Click for the AV Club’s review of The Twilight Zone episode, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.”
The Point of a Story
In our course, you write what you read and read what you write. We call the process emulation through analysis, or ETA writing. It means that you pick apart a text because you want to emulate it, not because of a “mean-spirited, picky insistence that every child get every last little scrap of ‘understanding’ that can be dug out of a book.”
That quotation comes from John Holt and his essay, “How Teachers Make Children Hate Reading,” which you studied as part of our introduction to literature and the reading process. Following that, you also received a three-part guide on how we read:
Our goal, again, is to emulate the works we study. To get there, we must analyze them, being careful not to let that analysis break the magic.
This time, we are studying narrative writing: a mode of discourse in which a sequence or series of events, real or fictional, is relayed or described. More simply, narrative writing tells a story.
For a piece of writing to be considered a complete narrative, it must fit the criteria outlined above, which it does through certain literary elements. Some of the basic elements of writing, like syntax and diction, are included in that protocol; everything else falls on a list you are given every year in your English classes. That’s why you’ll recognize everything in this article1:
Note: We are using that particular article for two reasons. First, if you read it, you’ll know everything you need to know to do this work. Second, it’s a site full of ads, which lets us use Snap and Read, one of the district’s most useful browser extensions, to eliminate distractions. When you click to “[r]emove distractions,” that site goes from this:
To this:
Analyzing Narratives
After you’ve read the background above, you can move on to analyzing and emulating. Because you take the English Regents Exam in June, however, we’ll start not with short stories that can be emulated easily, but with a longer story that has been adapted into an Oscar-winning film.
After reading the story and watching the film, run each through the protocol for works of literary merit. Use the template provided below. Load it, make two copies of it in your Drive, and then complete both.
The headings are repeated below for reference.
1⁰ Focus: How You Read
Focus on what this work reveals about how you learn and how you read. Does the length of the text help? How? Did you print a copy of the texts, or did you read online? Why? What was the effect? When you watched the film adaptation, how did you do it? Were you alone or with others? Did you watch it all at once or in sections? What did your choices reveal?
2⁰ Focus: What Literature Is For
Use the post and the ideas we gleaned from its central video to ask yourself what each text teaches you. Is it giving you wisdom and insight? Into what aspects of yourself or your world? When in doubt, remember the video’s final quotation:
We should learn to treat [literature] as doctors treat their medicine, something we prescribe in response to a range of ailments and classify according to the problems it might be best suited to addressing. Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others: because it’s a tool to help us live and die with a little more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.
Often, this kind of analysis is pitched in terms of essential questions about human nature or society. For this particular study, you should have already considered the following:
⍰ To what extent can any of us trust our senses?
⍰ To what extent can any of us trust our memories?
⍰ How do ignorance, knowledge, and happiness interact for us? In other words, would you want to be ignorant and happy, or have knowledge and be miserable?
⍰ To what extent and in what ways does power corrupt?
⍰ In what ways are any of us ever truly alone?
⍰ To what extent are people naturally self-destructive? What does it mean if we are?
⍰ At what point and for what reasons should a group stop an individual from doing whatever he or she wants?
3⁰ Focus: Emulation Through Analysis
The post on how to read covers diction, syntax, and other universal elements of writing. You can emulate those aspects in any writing response.
For this particular mode of discourse, and for each model text, you should also focus on literary devices. Characterization, conflict, foreshadowing, irony — all those and more can be analyzed and emulated. In fact, the best way to approach this sort of analysis is by adapting the directions from Part 3 of the Regents Examination in English Language Arts:
Closely read the text provided and write a well-developed, text-based response of two to three paragraphs. In your response, identify a central idea in the text and analyze how the author’s use of one literary element or literary technique or rhetorical device (characterization, conflict, denotation/connotation, metaphor, simile, irony, language use, point-of-view, setting, structure, symbolism, theme, tone, etc.) develops this central idea. Use strong and thorough evidence from the text to support your analysis. Do not simply summarize the text.
“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (Short Story)
Author: Ambrose Bierce
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge [Google Docs]
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge [Free eBook at Project Gutenberg]
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge [PDF]
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“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (Short Film)
Director: Robert Enrico
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge [on Vimeo]
Emulation: Narrative Writing
If you are so inspired, you can and should attempt to emulate Bierce’s short story with one of your own. That is the best use of this kind of analysis and discussion. You will, however, be asked soon enough to read, analyze, and emulate flash fiction — narratives that are short enough to be emulated by anyone, regardless, just through our work during each class period.
If you do elect to write your own story, take your time. Refer to this post:
Which is just one of many such documents available to you. The most cursory search on Google would give you hundreds more. ↩