The Five Moves of Analysis (aka The Most Important Thing You Will Ever Learn) 1. Suspend Judgment: Set aside your likes and dislikes, your agreeing or disagreeing. Say to yourself, “What I find most interesting here is...”. 2. Notice and Focus: Simply put, pay close attention to details. “What do you notice?” What is significant/interesting/revealing/ strange. Slow down and take your time here. Don’t jump to interpretations before you’ve exhausted the details. Uncertainty is good. 3. Look for Patterns: Start sifting through the text looking for Repetitions, Strands, Binaries, and Anomalies. Repetitions: sheep dog in "How to Talk to a Hunter" Strands: Animals in "How to Talk to a Hunter," alcohol in "Sonny's Blues" Binaries: Light/Dark in "Sonny's Blues," young/old in "One of Star Wars, One of Doom" Anomalies: Mysterious notebook in "One of Star Wars, One of Doom," tin of chocolates with Santa Claus "fondling" children painted on it in "How to Talk to a Hunter" 4. Make the Implicit Explicit: Explain to the reader what the details or the patterns imply. Explain your thought process. Pull out the implications and show them why you think they are “folded in” to the meaning of the text or image. What does this mean and So What? Why is it important? 5. Keep Reformulating Questions and Explanations: What else might this detail or pattern mean? How else could it be explained? What details don’t fit my theory? Can I adjust my theory to better fit with this? Prepping the Final Paper Take a minute to re-read the assignment sheet for Paper 3. Then choose which prompt you would like to focus on for your paper. Once you have chosen your prompt, I would like you to go through the book and identify the scenes that you think link to your topic in an interesting way. Now… 1. List the scenes you have chosen, e.g. “Scene #1: The scene in which Oscar is taken into the cane and beaten.” 2. Carefully gather details from your chosen scenes. These should include both individual details you find interesting or bizarre, AND binaries, strands, repetitions, and anomalies. Use the skills we’ve practiced all quarter long to gather these. Write them down. For example, “Oscar’s hands are ‘seamless’ in the dream.’ 3. Now spend some time pulling multiple implications out of as many details as you can. For instance, “Seamless hands = brand new, no history, no fingerprints so no traces, like a blank page.” 4. Choose your six juiciest, most interesting and analytically rich details and type them up in a list that includes implications. 5. Use your detail-analysis to develop a working thesis. This is your own analytical theory about what is going on in the scenes you’ve chosen. What have you uncovered and why is it significant? Write that thesis down. My answer 1. Scene #1: The scene in which Oscar’s dead at the beginning. #2: The scene in which the narrator is not Yunior in chapter 2. #3: Narrating the identity of Yunior. #4: Using footn ...