Life of Pi — In this activity you will create a ‘close reading’ of a passage from the novel. Your ‘close reading’ should focus on a selected theme of the novel and provided a detailed analysis of a passage from the novel.

Description

This is a culminating essay that will refer to elements/devices introduced throughout this course. It is based on, Life of Pi In this activity you will create a ‘close reading’ of a passage from the novel. Your ‘close reading’ should focus on a selected theme of the novel and provided a detailed analysis of a passage from the novel. A Close Reading constitutes a deep reading of the literary qualities of a work. It is an analysis of the work of literature. It is designed for the reader to have a deeper appreciation of the way the style and structure of a literary piece works to communicate its theme(s). It uncovers deeper meanings and more interesting perceptions. Some people resist this form of analysis as they feel that it tears apart and ruins the literature. Many students and scholars are uncomfortable with “dissecting literature”, but many others feel it is essential. Many twentieth century scholars of literature feel critical reading involves the deconstruction of the literature. In fact, deconstruction is pivotal in most twentieth century schools of criticism. Hopefully through this activity you will gain an appreciation of the benefits of deep literary analysis. As you grow as an English student, scholar and critic you will find that it is often not enough to just simply breeze through a work. It is much more enlightening, in the end, to peel it back layer by layer. Much like Shrek and Donkey you will need to peel the layers back like an onion. So this is your quest! In this activity you will analyze passages from Life of Pi. You will conduct your own close reading of a short passage and you will create an annotated (using track changes and comments) or a hypertext version of the passage. Below you will find an example of a close reading of a poem done in hypertext and a link that will take you to a site that will provide instructions on how to use the hypertext feature in Microsoft Word. I have more information to pass along.