What is the relation of the setting to the plot and the characters?

Learning Goal: I’m working on a english test / quiz prep and need an explanation and answer to help me learn.For this essay, read the document English 1302 Literary Analysis Information found in this module, and then look at information found on pages 1918 – 1937 in The Norton Introduction to Literature. The material in the textbook provides ideas of how to start this assignment and shows what steps are needed to complete it.In addition, read the document English 1302 Getting Ideas found in this module.This literary analysis essay must be 2 ½ pages minimum in length and 3 ½ pages maximum in length. A ½ page is usually 12– 14 full typed lines. You do not need a Works Cited page on this single source essay.After you understand the assignment, browse the stories and poems listed at the end of this document and select one for your literary analysis essay. Read your selected story or poem several times before you begin to write. As you read, make notes of ideas that are interesting to you and that might provide a focus for your literary analysis essay.As you start to draft your essay, remember that your opening paragraph will contain the title of the poem or story you are analyzing as well as its author. Your last sentence of your opening paragraph will be your thesis statement. Here is an example opening paragraph with the thesis highlighted:Walking in DarknessThe 14-line poem “Acquainted with the Night” by Robert Frost seems to be a narrative poem where the speaker, labeled only “I,” is moving by foot through a city at night. The tone is somber and solitary, and the form of the poem is simplistic. This simplicity, however, contains a complex truth, and a close reading of the poem with attention focused on word choices suggests that the narrative is not truly about walking through a city, but is about, perhaps, one person’s movement through emotional depression.Your thesis should be focused on one or two ideas of the story or poem. These focus ideas do not have to be controversial, but they must not be plot points or just ideas recapping the action or events of the story or poem. You are analyzing, not summarizing.Then form body paragraphs supporting your main ideas and analyzing your focus ideas. Move in a logical fashion, discussing everything about a character’s appearance in one paragraph, for example, and then discussing her words in another.Remember that all your body paragraphs must relate to and support your thesis idea.This literary analysis essay is not a research essay. Your analysis should reflect your own thoughts and ideas.Here is a body paragraph example about the Robert Frost poem:The opening line of the poem states the main idea of the poem: “I have been one acquainted with the night” (Line 1). The use of first person, I, immediately helps the reader identify with the speaker since we all refer to ourselves as “I.” In addition, the use of “acquainted” adds a certain distance and formality to the poem’s main idea. We have acquaintances, but they are not friends or family, and we may not be emotionally intimate with acquaintances. In fact, we are more likely to be polite and a bit reserved with acquaintances. Building on this idea, we start to see that being “acquainted” with the night does not reflect a strong bond and may, in fact, indicate a relationship that is not particularly desired.Work through your main ideas providing textual evidence as needed from the poem or story.Textual evidence (direct quotes from the story or lines from the poem) will support your ideas. You need 3 – 6 quotes as textual evidence (words from the story or lines from the poem) in your essay. Each quote must be introduced and incorporated into your sentence.Introduce each quote by making it a part of your sentence. Here is an example of incorporating and documenting a supporting quote from a poem:In the second stanza, the speaker seems reluctant to reach for help because he drops his eyes, “unwilling to explain” (Line 6).Here is an example of incorporating and documenting a supporting quote from a story:The girls in “A & P” are not dressed as the other customers are who “generally put on a shirt or shorts” before they come into the store (165).Information on correct citation and documentation may be found in the textbook starting on page 1962.Look at the student example essay in this module for more examples of correct introduction.Conclude your essay with a brief paragraph wrapping up your analysis. You do not need to restate main points in your conclusion.Create a title for your essay, use 12 font and one-inch margins, create a proper MLA heading, and double space essay in its entirety including heading and title area.This module contains a student example of a literary analysis essay, and additional examples are on pages 45 and 425 in the textbook. Please look at these samples as you draft and revise your essay.Please look at the English 1302 Literary Analysis Grading Rubric found in this module to get an understanding of how your essay will be graded.Select one of these stories or poems to analyze. All are found in the textbook for this class, The Norton Introduction to Literature, Shorter 13th edition.“The Birth Mark”“A Hunger Artist”“Recitatif”“Love Medicine”“Boys and Girls”“Good People”“St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves”“next to of course god America I”“Litany at the Tomb of Frederick Douglass”“Woodchucks”“Of the Threads that Connect the Stars”“The Changeling”“Goblin Market”A Literary analysis essay focuses on one writing, a poem, story, or drama, and examines one or two features of this writing in the context of the overall meaning of the poem, story, or drama.For example, a literary analysis of a poem might focus on the poem’s imagery and explore how that imagery supports a main idea of the poem. A literary analysis of a short story might concentrate on one character and show how that character’s words or actions expand a theme of the story; for example, the unnamed narrator in the short story “Cathedral” is close-minded and prejudiced against disabled people. In the ending paragraphs of the story, however, the narrator literally closes his eyes to experience what it is like to be blind, and what he learns by doing this supports an idea in the story that the physically blind can be sighted in terms of understanding and the physically sighted can be blind in terms of their own emotions and needs.Most literary analysis essays use one or more of the elements of literature as a starting point. For short stories, these elements are usually plot, point of view, character, setting, symbol and figurative language, and theme. Your textbook has an explanation and examples of these elements.Elements of poetry may include the ones listed above as well as speaker, situation and setting, theme and tone, language, visual imagery, symbol, and structure. Your textbook has an explanation and examples of these elements.Elements of drama include character, plot/structure, stages/setting, tone/language, and theme. Your textbook has an explanation and examples of these elements.A well-written literary analysis has a clear focus, a strong thesis, good textual support (quotes from the story or drama or lines from the poem) and draws a conclusion that is interesting and acceptable to readers.“Summing Up: Getting Ideas for Writing About Fiction”Here are some questions that may help stimulate ideas about stories. Not every question is relevant to every story, but if after reading a story and thinking about it you then run your eyes over these questions, you will probably find some questions that will help you think further about the story—that will help you get some ideas.It’s best to do your thinking with a pen or pencil in hand. If some of the following questions seem to you to be especially relevant to the story you will be writing about, jot down—freely, without worrying about spelling—your initial responses, interrupting your writing only to glance again at the story when you feel the need to check the evidence.PLOT1. Does the plot grow out of the characters, or does it depend on chance or coincidence? Did something at first strike you as irrelevant that later you perceived as relevant? Do some parts continue to strike you as irrelevant?2. Does surprise play an important role, or does foreshadowing? If surprise is very important, can the story be read a second time with any interest? If so, what gives it this further interest?3. Does chance play a role? If so, is chance used to begin, complicate, or resolve the work? Is the story improbable? If so, is it, therefore, unsatisfying?4. What conflicts does the story include? Physical, intellectual, moral, or emotional conflicts of one character against another? Of one character against the setting, or against society? Conflicts within a single character? Is the chief conflict between clear-cut good and evil, or is it more complex?5. Are certain episodes narrated out of chronological order? If so, were you puzzled? Annoyed? Why might the author have chosen that order?6. Are certain situations repeated? If so, what do you make of the repetitions?CHARACTER1. Which character chiefly engages your interest? Why?2. What purposes do minor characters serve? Do you find some who by their similarities and differences help define each other or help define the major character? How else is a particular character defined—by his or her words, actions (including thoughts and emotions), dress, setting, and narrative point of view? Do certain characters act differently in the same or in a similar situation?3. How does the author reveal character? By explicit authorial (editorial) comment, for instance, or by revelation through dialogue? Through depicted action? Through the actions of other characters? How are the author’s methods especially suited to the whole of the story?4. Is the behavior plausible; that is, are the characters well motivated?5. If the character changes, why and how does he or she change? (You may want to jot down each event that influences a change.) Or did you change your attitude toward a character not because the character changes but because you came to know the character better?6. Are the characters round or flat? Are they complex, or are they highly typical (for instance, one-dimensional representatives of a social class or age)? Are you chiefly interested in a character’s psychology, or does the character strike you as standing for something, such as honesty or the arrogance of power?7. How has the author caused you to sympathize with certain characters? How does your response—your sympathy or lack of sympathy—contribute to your judgment of the conflict?POINT OF VIEW1. Who tells the story? How much does the narrator know? Does the narrator strike you as reliable? What effect is gained by using this narrator?2. How does the point of view help shape the theme? After all, the basic story of “Little Red Riding Hood” – what happens – remains unchanged whether told from the wolf’s point of view or the girl’s, but (to simplify grossly) if we hear the story from the wolf’s point of view, we may feel that the story is about terrifying yet pathetic compulsive behavior; if from the girl’s point of view, about terrified innocence.3. It is sometimes said that the best writers are subversive, forcing us to see something that we do not want to see—something that is true but that violates our comfortable conventional ideas. Does this story oppose our comfortable conventional views?4. Does the narrator’s language help you construct a picture of the narrator’s character, class, attitude, strengths, and limitation? (Jot down some evidence—for instance, colloquial or formal expressions, ironic comments, figures of speech.) How far can you trust the narrator?SETTING1. Do you have a strong sense of the time and place? Is the story very much about, say, New England Puritanism, or race relations in the South in the late nineteenth century, or Midwestern urban versus small-town life? If time and place or important, how and at what points in the story has the author conveyed this sense? If you do not strongly feel the setting, do you think the author should have made it more evident?2. What is the relation of the setting to the plot and the characters? (For instance, do houses or rooms or their furnishings say something about their residents?) Would anything be lost if the descriptions of the setting were deleted from the story or the setting were changed?SYMBOLISM1. Do certain characters or certain objects seem to you to stand for something in addition to themselves? Does the setting – whether a house, a farm, a landscape, a town, a period – have an extra dimension?2. If you do believe that the story has symbolic elements, do you think they are adequately integrated within the story, or do they strike you as being too obviously stuck in?STYLE1. How has the point of view shaped or determined the style?2. How would you characterize the style? Simple? Understated? Figurative? Or what, and why?3. Do you think the style is consistent? If it isn’t – for instance, if shifts are made from simple sentences to highly complex ones – what do you make of the shifts?THEME1. Is the title informative? What does it mean or suggest? Did the meaning seem to change after you read the story? Does the title help you formulate a theme? If you had written the story, what title would you have used?2. Do certain passages – dialogue or description – seem to you to point especially toward the theme? Do you find certain repetitions of words or pairs of incidents highly suggestive and helpful in directing you thoughts toward stating a theme? Flannery O’Connor, in Mystery and Manners, says “In good fiction, certain of the details will tend to accumulate meaning from the action of the story itself, and when that happens they become symbolic in the way they work.” Does this story work that way?3. Is the meaning of the story embodied in the whole story, or does it seems tuck in, for example, in certain passages of editorializing?4. Suppose someone asked you to state the theme of the story. Could you? And if you could, would you say the theme of a particular story reinforces values you hold, or does it to some degree challenge them? Or is the concept of a theme irrelevant to the story?From – Sylvan Barnet’s A Short Guide to Writing About Literature, Sixth Edition
Requirements: 2 ½ pages minimum in length and 3 ½ pages maximum in length. A ½ page is usually 12– 14 full typed lines