A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Part I
1. Choose primary source (the work of art).
2. Actively read the primary source. Note sections where you observed conflict or felt your emotions run high.
3. Copy down your favorite passages — quotations which arrested your attention.
4. Analyze favorite passages and identify issues (love, blood, sex, death, money, religion, and levels of meaning).
5. Sort passages into categories according to issue. What is the artist’s message or worldview concerning each issue?
6. Review the content of significant passages. Interpret! Move from the literal to the metaphorical. Decode symbols.
7. How did the author arrest your attention? Through imagery? Diction? POV? Apply critical terms.8. Create a topic, construct a thesis, and a create a brief supporting
outline. (This is the most challenging step.)9. Begin research of secondary sources. What have critics said about the primary source? Use the CLC (Contemporary
Literary Criticism) reference set in the library.
10. If you cannot find criticism on your specific primary source, search for general comments about the author and quote them as they apply.
11. If you cannot find enough in the way of secondary sources, apply knowledge from outside literature.
(Quote a psychologist, a historian, or a book review in the New York Times. These are all secondary sources.)
12. Comment on your response to the secondary sources.Part 21. In Part 1, go through steps 1-11 several times. What pattern emerges? Identify the author’s truth and
explain how that truth is embodied in language.
2. Re-evaluate your thesis — explain how content is embodied in form. (Issues: love, blood, sex, death and money are symbolized through imagery, POV, diction, and
other critical terms.) Move from the general to the specific in the introduction. Use transitions.
3. Write the paper as though you were explaining the work of art to a class of bright high school students. Illuminate the text. Take them on a tour of your primary
source, and point out that which is significant, compelling, and memorable.
4. Read your work aloud and slowly. Keep re-organizing until the paper flows smoothly.
5. Revise and rewrite. Do not retell the story. Analyze it. What are the “life-lessons” of the work? And how does the author make us appreciate those lessons? Through
imagery? Diction? Again, apply critical terms.
6. Ask a smart friend to proofread your work and make suggestions and corrections.
7. Observe proper MLA format for the works cited page. (See pages 1244–1261 in our book). Use anywhere from two to fifteen secondary sources.
8. Submit your error-free paper at the final exam. It must be from 8 to 14 pages, typed, with page numbers, and double-spaced.
9. Finally, for the paper to receive credit, a handwritten copy of step 3 in Part 1 (favorite passages) must be attached to the back of the final paper.
10. Become tolerant of frustration. You can’t know what you think till you see what you say . . .
11. And keep working these steps, in order. Epiphanies guaranteed.
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