Summary and Analysis of a Literary Text
Summarize and offer a brief preliminary analysis of Ernest Hemingway’s “Cat in the Rain.” Your essay will be approximately one page or 350-500 words, and it will be comprised of two paragraphs: one paragraph of summary and one of analysis.
First Paragraph: Summary
In summary writing, you demonstrate your understanding and interpretation of a text. The rhetorical purpose of a summary is to explain a text to an audience who may not be familiar with the text. For this assignment, imagine your audience is comprised of students in another section of English 210 who have not read this story. To achieve your overarching rhetorical purpose, your summary will need to blend plot-based and thematic summary elements (which we will discuss in class). In short, the essay will need to make the following moves:
Identify the text by author, title, and date of publication.
Provide readers with important elements of plot, characters, and setting.
Offer readers a thematic perspective that goes beyond the events of the story.
Second Paragraph: Analysis In the second paragraph, you will build on your thematic perspective of the story to provide a short, but rich, literary analysis. Your analysis can draw upon the strategies discussed in class. As with any analysis, you will need to do the following:
Make claim(s) about how the text works.
Use direct evidence drawn from the text (e.g. point to specific passages or moments from the text) to support your analytic claims.
Demonstrate how the text works (as opposed to just reviewing what the text is about).
