Posted: June 11th, 2015

The Norton Introduction to Literature

The Norton Introduction to Literature

Choose a short story from the reader, The Norton Introduction to Literature, and analyze this story in a three-five page paper (800-1200 words). Be sure to narrow your focus to only one of the different ways of looking at the piece of literature. In order to practice this analysis, choose a poem from our text, and answer the following questions with a well-developed answer for each question giving examples from the text.
What is the poem about? Describe the action of the poem.
Who is the speaker of the poem? It is not the author necessarily. What can you tell about the speaker from the poem?
What is the organization of the poem? Look at lines, stanzas, sentences, and/or rhyme schemes. How does that affect the meaning of the poem?
How is language used in this poem? Do you find metaphors, analogies, symbols, alliteration, figures of speech that carry connotations as well as denotations. (Connotations would be the suggested meaning as opposed to denotations which would be the literal meaning—see glossary for literary terms in The Norton.)
What do you have problems with or do not quite understand in this poem? Be as specific as possible, and look at what the section might possibly mean. (Hint: use a dictionary if a word isn’t clear; sometimes poets use a word or phrase with a different meaning than the common one.)

You may choose any poem from the 11th edition of Norton Introduction to Literature.

The Norton Introduction to Literature