Essential Question:  Do Literature teachers just make this stuff up?

Objectives: 1. Students will be able to readily apply literary devices and writing techniques to literary analyses.

Notes from Online:

a. A quester

b. A place to go

c. A stated reason to go there

d. Challenges and trials

e. The real reason to go—always self-knowledge

2. Nice to Eat With You: Acts of Communion

a. Whenever people eat or drink together, it’s communion

b. Not usually religious

c. An act of sharing and peace

d. A failed meal carries negative connotations

3. Nice to Eat You: Acts of Vampires

a. Literal Vampirism: Nasty old man, attractive but evil, violates a young

woman, leaves his mark, takes her innocence

b. Sexual implications—a trait of 19th century literature to address sex indirectly

c. Symbolic Vampirism: selfishness, exploitation, refusal to respect the

autonomy of other people, using people to get what we want, placing our

desires, particularly ugly ones, above the needs of another.

4. If It’s Square, It’s a Sonnet

5. Now, Where Have I Seen Her Before?

a. There is no such thing as a wholly original work of literature—stories grow

out of other stories, poems out of other poems.

b. There is only one story—of humanity and human nature, endlessly repeated

c. “Intertexuality”—recognizing the connections between one story and another

deepens our appreciation and experience, brings multiple layers of meaning to

the text, which we may not be conscious of. The more consciously aware we

are, the more alive the text becomes to us.

d. If you don’t recognize the correspondences, it’s ok. If a story is no good,

being based on Hamlet won’t save it.

6. When in Doubt, It’s from Shakespeare…

a. Writers use what is common in a culture as a kind of shorthand. Shakespeare

is pervasive, so he is frequently echoed.

b. See plays as a pattern, either in plot or theme or both. Examples:

i. Hamlet: heroic character, revenge, indecision, melancholy nature

ii. Henry IV—a young man who must grow up to become king, take on

his responsibilities

iii. Othello—jealousy

iv. Merchant of Venice—justice vs. mercy

v. King Lear—aging parent, greedy children, a wise fool

7. …Or the Bible

a. Before the mid 20th century, writers could count on people being very familiar

with Biblical stories, a common touchstone a writer can tap

b. Common Biblical stories with symbolic implications

i. Garden of Eden: women tempting men and causing their fall, the apple

as symbolic of an object of temptation, a serpent who tempts men to

do evil, and a fall from innocence

ii. David and Goliath—overcoming overwhelming odds

iii. Jonah and the Whale—refusing to face a task and being “eaten” or

overwhelmed by it anyway.

iv. Job: facing disasters not of the character’s making and not the

character’s fault, suffers as a result, but remains steadfast

v. The Flood: rain as a form of destruction; rainbow as a promise of

restoration

vi. Christ figures (a later chapter): in 20th century, often used ironically

vii. The Apocalypse—Four Horseman of the Apocalypse usher in the end

of the world.

viii. Biblical names often draw a connection between literary character and

Biblical charcter.

8. Hanseldee and Greteldum--using fairy tales and kid lit

a. Hansel and Gretel: lost children trying to find their way home

b. Peter Pan: refusing to grow up, lost boys, a girl-nurturer/

c. Little Red Riding Hood: See Vampires

d. Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz: entering a world that doesn’t work

rationally or operates under different rules, the Red Queen, the White Rabbit,

the Cheshire Cat, the Wicked Witch of the West, the Wizard, who is a fraud

e. Cinderella: orphaned girl abused by adopted family saved through

supernatural intervention and by marrying a prince

f. Snow White: Evil woman who brings death to an innocent—again, saved by

heroic/princely character

g. Sleeping Beauty: a girl becoming a woman, symbolically, the needle,

blood=womanhood, the long sleep an avoidance of growing up and becoming

a married woman, saved by, guess who, a prince who fights evil on her behalf.

h. Evil Stepmothers, Queens, Rumpelstilskin

i. Prince Charming heroes who rescue women. (20th c. frequently switched—the

women save the men—or used highly ironically)

9. It’s Greek to Me

a. Myth is a body of story that matters—the patterns present in mythology run

deeply in the human psyche

b. Why writers echo myth—because there’s only one story (see #4)

c. Odyssey and Iliad

i. Men in an epic struggle over a woman

ii. Achilles—a small weakness in a strong man; the need to maintain

one’s dignity

iii. Penelope (Odysseus’s wife)—the determination to remain faithful and

to have faith

iv. Hector: The need to protect one’s family

d. The Underworld—an ultimate challenge, facing the darkest parts of human

nature or dealing with death

e. Metamorphoses by Ovid—transformation (Kafka)

f. Oedipus: family triangles, being blinded, dysfunctional family

g. Cassandra: refusing to hear the truth

h. A wronged woman gone violent in her grief and madness—Aeneas and Dido

or Jason and Medea

i. Mother love—Demeter and Persephone

10. It’s more than just rain or snow

a. Rain

i. fertility and life

ii. Noah and the flood

iii. Drowning—one of our deepest fears

b. Why?

i. plot device

ii. atmospherics

iii. misery factor—challenge characters

iv. democratic element—the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike

c. Symbolically

i. rain is clean—a form of purification, baptism, removing sin or a stain

ii. rain is restorative—can bring a dying earth back to life

iii. destructive as well—causes pneumonia, colds, etc.; hurricanes, etc.

iv. Ironic use—April is the cruelest month (T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland)

v. Rainbow—God’s promise never to destroy the world again; hope; a

promise of peace between heaven and earth

vi. fog—almost always signals some sort of confusion; mental, ethical,

physical “fog”; people can’t see clearly

d. Snow

i. negatively—cold, stark, inhospitable, inhuman, nothingness, death

ii. positively—clean, pure, playful

11. …More Than It’s Gonna Hurt You: Concerning Violence

a. Violence can be symbolic, thematic, biblical, Shakespearean, Romantic,

allegorical, transcendent.

b. Two categories of violence in literature

i. Character caused—shootings, stabbings, drownings, poisonings,

bombings, hit and run, etc

ii. Death and suffering for which the characters are not responsible.

Accidents are not really accidents.

c. Violence is symbolic action, but hard to generalize meaning

d. Questions to ask:

i. What does this type of misfortune represent thematically?

ii. What famous or mythic death does this one resemble?

iii. Why this sort of violence and not some other?

12. Is That a Symbol?

a. Yes. But figuring out what is tricky. Can only discuss possible meanings and

interpretations

b. There is no one definite meaning unless it’s an allegory, where characters,

events, places have a one-on-one correspondence symbolically to other things.

(Animal Farm)

c. Actions, as well as objects and images, can be symbolic. i.e. “The Road Not

Taken” by Robert Frost

d. How to figure it out? Symbols are built on associations readers have, but also

on emotional reactions. Pay attention to how you feel about a text.

13. It’s All Political

a. Literature tends to be written by people interested in the problems of the

world, so most works have a political element in them

b. Issues:

i. Individualism and self-determination against the needs of society for

conformity and stability.

ii. Power structures

iii. Relations among classes

iv. issues of justice and rights

v. interactions between the sexes and among various racial and ethnic

constituencies.

14. Yes, She’s a Christ Figure, Too

a. Characteristics of a Christ Figure:

i. crucified, wounds in hands, feet, side, and head, often portrayed with

arms outstretched

ii. in agony

iii. self-sacrificing

iv. good with children

v. good with loaves, fishes, water, wine

vi. thirty-three years of age when last seen

vii. employed as a carpenter

viii. known to use humble modes of transportation, feet or donkeys

preferred

ix. believed to have walked on water

x. known to have spent time alone in the wilderness

xi. believed to have had a confrontation with the devil, possibly tempted

xii. last seen in the company of thieves

xiii. creator of many aphorisms and parables

xiv. buried, but arose on the third day

xv. had disciples, twelve at first, although not all equally devoted

xvi. very forgiving

xvii. came to redeem an unworthy world

b. As a reader, put aside belief system.

c. Why us Christ figures? Deepens our sense of a character’s sacrifice,

thematically has to do with redemption, hope, or miracles.

d. If used ironically, makes the character look smaller rather than greater

15. Flights of Fancy

a. Daedalus and Icarus

b. Flying was one of the temptations of Christ

c. Symbolically: freedom, escape, the flight of the imagination, spirituality,

return home, largeness of spirit, love

d. Interrupted flight generally a bad thing

e. Usually not literal flying, but might use images of flying, birds, etc.

f. Irony trumps everything

16. It’s All About Sex…

a. Female symbols: chalice, Holy Grail, bowls, rolling landscape, empty vessels

waiting to be filled, tunnels, images of fertility

b. Male symbols: blade, tall buildings

c. Why?

i. Before mid 20th c., coded sex avoided censorship

ii. Can function on multiple levels

iii. Can be more intense than literal descriptions

17. …Except Sex. When authors write directly about sex, they’re writing about

something else, such as sacrifice, submission, rebellion, supplication, domination,

enlightenment, etc.

18. If She Comes Up, It’s Baptism

a. Baptism is symbolic death and rebirth as a new individual

b. Drowning is symbolic baptism, IF the character comes back up, symbolically

reborn. But drowning on purpose can also represent a form of rebirth, a

choosing to enter a new, different life, leaving an old one behind.

c. Traveling on water—rivers, oceans—can symbolically represent baptism. i.e.

young man sails away from a known world, dies out of one existence, and

comes back a new person, hence reborn. Rivers can also represent the River

Styx, the mythological river separating the world from the Underworld,

another form of transformation, passing from life into death.

d. Rain can by symbolic baptism as well—cleanses, washes

e. Sometimes the water is symbolic too—the prairie has been compared to an

ocean, walking in a blizzard across snow like walking on water, crossing a

river from one existence to another (Beloved)

f. There’s also rebirth/baptism implied when a character is renamed.

19. Geography Matters…

a. What represents home, family, love, security?

b. What represents wilderness, danger, confusion? i.e. tunnels, labyrinths,

jungles

c. Geography can represent the human psyche (

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