Interpretation and Criteria for Literary Analysis What is Interpretation? Why?

Subject matter – literary texts, authors, readers;Polyvalence

Artistic Language

Academic Discourse – theories, methods, terms

Metalanguage

What is analysis? And what are the objectives?

Literary Analysis

Interpretation/Reading tries to understand what a text means in terms of its content and ideas (polyvalence)

Analysis tries to describe and explain how a text creates meaning by its structure and composition(type, structure, language)

Time, history and tradition are the quintessential features of much of Kafka’s fiction. For instance, A Hunger Artist opens with the following statement “During these last decades the interest in professional fasting has markedly diminished” (Kafka 1971, 268). With the very opening remark “during the last decades” and “nowadays it is impossible”, Kafka invokes history to ascribe “hunger” an artistic status. As the story unfolds, Kafka’s rhetorical devices develop in two curious directions. First, by staging hunger art for public performance, Kafka separates hunger from the private realm of existence. Second….

Find out Analysis and Interpretation in this Text

Review – no judgements about its polyvalence

Literary Analysis – judgements about its meaning and quality

Analysiscoded, classified, indexed (Internal)- Interpretationpolyvalent, multiple (External)

Hermeneutics – the art of interpretationA whole is connected to its parts

“A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.”

PartsWhole

“Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar.”

Thematic and Formal

Thematic: ‚What‘ (cultural, historical)Formal: ‚How‘ (formal, critical, hermeneutics)

Function: effect, the role (internal, external)Semantic function and literary function

independent

Structural Stylistic Psychological

Read the short story “Making Do”

Types for interpretation p. 27

Calvino’s “Making Do” is a semi-parable, semi-short story which deals with uncertain causes of revolutions. The text consists of a third person narrator, some constables, and a group of anonymous “subjects”. Calvino creates a forceful effect by attributing dialogues not to individuals but to plural “subjects”. He employs curious aesthetic devices by inventing a game called “tip-cat”. The story teaches that people may not necessarily rebel when everything is banned or everything is going bad, but that they may rebel when one thing they really like is banned, however trivial it may be. The story could be classified as a modernist parable because of its anonymous spatial coordinates and experimental nature.

THEORY HISTORY

Interrelated – text (date), theory (vision), history (tradition)

Ode (euology, praise, Greek and English) English: Abraham Cowley and Andrew

Marvell (17th Century) Sonnet (generally has 14 lines, iambic

pentameter (unstressed/stressed syllable)

/U /U /UI want – to kill– the beast

Epic – Heroic deeds, narrative poem, proper story (Milton‘s Paradise Lost (1667))

Tragedy – Human suffering (Shakespeare) Fable – fictional human world (allegorical –

moral lessons) Fairytale – Fictional human-animal

synthetic characters, naturism, cosmology

Renaissance and Reformation Literature: 1510-1620Features, theology, philosophy, science. Example: Christopher Marlowe‘s The Jew of Malta (1563) Revolution and Restoration Literature: 1620-1690Features: after Interregnum, praising monarchy. Example: Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene

(1552) Eighteenth-Century Literature: 1690-1780Features: Enlightenment, Reason, exploration. Example: Daniel Dafoe‘s Robinson Crusoe (1659) Literature of the Romantic Period: 1780-1830Features: Return to nature, aesthetics, beauty. Example: William Wordsworth‘s The Prelude

(1770) High Victorian Literature: 1830-1880Feature: fate, luck, struggles of life. Example: Charles Dickens‘ Great Expectations (1812) Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature: 1880-1920Features: struggle, hardship, poverty. Example: Joseph Conrad‘s Heart of Darkness (1857) Literature of Modernism and its Alternatives:1920-1945Features: individuality, human struggles, women‘s struggle. Examples: D.H. Lawrence‘s Sons and

Lovers (1885) Post-War and Post-Modern Literature 1945-1995Features: Loss of meaning, failures of reason and rationality. Examples: Joseph Heller‘s Catch 22

(1923) Sanders, Andrew (1996): The Short Oxford History of English Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP.