Literary text analysis in Modern Literary theory

Literary text analysis in Modern Literary theory

Literary text analysis in Modern Literary theory
1. The subject matter of literary text analysis
2. The methodological basis of literary text analysis

The object of literary text analysis is a literary text. Terry Eagleton (based on Russian formalists Boris Tomashevsky, Yury Tynyarov). He thought that literary text is created by peculiar use of language formed in various ways: “Under the pressure of literary devices ordinary language is intensified, condensed, twisted, turned on its head”.

The subject matter of literary text analysis is the text artistic language and text aesthetic properties generally knows as: literariness, poeticity, expressiveness, functionality.

Literariness is a set of language aesthetic properties of a text, which presupposes a recognizable social reality and as such can be considered in terms of a conventionalized cultural tradition. (L. Jakobson, 1921).

The term poeticity implies that words and their composition, their meaning, their external and inner form acquire a weigh and value of their own instead of referring indifferently to reality.

Expressiveness adds an emotional edge to the logical neutralities (?) of the lingual expression.

Literary expression is achieved by a variety of verbal procedures from the purely acoustically meaningful like alliteration to their broadest textual…

In terms of fictionality a work of literature can be defined as a verbal text modeled upon the real physical and social world to which meanings in the text are related.

Wolfgang Iser: A literary work has two poles: the aesthetic and the artistic. The artistic pole is the author’s text and the authentic is the realization accomplished by the reader.

The text has virtual characteristics that cannot be reduced to the reality of the text itself of the subjectivity of the reader and it derives by its dynamism from that virtuality:

Literary text analysis: literary history, literary theory, literary criticism.
Literary theory or poetics, describes the principles of literature, it’s genres, techniques and functions.

History views literature as a part of historical process. Criticism studies and analyses works and their authors often from specific theoretical approaches such as Marxism or feminism.

Approaches to literary text analysis: author-oriented, text-oriented, reader-oriented, context-oriented.

Text-oriented is primarily concerned with question of language and style and the formal structure of literary works.

Author-oriented tries to establish connections between the work of art and the biography of its creator.

Reader-oriented focuses of the reception of texts and the texts’ general impact on the audience.

Context-oriented approach tries to place literary texts against a background of historical, social or political developments, attempting to classify text according to the genres and historical periods.

Meyer H. Abrans

Traditional perspectives of literary text analysis
1) Mimetic: interested in the world that the text reveals
2) Pragmatic: focused on the text’s impact upon the reader
3) Expressive: concerned with the origin of the text
4) Objective: considers the quality of the text itself

Literary work: universe, artist, audience.
Speaker 1: reader-response criticism

Meaning of literary text

Meaning of literary text

Meaning of literary text is:

- Intended by the author (author uses cultural conventions, which are hard to read)

- Created and contained in the text itself (produced by formal properties of the text, i.e. grammar, vocabulary, images created in the text; it is considered that an educated reader will inevitably come to essentially the same interpretation, however it is almost impossible to know whether the same interpretations have been arrived at by different readers)

- Created by the reader (exists in the readers; response of the readers’ reception of the text. This is inescapable because meaning exists only if it means something to somebody).

Essential issues: 

1) Meaning is social (depends on cultural conventions and exists as shared meaning)
2) Meaning is contextual (if you change the context, it will change the meaning)
3) The question of meaning is the matter of reader’s competence
4) Meaning requires a negotiation between cultural meanings across time, gender, class.

Literary text categories

Literary text categories

Categories of literary text analysis


Literary text categories

1) category of segmentation manifests itself through the literary text division into parts, chapters, paragraphs that are characterized by formal and compositional autonomy

2) category of connectedness is realized through cohesion (formal connectedness and coherence (content connectedness)).

3) category of prospection is associated with the plot development, which can be prospective or cataphoric (looking towards the future; realized by means of flash-forwards) and retrospective or anaphoric (looking towards the past) realized by means of flashbacks.

4) category of retrospection

5) category of anthropocentricity is reflected through the subordination of the text to the task of person characterization

6) category of local-temporal reference of the text is expressed through the system of tenses and lexical time markers as well as place description

7) category of conceptuality accounts for the embodiment of social, moral, aesthetic ideas of a literary work, which constitute its concept

8) category of informativity is responsible for information stratification into: factual, conceptual and implicit (or subtext)

9) category of systemic character is attributed to the literary text because its macro and microelements and functions integrate in a closed system that serves a specific purpose. Pecularities: no element exists independently; limited in time and space; its constituents cannot be developed, substituted, removed

10) category of integrity and completeness differentiated a text from a non-text

11) category of modality is the result of the author’s subjective interpretation of reality

12) category of pragmatic orientation consists in stimulating the reader’s feedback – intellectual and emotional reactions

Categories of time, space, person – literary text universals, everything that is described in the texts described with the purpose of distinguishing a person.

Genre, text type and discourse in literary studies

Genre, text type and discourse in literary studies

Genre usually refers to one of the three classical literary forms of epic, drama and poetry. The epic is the forerunner of the modern novel because of its structural features such as plot, character presentation and narrative perspective. The tendency today is to abandon the term epic and introduce prose fiction or prosefiction.

Text type: this term has been introduced under the influence of linguistics, it refers to conventional written documents such as instructional manuals, categories, scientific writing, sermons, advertising text.

Traditional literary studies also distinguish between the artistic object or primary source and its scholarly treatment in a critical text or secondary source. 

Primary sources denote the traditional objects of analysis in literary criticism, including tests of all literary genres.

The term secondary source applies to articles, essays, book reviews, all which are published in scholarly journal. Discourse is the broadest term, which refers to a variety of written and oral manifestations, which share common thematic and structural features, e.g. male or female political, philosophic discourse.

Perspectives of different genre’s analysis

Perspectives of different genre’s analysis

Legends, myths, fables, fairy tales are the earliest forms of literary works.

Novel emerged as the most important form of prosefiction in the 18th century. The majority of traditional epics revolve around a hero, who has to perform a number of tasks of national or cosmic significance in a multiplicity of episodes. Classical epics have their roots in myth history and religion. Therefore reflecting a self-contained worldview of their particular periods and nationalities.

Romance established itself as an independent sub-genre in the Late Middleages and has a tendency towards a focused plot and unified point of view.

The roots of the short story lie in the antiquity of the Middle Ages. A crucial feature commonly identified with the short story is its impression of unity since it can be read in one sitting without interruption. Due to restrictions of length the plot of the short story has to be highly selective, its temporal dimension usually focuses on one central moment of action.

Novella or novelette hold an intermediary position between novel and short story. Its length and elements cannot be strictly indentified with either of the two subgenres. The prospective of fiction always include:

1) plot or what happens
2) characters or who acts
3) narrative perspective, who sees what
4) setting, where and when the events take place

The genre of poetry is often subdivided into two main categories:

1) Narrative poetry
2) Lyric poetry

Narrative poetry tells stories with clearly developed and structured plots (a ballad). Lyric poetry is mainly concerned with one event, impression, idea.

Poetic language can be analyzed on lexical-thematic, visual, rhythmic, acoustic levels, e.g.

1. its diction (word choice), rhetorical figures and theme
2. appearance, forms, alignment
3. rhythms, rhyme, meter, assonance, alliteration

Drama combines verbal and a number of non-verbal means (scenery, stage, props, lighting, gestures, facial expression). Because of the elements of performance drama generally transcends the textual dimension. The written word serves as basis of drama. It is intended to be transformed into a performance before an audience.

Text transformation and performance level. The first level is text level: dialogues, monologues, plot, setting, themes.

Transformation (analyze the direction, stage scenery, props). Performance (actors, their methods).

Verbal and superverbal layers of the literary text

Verbal and superverbal layers of the literary text

The words of literary text combine into phrases, phrases into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, paragraphs making up larger passages, chapters, sections, parts. All these represent the verbal layer of literary text.

At the same time we cannot but see another layer, gradually emerging out of these sequences. Words represent a series of events, conflicts and circumstances of the literary work happen to hind themselves.

Word sequences make up composition, plot genre and style. They serve to create an image or reality through which the author conveys his message and his vision of the world. Plot, theme, composition genre, style and image constitute the supraverbal layer of the text, which is nevertheless revealed in verbal sequences.

The supra- and superverbal layers are inseparable from each other and their cohesion makes up the poetic structure of poetic text.

Principles of literary structure cohesion

Principles of literary structure cohesion

Imaginative representation of reality has its own principles which cohere all the elements of the text:

1. principle of incomplete representation
2. principle of analogy and contrast
3. principle of recurrence

1) in recreation an object or phenomenon of reality the author selects out of an infinity of features obtaining the object only those, which are the most characteristic. All images in a literary text, those of people events, situations, landscapes are incompletely represented. At least two factors condition this. The first factor is linguistic, which means the verbal representation of the image would always differ from reality. The second factor is aesthetic because literature must stir up the readers’ interest.

One way to do this is to make the reader fell in for himself, those parts of the whole, which have been gapped or incompletely represented. The degree of incompleteness depends upon the genre of literary work and upon individual manner of the writing.

It is greater in lyric poetry and smaller in epic works.

2) analogy and contrast are the organizing axis of poetic structure. In this way the author reveals the good and the evil and the beautiful and the ugly just and unjust in life.

Analogy of contrast permeate all the components of the text. Analogy of contrast underlie a number of stylistic devices.

3) Principle of recurrence

When we begin to read a text, we do not yet perceive the complexity of the content contained in it because the verbal layer of the text is direct and superverbal is recursive (the structure of literary text is modeled so that certain elements of the text, which have already occurred in it appear again at definite intervals).

This recurrence of an element may have several functions. One is organizing the subject matter, giving it a dynamic flow. A recurrent element may represent have leitmotif of the literary text. It creates the rhythm of the text.