4.4–Writing About Novellas

When writing a literary analysis essay, your goal is to create an argument about the text using close readings as supporting evidence. Instead of merely cataloging the literary elements you can identify in a text, literary analysis essays argue how the text can or should be read based upon close analysis of those elements. Listing literary elements remains on the surface of the text, whereas literary analysis engages with the subtext, providing an interesting reading of the text that would not immediately be apparent to a first-time reader.

You might be tempted to cram as many literary terms into your essay as possible to show your understanding of the textbook readings. Most instructors, however, care more about your demonstration of your close reading skills and your creation of a strong argument than if you use the term “foil.” Be especially careful when including literary terms that you are not entirely comfortable talking about. Strive, instead, to use language that you know the meaning of rather than use vocabulary with nuances that you may not fully understand. When you encounter terms that you are not sure about or need other assistance with your essay, ask your instructor for help.

Generating Ideas to Write About

So, how do you identify what you want to write about? Think back to our discussion earlier in this chapter (or in Chapter 1) about engaging in a conversation with the work you’re reading. You have done this by annotating things that strike you about the text. For example, as we discussed in the section on symbols, those birds that Chopin mentions in the first few sentences of the novella are pretty interesting, and they become even more interesting as you begin to note that birds or birdlike images appear frequently throughout the text.

In addition to the annotations you make as you are reading (and rereading) the text, you might also consider generating ideas by using data visualization tools. Voyant is a free website that allows you to upload all or portions of a text.^[1] Once you upload a text, you can use Voyant to make word clouds of most frequently used terms, trace how frequently a word is used at different points within a text, and more. You can use this tool to analyze words that you already know are important, and it might identify some words that are repeated more frequently than you might have originally thought. For example, you can use Voyant to search for “bird” in the novella. How many times and in what specific contexts might you find the word appearing? Does the word appear more frequently at a certain point in the novella? You might also search for another word that strikes you as critically important to a deeper understanding of the text.

When using digital humanities tools, keep a few things in mind. Tools like Voyant work best with longer written texts (as opposed to a short poem where it is easy to count the number of times a word appears) that are digital (so you do not have to type up, say, a one-hundred page novella). When using a digital text, you should also consider its quality: is it accurate to the original version? Does it include any material that you need to exclude? For instance, Project Gutenberg’s copy of The Awakening includes a selection of short stories that you will need to eliminate to produce an accurate analysis of the novella.

Once you identify a pattern in the text or something else that seems significant to you as you’ve been reading and annotating, you can begin to think about the argument you want to make about that pattern or significant thing. Why is it important to notice? What might it mean?

Making Claims

As reiterated in this textbook, there is no single meaning that is present in a text; however, this doesn’t mean that you can make up or say whatever you want in your essay about the text. Rather, think in terms of credible (and therefore valid) arguments instead of “right” and “wrong” arguments. Say we want to make the following claim about The Awakening: “The parrot, not Edna, is the protagonist.” You can already see how this position is not a credible one. If there’s any doubt about this, you only have to think about how many times the parrot is mentioned in the text and how many times Edna is mentioned.

Not only must your claim be valid, but it also must be arguable and not obvious to every reader. If you were to claim, “The word ‘bird’ appears in The Awakening,” no one would argue with you; you are simply stating a fact. Based on your use of digital tools, you might be tempted to argue that the word “bird” appears frequently. This claim, however, stays on the surface; you will still need to analyze and relate this textual evidence to a larger argument about the work. You will want to begin to think about why the frequency of the word “bird” is important in the text. Once you begin to identify a potential credible argument about your observations or data, you will then consider the pieces of the text that lead you to that meaning.

Using and Analyzing Evidence

When making a claim about any piece of literature, you should be able to support that claim with evidence from the text, and the text itself should not have glaring evidence that undercuts your claim. Returning to the idea of Chopin’s including birds frequently throughout her novella, you might note where birds (or bird references) appear and ask yourself how those appearances relate to the other major literary elements in the text. If birds seem to be important because they appear often in The Awakening, how and why are they important? Do they relate to the plot in some way? How might they be relevant to a deeper understanding of Edna’s character and other characters in the book?

Researching

In addition to supporting your analysis with evidence from the text, you also want to establish credibility through research and inclusion of scholarly/reputable sources. While you may be able to find some scholarly sources via search engines like Google, search engines also retrieve many other types of sources like news articles, blogs, and other websites. You may find it difficult to sift through these types of search results to find specific types of sources, like scholarly journal articles. If you do locate a scholarly source via a search engine, you may find that the source is paywalled, meaning you’ll be asked to pay a fee to access the source.

Libraries like Texas A&M’s subscribe to databases that contain more specific types of sources. For example, there are databases of newspaper articles, databases of government information, and databases of scholarly and academic sources. Some databases contain materials targeted to a specific discipline. MLA International Bibliography is a popular database for those studying literature. Other databases are used by a group of disciplines. For instance, JSTOR is a database commonly used in the humanities and social sciences. Using databases like MLA International Bibliography and JSTOR will help you find relevant scholarly material, because they are more focused than a general search engine. Using library databases can also help you avoid paywalls, because access is already included as part of your tuition and fees.

Although scholarly may sound like another way of saying academic or credible when referring to types of sources, it typically refers to a particular type of source. The term “scholarly” usually refers to books or articles that have been through a formal peer review process. Peer-reviewed materials have been evaluated by other scholars in the same field before publication, often after identifying information has been removed, so neither the reviewer nor the author knows the other’s identity. Although peer review is often considered an important step in the production of quality academic research, it is not a perfect process, nor does it mean that sources that are not peer reviewed are not useful or credible. However, searching through databases of scholarly sources is often a good strategy to find the types of credible and reputable sources that will bolster your argument.

In addition to secondary sources like journal articles, which are written about a text, you may want to look at databases and archives of primary sources, which are the texts that you are studying. If you want to see what a text looked like when it was originally published, you could look at databases of primary sources of historical works of literature, like Nineteenth Century Collections Online. Archives are another great place to look for materials. In the case of materials related to Chopin, the Missouri Historical Society Archives contain large numbers of historical documents that have been digitized and are available online.