What is a Literary Exploration Essay?

You have already written personal responses to literature and to both visual and written texts in this course. You should have noticed that for each level of personal response, you have built on your learned skills and prior knowledge. This literary exploration assignment will be no different. You have learned that a personal response involves, "What you think, what you feel, and your abilities to prove your ideas from the reference text." In order to create a literary exploration essay, you will add one more component to your writing, and this will be that you now must also address a very specific discussion topic. The discussion topics that are generally given for literary explorations are usually drawn from some type of essential question. This discussion question will allow you to think critically about the specific topic, and to present and support your own perspectives of this given topic with evidence from the reference text. Your entire literary exploration must develop the specified discussion topic.

Specific Discussion Topic


  • Your thoughts about the given discussion topic

  • Your personal connection to the text

  • Textual evidence from the reference text