Reading Standards

(In accordance with NYS common core standards):

Students read and respond to historically or culturally significant works of literature.  They conduct in-depth analyses of recurrent themes.  They are able to discuss the author’s style and structure while appreciating the “painterly” nature of fiction.  Further, students are able to discern the differences between devices, elements, and techniques while articulating their interrelationship.

  • Analyze characteristics of subgenres (e.g. satire, parody, allegory, pastoral) that are used in poetry, prose, plays, novels, short stories, essays, and other basic genres.
  • Analyze the way in which the theme or meaning of a selection represents a view or comment on life, using textual evidence to support the claim.
  • Analyze the ways in which irony, tone, mood, the author’s style, and the “sound” of language achieve specific rhetorical or aesthetic purposes or both.
  • More specifically, discern the difference between literary devices and literary elements.  Students will analyze the interrelationship between devices and elements in search of meaning.  Additionally, consider THE HOW’S AND WHY’S!
  • Analyze ways in which poets use imagery, personification, figures of speech, and sounds to evoke readers’ emotions.
  • Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text.
  • Interpret, analyze, and evaluate narratives, poetry, and drama, aesthetically and ethically by making connections to: other texts, ideas, cultural perspectives, eras, personal events and situations.
  • Analyze the way in which authors through the centuries have used archetypes drawn from myth and tradition in literature, film, political speeches, and religious writings.
  • Demonstrate an understanding of the author’s use of stylistic devices and an appreciation of the effects created.
  • Determine a theme or central idea of a text and analyze in detail its development over the course of the text, including how it emerges and is shaped and refined by specific details.
  • Analyze how an author’s choices concerning how to structure a text, order events within it (e.g., parallel plots), and manipulate time (e.g., pacing, flashbacks) create such effects as mystery, tension, or surprise.
  • Analyze how complex characters (e.g., those with multiple or conflicting motivations) develop over the course of a text, interact with other characters, and advance the plot or develop the theme.
  • Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in the text, including figurative and connotative meanings; analyze the cumulative impact of specific word choices on meaning and tone (e.g., how the language evokes a sense of time and place; how it sets a formal or informal tone).
  • Analyze how an author draws on and transforms source material in a specific work (e.g., how Shakespeare treats a theme or topic from Ovid or the Bible or how a later author draws on a play by Shakespeare).
  • Analyze works of world literature from a variety of authors:
  1. Compare the varied treatment of similar themes across a body of literature.
  2. Relate literary works and authors to the major themes and issues of their eras.
  3. Evaluate the philosophical, political, religious, ethical, and social influences of the historical period that shaped the characters, plots, and settings.
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