Discover the expert in you.
Discover the expert in you.
A story, novel or play may achieve the status of literature for various reasons: a distinctive writing style, a gripping plot or noteworthy philosophical insights. Above all else, however, works of literature have strong, memorable characters. Though great characters feel completely original, studying their function in the story allows critics to categorize them into a few basic character types.
Plot describes what happens in a story, but theme describes a text's main idea. The plot of "Hansel and Gretel," for instance, follows two poor children who are abandoned in the woods, where they discover a gingerbread house. They outsmart the witch who lives in the house, who plans to cook and eat them, and escape with her treasure. The themes of the folk tale include the ideas that you should always leave a solid trail behind you, and if something looks too good to be true, it probably is. Identifying themes is an essential part of analyzing a text.
Children's literature has continued to evolve to address more culturally or socially relevant topics. Besides trying to catch the interest of children and promote early reading habits, contemporary children's literature tries to reflect situations that children and young adults may find themselves in today. Protagonists may be young people who are trying to grow up in a multicultural environment or they may be those with same-sex parents. Contemporary children's literature also may deal with historical issues such as slavery.
There is no limit to the number and variety of topics that are appropriate to debate in literature class. The best topics inspire a wide range of viewpoints, inspire students to think deeply and require them to do extensive research to support their conclusions.
One of the writer's most important duties is to foster reader comprehension. To provide the clear direction needed in guiding readers effortlessly across their prose, writers incorporate punctuation such as hyphens to string together related words and phrases. The hyphen is essential to fostering a clear sense of comprehension among readers. Compound words in particular make use of the hyphen to connect words that may be hard to read, unclear or too long.
A senior research paper on British literature may sound like a daunting task. There are so many topics to choose from that it's hard to know where to begin. In British literature, you have more than a thousand years of written material to choose from for a paper. The quickest way to get a handle on things is to break the subject up into smaller parts. Fortunately, most literary paper topics can be organized into several broad categories. After that, choose an area of interest - a time period, person, or an event - and construct a thesis that answers…
Young adult literature appropriately depicts the experiences of young adults. As such, its themes focus on topics that interest, challenge and motivate young adults. Such topics may include conflict with authority figures and peers, future career goals and body image, as well as as contemporary social, environmental and political issues.
Not all questions are created equal. When considering effective classroom questioning, many teachers turn their attention towards Bloom's Taxonomy. This taxonomy of questioning ranks question difficulty based upon the task students are being asked to complete in the question itself. The hierarchy of difficulty ranges from knowledge through evaluation. To ensure that their classroom questioning is optimally effective, teachers should integrate as many higher level questions as possible into their teaching, as these questions provide a more effective picture of student understanding. To increase the number of higher-level questions with which your students are faced, you must change the way…
Although the term "primary source" is used in many disciplines to describe an original document or other source of information, "primary literature" most often denotes peer-reviewed scientific papers that depict original research. Although it may come in the form of conference papers, theses or dissertations, primary literature is most often found in scientific journals and follows a standard format that employs generic headings: abstract, introduction, methods, results and discussion. Prior to publication in a journal, other scientists must review the literature and agree that it satisfies scientific scrutiny. Once the author makes any requested revisions, the paper is published and…
Setting plays as much of an important role in literature as characters or plot. Setting, which includes scenery, time period and moral or intellectual environment, creates the stage on which characters move and act. Why an author chooses a particular setting for her novel, poem or play tells a great deal about her literary intent. Therefore analyzing the setting in a piece of literature can produce a lot of information about its themes.
Most, though not all, stories have plots. The plot is what happens within a story. It is driven by the characters in the story, whose actions push the momentum forward. While plots in literature might not appear to yield a great deal of insight into the story itself, plots are in fact the foundation of the story's theme and the author's intent. Therefore plot is an important element to understanding literature.
A metaphor is an important literary device, most often found in poetry, though prose pieces utilize them as well. It involves the use of dissimilar terms that in comparison reveal new truths about one, or both, items. They are used to describe something that the author cannot adequately represent in a literal fashion or in a simple declarative sentence, or they can broaden or bring a fresh perspective to a familiar or overused subject or action. Whatever the author's intent, analyzing the context in which a metaphor is used will reveal much about the poem's or prose work's meaning.
Characters are the most important aspects of literature. They drive the story and the plot. They also provide opportunities for authors to delve into general themes about life. Characters are the most analyzed elements in literature because they provide the richest critical analysis of the author's intent. In order to analyze characters in literature, it is important to read who and what these characters are and the ways they relate to the overall themes in the story.
Every piece of literature has a theme, which is the general point the author means to make in the piece. Well-written pieces of literature embed these themes in a number of different ways, using character, plot, metaphor, etc. A good reader analyzes these different elements to uncover the theme. In order to analyze themes in literature, it is important to be a close reader and to pay attention to how all the elements in the piece point to its themes.
Readers can get the most out of literature -- novels, poems, plays and non-fiction -- by carefully studying and analyzing texts. Learning the tools of literary analysis makes previously inaccessible texts interesting and meaningful. Different schools of thought throughout the centuries from Plato to Derrida have promoted different methods of studying literature, which can make knowing where to turn for instruction daunting. Consider a literary text on a series of levels, beginning with plot as the most basic level, then elements such as narration and character next, and finally taking into account how all of these levels of complexity work…
