Tackilng Textuality - With Theory

In the text, Tackling Textuality – With Theory, Peter Berry offers a check-list when analysing literary texts in an attempt to show what kind of tools teachers and literary critics are using when interpreting literary work.

To begin with Peter Berry gives us ten easy steps to follow when interpreting a text, steps that can be used both by professionals in their line of work and by the “ordinary” man who wants to get a deeper understanding for the literary work he has just been reading. For example step one is looking for structural patterns, step two is looking for similarity beneth apparent dissimilarity, step three distinguish between overt and covert content and so on.

Berry also gives us four aspects to use as a point of origin when searching for a deeper truth or thought behind the literture and its connection to the world. The aspects are literature and history, literature and language, literature and gender, literature and psychoanalysis.

By using Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, Hilda Doolittle’s poem “Ored”, and Adrienne Rich’s poem “Transit”, Peter Berry shows us how to use the steps and some of the four aspects presented in the text, when analysing a literary work of some kind.

Keywords
Tackilng Textuality – With Theory
Interpret a work of literature
Structual patterns
Similarity beneath apparent dissimilarity
Overt and covert content
Distinguish between mening and significance
Genre or literary type
Patterns in literary work
Stages and phases within a literary work
Linguistic period
Literature and history
Literature and gender
Literature and language
Literature and psychoanalysis