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Literary Analysis Reflection

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Before high school, if I was asked what it meant to analyze literature, I would simply say that it meant summarizing the plot of a story. Little did I find out, it was much more than that. During my freshman and sophomore year of highschool, I started learning more and more about analyzing literature. At first, it was really hard to understand because I was still used to doing it the easy way, which was plainly summarizing. But with a lot of practice and dedication to learning about literary analysis, I was able to learn a lot. Now, I see summarizing and analyzing as two completely different things. When summarizing, you’re basically rephrasing what happened in a piece of text and you can’t state your own opinion or make arguments. Literary analysis is the opposite of that. When analyzing literature, you’re able to work closely with a piece of text or picture to find evidence that proves the overall theme or message. One of the more interesting aspects of analyzing that has to be talked about first is poem analysis. I’ve never been a huge fan of poems because I’ve never really understood them at all. When I began learning about literary analysis, the first thing I thought about was to apply it to poems to help me create a better understanding. I must admit, poems are a little hard to analyze because everybody understands them in a different way. With the use of figurative languages as well, I had to pay close attention to any connections that author had made. One strategy that really helped me analyze poems better was looking at the title of the poem and the author. The title of the poem is important to me because whenever I don’t understand a poem, the title usually has the topic of the entire poem in it. When I’ve obtained both information, I would do some research on the author and learn a little bit about his background. Many authors would have a drive or motivation to start on a piece of writing and sometimes when you learn about their background, it is very easy for you to understand their poems. A good example would be a poem with the title The Butterfly by Pavel Friedman. At first, this poem was hard to understand because it just mainly spoke about what seems to be the life of a butterfly who

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