Literary Monster: Close Reading

Focus on your selected passage and provide a close reading of its portrayal of your monster, examining its form, imagery, and thematic resonances with the rest of the text. How does it contribute to the creation of your monster as a literary artifact? Look at: imagery; stylistic devices; verbal patterns. Make interesting, specific, arguable claims about the portrayal of your monster, both in the passage and in the work as a whole. Back up your claims with good evidence, observing stylistic devices and literary strategies in the chosen passage, and linking details of the passage with the wider themes of the poem. In this section, you should also take a comparative approach: How does this monster compare to another monster in another text studied this term? (At this point, you may reference Beowulf.) How are the monsters similar? How are the monsters different? What specific insight do you gain from that into the monster you are focusing on?