How to Make Claims in a Literary Analysis

You should make the kind of claims that you can support with evidence from within the literary text.

Honoré Daumier, “A Literary Argument from the Second Gallery.” Public domain via the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

It should go without saying that the principal task in a literary analysis should be analyzing literature, i.e. explaining how specific words and phrases from the text support a specific argument about the text. You will have to make claims in order to propose a particular way of understanding the literary text you are analyzing, and you should focus on making claims that you can support with evidence from within the text. Those will be positive, debatable claims about how specific passages from the text can be interpreted. Limiting yourself to making this kind of claim will enhance your credibility.

Making claims that you cannot support by analyzing specific words and phrases within a literary text may weaken your credibility. Here’s what you should try to avoid:

William Faithorne the Elder, Portrait of John Milton. Public domain courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Avoid biographical claims. It is very difficult to support claims that relate an author’s biographical details to the literary texts they produce. You’ll see scholars trying this often — Milton scholars are particularly bad about…