Oxford Dictionaries Definition of annotation in English

Annotation:

Noun

A note by way of explanation or comment added to a text or diagram.

‘marginal annotations’

Overall Expectations for Reading and Studying Literature ENG3U

1. Reading for Meaning: read and demonstrate an understanding of a variety of literary, informational, and graphic texts, using a range of strategies to construct meaning;

2. Understanding Form and Style: recognize a variety of text forms, text features, and stylistic elements and demonstrate understanding of how they help communicate meaning;

3. Reading With Fluency: use knowledge of words and cueing systems to read fluently;

4. Reflecting on Skills and Strategies: reflect on and identify their strengths as readers, areas for improvement, and the strategies they found most helpful before, during, and after reading.

• An effective communicator who speaks, writes and listens honestly and sensitively, responding critically in light of gospel values.
• A reflective, creative and holistic thinker who solves problems and makes responsible decisions with an informed moral conscience for the common good.
• A self-directed, responsible, lifelong learner who develops and demonstrates their God-given potential.
• A collaborative contributor who finds meaning, dignity and vocation in work which respects the rights of all and contributes to the common good.

• When you annotate a text you make meaning out of what you are reading.
• As you read identify components of the text you understand and jot down your interpretation of what you are reading.
• Look for: literary devices, symbols, images, themes, motif, vocabulary, plot, setting and any other key points that get your attention.
• Identify elements of the text you find confusing.
• Make associations of the text to other works of literature, art, media, popular culture or any other items you see in the text.

Annotating Literature

Taking notes on the following items while reading a piece of literature can enhance your thinking and analytical skills while also giving you a deeper understanding of the text.

Title: Ponder the title before reading and predict what the text may be about.

Read: Highlight, underline, and/or circle words you do not know.

5 w's: Address the who, what, where, when, and why.

Attitude: Observe both the speaker's and the author’s attitude (tone).

Shifts: Mark the changes in the speaker and/or character(s), and pay particular attention to the conclusion.

Title: Once you finish the passage/text, examine the title again, but this time on an interpretive level. (Does the meaning change?)

Conflicts: Highlight and mark for yourself any conflicts that occur with the main character (protagonist). Note your ideas about these conflicts in the text (who/what is involved, attempts to resolve conflicts, etc.).

Theme: What is the human experience, motivation, and/or condition suggested by the text? What is the overall meaning?

Author's Craft: Highlight literary devices/elements and explain how it impacts theauthor’s meaning. (Examples: Simile, metaphor, alliteration, personification, irony, tone, and mood)

Ask Questions: Create open-ended questions and try to answer them to gain a deeper understanding of text.

Northrop Frye, writer

Frye's enormous influence derived from his insistence that literary criticism is a symbolically co-ordinated discipline that outlines the shape of the human imagination itself (photo by Andrew Danson).

Herman Northrop Frye, literary critic, university professor, editor (b at Sherbrooke, Qué 14 Jul 1912; d at Toronto 23 Jan 1991). A professor of English at Victoria College at the University of Toronto since 1939, Frye achieved international recognition for his literary theories, expounded in his study of William Blake's prophecies, Fearful Symmetry (1947), his grammar of mythic form, Anatomy of Criticism(1957), and his 2-volume study of how the Bible provided the symbolic underpinnings of Western literature, The Great Code (1982). These works, particularly Anatomy, made Frye one of this century's leading literary theorists and resulted in his receiving honorary degrees from many of the major universities in the Western world. A particular honour was his appointment as Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard for the 1974-75 year.

Raised in Moncton, Frye first came to Toronto to compete in a national typing contest in 1929. He enrolled at Victoria College and, except for 2 years of study at Merton College in Oxford, he remained associated with the college throughout his life, becoming chancellor in 1978. While a graduate student, Frye decided to write a definitive study of Blake's prophetic poems, then considered incoherent, even aberrant. In Fearful Symmetry, Frye showed that Blake deliberately used a regular pattern of symbolism which reflected Milton and ultimately on the Bible. In Anatomy of Criticism, Frye expanded this idea by outlining a verbal universe of repeated archetypes and symbolism and rhetoric that binds all literature together. This universe is divided between desired and abhorred visions, the former expressed by comedy and romance, the latter by tragedy and irony.

Blighted Winter

Frye's evangelical Methodist background influenced his view that there is in human culture an inherent impulse towards affirming the sunnier vision and implementing it in the world. Ironically his own view of Canadian literature was notoriously sunk in gloom. Frye contended that like the poetry of his own mentor, E.J. Pratt, it is the product of a "garrison mentality" of beleaguered settlers who huddled against the glowering, all-consuming nothingness of the wilderness. Its birth lay in a blighted winter, rather than vibrant spring.

Despite his insistence on the ultimate visionary process of literary studies, Frye has demanded the kind of discipline in study he experienced himself in music, which has an intensely integrated theory. He teaches that literature is not a grab bag of thousands of individual works but an integrated universe of recognizable forms. He always saw a close association of disciplined recognition of form with major literary talent, such as that of his own preferred subjects, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Yeats and Eliot. He spurned a predominantly evaluative approach in criticizing literature because evaluation tends to say more about the critic than the work studied. This led him into endless international controversy, which has obscured his fundamental purpose in trying to establish an objective and universally accepted terminology for literature studies.

Mythic Trend

Frye's impact was strongest in the mid-1960s, when a new generation of American scholars, notably Harold Bloom and Geoffrey Hartman, were influenced by the ideas of Anatomy. They were attracted by Frye's insistence that literary criticism was not a poor cousin of philosophy, psychology, linguistics or aesthetics but a symbolically co-ordinated discipline which outlines the shape of the human imagination itself. As such, it has its own authority, which can be useful in the study of other arts and social sciences. While Frye believed his ideas could also help creative writers focus their work, the notion was often abused in the Canadian writing community. The prestige of Frye's thinking nevertheless reinforced a significant mythic trend in Canadian poetry in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly in the work of such former students as Jay Macpherson, James Reaney and Margaret Atwood. Frye's own work, which is quite theoretical, is best approached through his lectures in The Educated Imagination (1962).