo and Juliet.
This example focuses on DESCRIPTION.	This example focuses on RESPONSE.	This example focuses on ANALYSIS.
A description simply tells what a text or piece of literature is about or what it does.	A response may share a personal opinion or reaction.	An analysis examines the parts of a story in order to better understand its meaning. A strong analysis offers a unique interpretation or explanation of a text.

The third example focuses on analysis; it goes beyond description to EXAMINE and INTERPRET the story. You can certainly use description when writing an analysis, but you must make sure the descriptions are used to support and reinforce a deeper interpretation or claim.

Analysis goes deeper than description or response in that it breaks down the individual parts of something (whether it’s an image, a piece of literature, a commercial, or an argument) and examines how each of the parts contributes to the whole.

Read this information here for a great breakdown of the differences between summary and analysis

In order to write an effective analysis, you must complete the steps in this document.

Understand the TEXT.

There are many ways to define the word text. In this class, we will use text to identify any piece of communication. A text can be written (like an essay or a short story), visual (like a photograph or a billboard), oral (like a speech or a song), or in various other formats. Anything that communicates an idea can be considered a text worth analyzing.

To begin an analysis, make sure to read/view the text and examine each part of it carefully. For a written text, this will involve annotating the text, taking notes on the main ideas and supporting details, and looking up unfamiliar words. Often, you need to read the text several times to gain a clear understanding of its parts.

One way to make sure you understand a text fully is to annotate it. See detailed information on how to annotate a reading here and here.

After annotating a text, you should summarize it. Read information on how to summarize here.

Identify the CONTEXT and SUBTEXT.

The image to the right relies heavily on context in order to communicate its message. If you were not familiar with the circumstances under which this image was created, you could never fully understand its message.

Context is a set of the circumstances or knowledge that you must understand in order to fully understand a text. It is information that exists outside of the text but still contributes to its basic meaning.

For example, when we look at this image, we see three men. If we do not understand the context, we can only make very basic claims about them. They are wearing Penn State shirts, they are covering their eyes, ears, or mouth, etc. Without context, we can’t know WHY they are doing these things. However, if we understand the circumstances or events that inspired this image, we can understand it much better. This image was created in response to the Penn State child abuse scandal in 2011. Read more about the context of this image here: Penn State Scandal .

In addition to the details of the Penn State Scandal, it would help to know other context as well. We would need to be familiar with the image of the three monkeys to the left. Where did this image come from? What is its meaning? Learn more here.

Consider the following aspects of context:

Historical	Where/when it was written; consider the history surrounding the work as well as within it; for example, someone born prior to women’s suffrage may have different beliefs about the woman’s role in the home than someone today.
Biographical	Events or circumstances in the author’s life; for example, a writer who lived through the Holocaust may write differently about eugenics than someone writing before WWII.
Philosophical/religious	Personal bias of the author or the culture due to a predominant philosophical or religious belief of the times; for example, a writer who was raised Catholic may have different perceptions of euthanasia than someone of another religion.
Social	The race, gender, or socioeconomic background of the author or the narrator’s of the text; for example, James Baldwin was a gay, black writer during the Civil Rights movement. His texts discuss homosexuality and race differently than we might see in texts today.
Political	The popular political movements of the time of publication or political affiliations of the author; writers who produced work under communist regimes may be influenced by communist philosophies, whether they are supportive or critical of the movement.

Subtext is information or content that is not stated explicitly in a text, but careful readers will pick up on these implicit ideas. Subtext is something that is hinted at, but never stated outright. For example, say you are out shopping with your significant other. You try on an outfit and decide that you want to buy it. Your significant other looks at you and says, “Are you sure this is the one you want? Look at this one that’s a little cheaper.” While your partner may not have stated outright that he or she thinks the outfit is too expensive, it is hinted at by the tone and the statement about the cheaper outfit. In longer works, subtext is built over time.

Images can contain subtext as well. While you need to understand the Penn State Scandal and the image of the three wise monkeys to understand the image on the previous, you must use subtext to figure out the argument. The author doesn’t state what he feels about this scandal directly; instead, you must infer what he wants to argue about the men involved in the scandal through the images he provides.

Identify the elements of the story.

All stories contain some basic elements. These can include the following:

Character—the individuals around which the story/action revolves; often, there is a protagonist and an antagonist.

Narrator—the person doing the “talking” in the story or poem; the narrator is NOT the same as the writer

Plot—the events that occur in the story

Setting—the location in which the story takes places. The setting can reveal information about the larger theme; for example, a story may be set in a jungle to represent the wildness of one of the characters.

Conflict—the problem or issue that the protagonist must overcome; conflict can be of the following types:

· Man against man

· Man against himself

· Man against nature

· Man against society

· Man against fate

· Man against machine

Resolution—how the conflict is overcome or resolved

Tone—the author’s or main character’s attitude toward the events or other characters in the story

Theme—a central idea on which the story is focused; the topic on which the reader should gain a deeper insight.

Consider these elements carefully as you may be able to formulate a critical question for your analysis based on these elements. For example, you might ask yourself, “How does the setting represent the overall theme?” The novel Wuthering Heights takes place on the English moors. Critics argues that the isolation of the moors contributes to the somber, dark tone of the novel; they also argue the wildness of the setting may reflect the wildness of Heathcliff’s character and his inability to be accepted into polite society.

If you struggle creating a question, the following will work for many stories:

· How does the title reflect the theme of the story?

· Are there any dominant symbols that are important in helping the reader understand the theme?

· How would you characterize the main characters?

· Does the major conflict provide social commentary? (Make sure to consider WHEN the stories were written if you want to address this question.)

· Is the conflict adequately resolved? Does the resolution or lack therefore make a statement about how the author views the particular problem in the story?

Consider the devices or strategies the author uses to create his/her message.

In addition to the elements of a story, you can consider the literary or rhetorical devices used by the author. Part of analysis is breaking apart your text. If you were to analyze an image, you would break apart different visual elements like color, line, shading, composition, etc. If you were to break apart an argument, you would look at the writer’s claim, the support/reasons, the different kinds of evidence, the rhetorical appeals, etc. In order to break apart a piece of literature, you examine the different literary devices or strategies.

A literary or rhetorical device is a tool or strategy employed by a writer to communicate his or her ideas more clearly. They often involve the figurative use of language rather than the literal.

A metaphor is one example of a literary device. A metaphor is a figure of speech in which the writer refers to something in a way that it is not literally applicable. For example, if I were to say, “Her heart was a frozen ball of ice,” I do not literally mean someone has a ball of frozen water in her chest. Instead, I may mean the person is cold-hearted or uncaring. I use the image of ice to convey how cold she is. The figurative language here makes the statement stronger and more tangible to the reader.

Metaphors can be made through language or imagery. In the image to the left, women are compared to fresh meat. While we would not literally put women in a package like chicken wings, the creator of this image comments on how culture treats women like meat: they are to be consumed for our pleasure and disposable. This metaphor in the image is much stronger than just saying, “We treat women like meat.”

Another example of a literary device is allusion. It occurs when the writer references another piece of literature, history, or folklore. This indirect device works on the knowledge and memory of the reader, tapping associations and emotional resonance from the original literature. For example, the apple in Snow White may remind the reader of Eve and the fruit from the Garden of Eden in the Bible. After Snow White eats the apple and falls asleep, she awakens a woman when the prince kisses her, hence losing her “innocence” in the process.

There are hundreds of literary devices; this website lists and defines some of the most common. This website lists even more and provides more comprehensive examples.

Create an analytical thesis.

In 1301, you should have learned that a thesis is a sentence that captures your main claim or argument in an essay. It is essentially what you intend to prove to your audience. An analytical thesis offers your unique interpretation or explanation of a text; it is argumentative because other readers may interpret the text differently. Read more about thesis statements in general here.

In order to create an analytical thesis, you must consider what you learned about your text from your close reading. Think about the dominant rhetorical devices and why the author may have used them. Create a question that could be answered in different ways. Let’s consider the following example:

In the Grimm’s version of the fairy tale of Cinderella, Cinderella leaves a golden slipper at the ball. However, in older French versions of the tale, Cinderella wears a fur slipper, and in modern versions she wears a glass slipper. Why did the authors choose different material for the slippers? Does the choice of material reveal any differences between the different cultures in which the stories were produced?

In order to answer this question, we would need to follow the steps we’ve already covered in this handout. We would consider the context of the time; we look at history to determine what materials were more prevalent or valuable in these cultures. We would consider rhetorical devices like symbolism—does fur have any symbolic value in French culture that doesn’t exist in German culture? Looking into these elements will help us better understand the story and its meaning. Once we examine all this information, we would boil our claim down into one sentence that we can offer as a thesis.

Another way to create an analytical thesis is to examine the gaps in the story. Often a story will describe what a character does, but they may not explicitly tell you why the character does it. This is an example of a gap that you can work to fill. Create a thesis that offers your interpretation for why a character behaved a certain way and what lesson the author wanted to provide through this action.

Make sure to use key words to indicate your thesis is analytical. Your thesis should focus on the how and why rather than the what. Tell me how or why an author does something; don’t just describe what he does.

Refer to the following link for more info on creating a thesis for a Literary Analysis.

Review information from Purdue OWL on how to construct an analytical thesis here (skip down to the Thesis Statements and Focus portion of the page): Analytical Thesis. **This information will be helpful in Unit 2 as you move from literary analysis to rhetorical analysis as well.

Support your thesis with evidence from the text (or context).

An analytical thesis is an argumentative thesis; other readers may disagree with your interpretation. Therefore, you must offer evidence for your viewpoint. Most of this evidence will come directly from the text. Describe specific plot points or events in the tale that support your claims. You can quote lines from the characters.

You can also bring in evidence from outside sources. You can use historical documents to help describe the context of the story. Historical documents can help show that the characters in the story may act differently than we might today. You can use documents to support your interpretations of different literary or rhetorical devices. For example, you might need to explain the significance of a certain symbol to a certain group of people.

For each piece of evidence, whether it comes directly from the text or from an outside sources, make sure to connect it back to your central thesis. Explain to the reader how your evidence proves your claim.

Please find more information and helpful resources at the following links:

Ten Tips for a Successful Literary Analysis

Literary Criticism