Expert answer:Short Story text analysis
Solved by verified expert:I have a short story analysis task to submit.In writing this analysis, please consider how the short story functions as a whole. Please avoid merely describing the plot and, instead, analyse how the text functions as a rewriting of a traditional fairy tale. Alongside this, your analysis should contain evidence of close reading as you zoom in to focus on some of the textual details of the story. Crucially, this includes the way in which the text is written: the choice of language; the structure of sentences; the use of imagery; and so on.
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a2n_term_1_week_2_seminar.pptx
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The Werewolf — Angela Carter
It is a northern country; they have cold weather, they have cold
hearts.
Cold; tempest; wild beasts in the forest. It is a hard life. Their
houses are built of logs, dark and smoky within. There will be a crude
icon of the virgin behind a guttering candle, the leg of a pig hung up
to cure, a string of drying mushrooms. A bed, a stool, a table. Harsh,
brief, poor lives.
To these upland woodsmen, the Devil is as real as you or I. More
so; they have not seen us nor even know that we exist, but the Devil
they glimpse often in the graveyards, those bleak and touching townships of the dead where the graves are marked with portraits of the
deceased in the naïf style and there are no flowers to put in front of
them, no flowers grow there, so they put out small, votive offerings,
little loaves, sometimes a cake that the bears come lumbering from
the margins of the forest to snatch away. At midnight, especially on
Walpurgisnacht, the Devil holds picnics in the graveyards and invites
the witches; then they dig up fresh corpses, and eat them. Anyone
will tell you that.
Wreaths of garlic on the doors keep out the vampires. A blue-eyed
child born feet first on the night of St John’s Eve will have second
sight. When they discover a witch – some old woman whose cheeses
ripen when her neighbours’ do not, another old woman whose black
cat, oh, sinister! follows her about all the time, they strip the crone,
search for her marks, for the supernumerary nipple her familiar
sucks. They soon find it. Then they stone her to death.
Winter and cold weather.
Go and visit grandmother, who has been sick. Take her the
oatcakes I’ve baked for her on the hearthstone and a little pot of
butter.
The good child does as her mother bids – five miles’ trudge
through the forest; do not leave the path because of the bears, the
wild boar, the starving wolves. Here, take your father’s hunting knife;
you know how to use it.
The child had a scabby coat of sheepskin to keep out the cold,
she knew the forest too well to fear it but she must always be on her
guard. When she heard that freezing howl of a wolf, she dropped her
gifts, seized her knife and turned on the beast.
It was a huge one, with red eyes and running, grizzled chops; any
but a mountaineer’s child would have died of fright at the sight of it. It
went for her throat, as wolves do, but she made a great swipe at it
with her father’s knife and slashed off its right forepaw.
The wolf let out a gulp, almost a sob, when it saw what had
happened to it; wolves are less brave than they seem. It went
lolloping off disconsolately between the trees as well as it could on
three legs, leaving a trail of blood behind it. The child wiped the blade
of her knife clean on her apron, wrapped up the wolf’s paw in the
cloth in which her mother had packed the oatcakes and went on
towards her grandmother’s house. Soon it came on to snow so
thickly that the path and any footsteps, track or spoor that might have
been upon it were obscured.
She found her grandmother was so sick she had taken to her bed
and fallen into a fretful sleep, moaning and shaking so that the child
guessed she had a fever. She felt the forehead, it burned. She shook
out the cloth from her basket, to use it to make the old woman a cold
compress, and the wolf’s paw fell to the floor.
But it was no longer a wolf’s paw. It was a hand, chopped off at
the wrist, a hand toughened with work and freckled with old age,
There was a wedding ring on the third finger and a wart on the index
finger. By the wart, she knew it for her grandmother’s hand.
She pulled back the sheet but the old woman woke up, at that,
and began to struggle, squawking and shrieking like a thing
possessed. But the child was strong, and armed with her father’s
hunting knife; she managed to hold her grandmother down long
enough to see the cause of her fever. There was a bloody stump
where her right hand should have been, festering already.
The child crossed herself and cried out so loud the neighbours
heard her and come rushing in. They knew the wart on the hand at
once for a witch’s nipple; they drove the old woman, in her shift as
she was into the snow with sticks, beating her old carcass as far as
the edge of the forest, and pelted her with stones until she fell down
dead.
Now the child lived in her grandmother’s house; she prospered.
Approaches to Narrative (2017/18)
Term 1, Week 2 Writing Exercise
Task (1 hour):
Drawing upon the advice offered in the first part of the seminar, please write a textual
analysis of Angela Carter’s ‘The Werewolf’.
In writing this analysis, please consider how the short story functions as a whole. Please avoid
merely describing the plot and, instead, analyse how the text functions as a rewriting of a
traditional fairy tale.
Alongside this, your analysis should contain evidence of close reading as you zoom in to focus
on some of the textual details of the story. Crucially, this includes the way in which the text
is written: the choice of language; the structure of sentences; the use of imagery; and so on.
Please have confidence in your own readings and your own ideas! We’re looking forward to
reading your thoughts and offering some feedback.
Approaches to Narrative (2017/18)
Rewriting Fairy Tales
HOW TO WRITE A TEXTUAL ANALYSIS
Textual Analysis Exercise
Three overlapping elements:
i) Demonstrate your understanding of how the text
– in this case, a short story – functions as a whole
ii) Demonstrate your ability to offer some close
readings of the text
iii) Demonstrate your ability to offer some critical
arguments about the text
What is close reading?
The process of close reading is twofold: first, read the text;
second, interpret your reading.
Interpretation is a kind of inductive reasoning: you should
move from the observation of particular facts and details to
a reading based on those details.
A close reading does not mean a close description: the
‘reading’ element indicates activity on the part of the
reader.
This activity should be thought of in terms of the analysis,
synthesis, and interpretation of the text’s formal features.
How to Read the Text:
A Three Step Process
i) As you read the text, annotate it: ‘annotating’ means underlining or
highlighting key words and phrases – anything that strikes you as
surprising or significant, or that raises questions – as well as making
notes in the margins.
ii) Focus on particulars and specifics: who is speaking? where is the
scene located? at what time of day? what kind of language is being
used? what allusions are made? what kind of punctuation is employed?
iii) When you have a list of particulars you’ve noticed about the text,
you need then to formulate this list into an interpretation.
Organising your thoughts:
writing a textual analysis
The close reading that forms the textual analysis is designed to bring
out your reading of a text, and as such, will involve you making an
argument (remember, close reading is not just a description of the text).
When you have thought about the way in which a text is written, you
need to think about what effects these create and what the text is
saying by doing this.
There is no ‘right’ argument to be gained through completing this
process as each interpretation will choose to focus on a different aspect
of the text.
An argument looks to persuade, not insist; it engages the reader as a
thoughtful listener, who could be imagined as responding to, or
questioning, your claims.
Key elements of your writing
1) Understanding of narrative as a whole
2) Analysis
3) Argument
4) Evidence
1) Analysis
Rewriting of traditional fairy tale
Narrative technique
Contradictions/oddities/tensions
2) Argument
What is the point?
“I believe that…”
Why that point?
“all women in the 19th century
were oppressed…”
How will you demonstrate that?
“The Crucible is a play about
McCarthyism”
Reason:
inductive and
deductive
3) Textual Evidence
Analysis: please draw upon your annotations and observations.
Quotation: make sure that you support your points by quoting from,
and analyzing, parts of the text. Introduce the quotation and, crucially,
comment on it.
…
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