A question came up in a lecture that is important and interesting enough that I’m going to pause to answer it here. The question was simple, but cuts right to the core of what we’re doing here: What is literary analysis? Or at the very least, what do we mean when we’re talking about that here?
The short of it is that literary analysis is the process of examining literature for the craft elements, rhetorical or poetic devices, thematic elements, etc. that comprise it. If a book is a sausage, then literary analysis is the process of identifying how it was made by identifying the flavors of the seasonings, pulling off the casing, and examining the mixture directly. People do this all the time for lots of reasons. For starters, it’s fun! Ever watch Penn and Teller explain how a magic trick works? Literary analysis is like that, but for books.
In addition to the fun, though, literary analysis can help you figure out what’s going on in the work you encounter. This almost always makes things cooler than they were at first glance, because there’s almost always more going on than you (consciously) realized while experiencing it the first time. Like finding an Easter egg in a video game, spotting the subtle or clever things an author did to achieve an effect or convey meaning is a reward on its own. It’s also a clue to how you can do something similar.
Most people are familiar with at least some elements of literary analysis. The jargon of the discipline is the stuff of English vocabulary tests from school: trope, motif, archetype, metaphor, synecdoche and on and on. What’s important is not that you know the shiny vocabulary word, but that you have a way of talking about the concept. Knowing all 5 million terms for all the possible things a bit of text, or a lot of text, can do is helpful for recognizing the virtually infinite things going on in what we read. But you can still notice that a piece is doing interesting things with compelling imagery without knowing the difference between a simile and a metaphor. The noticing is what matters first. Then comes the thinking and talking and writing about it.
One of the especially fun ways to do a literary analysis is to choose a perspective or point of view and analyze the work from there. This can be like role playing, or like testing a hypothesis. Critics and reviewers who have a particular perspective or agenda do this all the time—you can do a feminist analysis of work, or Marxist, or evangelical—and reading analyses from different perspectives is a great way not only to notice elements of the work that you might have missed while taking an “objective” approach, but also in thinking about how a work relates to its intended audience, to current society, to its contemporary society, and to the literary canon as a whole.
We’re going to talk about audience and audience perspective a lot before we’re done here, and analyses-with-agendas are a great tool for cracking into that. (If you don’t believe me that this is fun, think about it like this: The entire source of humor in things like Honest Movie Trailers is that the audience is clapping back at the trailer with evidence from the film rather than passively accepting their intended role as trailer-audience.)
Of course, literary analysis isn’t enough on its own for you to improve as a writer. You need the curiosity and interest that prompts you to spot things you’d want to explore, an ability to find places in your own work to apply things you’ve learned, and the ability to learn the right lessons from the things you analyze. Practice makes all of that easier. With enough practice, you’ll be automatically analyzing things as you encounter them, and your conversation about media will immediately become 1000% more interesting for everyone around you.
(Or you’ll get a reputation as the person who nitpicks things to death over details nobody else notices or cares about. Results not guaranteed, professional driver on a closed course, some side effects may appear, consult your doctor before engaging in heavy physical analysis.)