Critical Analysis Writing

I love critiquing literature. At first it was a concept I was fearful of, but I find myself doing it so naturally with everything I read. I love absorbing and discussing what I find in a piece, and I love sharing my ideas and beliefs with others. My growth as an analytical writer is remarkable, and I hope for nothing but growth in this skill.

Poetry has universally become something most people stray away from altogether, but I find myself clinging to it. By using the Deconstructionism theory of critical analysis, I wrote an essay on Sylvia Plath’s poem “Lady Lazarus”. Her work is so rich with underlying meaning and I loved picking it apart. Here is a short excerpt from an essay I wrote, where I discuss using this theory and defining the “self” and “unconscious self” in poetry, and how Plath is doing so.

Deconstructing Sylvia Plath: Finding Life in A Poem Full of Death

“Lady Lazarus” showed to me that Plath is exploiting her fixation on death, and almost her love for it. With death being the self, the unconscious self would be life. I found this present in a lot of her poem. So, with the binary opposition being death and life, death being the privileged term in this binary opposition, this gives the poem a space to be looked at to suggest something completely new. In the line “A sort of walking miracle, my skin/ Bright as a Nazi lampshade, / My right foot/” (Plath), although it uses the term “Nazi lampshade,” it is not as dark and evil as the Nazi’s were.  By using the phrase “walking miracle,” along with words like “bright” and “skin,” the line has a positive connotation. Life being a “walking miracle” and “bright” has a very uplifting and life enhancing sound. Being a walking miracle is something that seems it should be celebrated, not looked on as something negative and referring to death.