Assignement 5

Peter Barry is in his text “Tackling Textuality – with theory” dealing with problems one might encounter when interpreting literature. He provides a checklist with types of rules we use when we deal with literature.

1. We look for the structure of the work. That is in order to be able to read between the lines.
2. Characters and things might change; what looked like a matter of course in the beginning of the novel might change and turn out to be something completely different towards the end.
3. We read between the lines and look beyond the obvious.
4. We make a distinction between meaning and significance.
5. The genre of the book affects the way we comprehend the work.
6. Many text are supposed to be read as metaphorical, especially poesy.
7. We don’t read everything as metaphorical, what is written is sometimes the only purpose and no further interpretation in needed.
8. We look for patterns. However, the interesting part is where the pattern is broken.
9. We understand how literary work is divided, the obvious divisions and the more hidden ones.
10. We understand that the meaning of words differ from different time periods.

Barry emphasises the importance of these ten ways on how to approach literature. However, they are not adequate; we need more means when we are interpreting literary works. He suggests four more elements and he uses Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 to illustrate theses in contrast to each other. According to Barry are these four elements literature and history, literature and language, literature and gender and literature and psychoanalysis. He illustrates clearly how theses different aspects of interpreting the very same text differ depending on the method one uses.

Barry discusses the relationship between language and literature. He defines the term deconstructive reading by using the term “textual harassment”. It is very common that people focus on details within the text rather than looking at the text as unit. He uses the poem “Oread” by Hilda Doolittle to illustrate how a “deconstructor”, as Barry likes to call them, reads a text.

He sums up by once again saying that analyzing literature is not easy. He claims that the tricky bits are there for a reason and that it is fun to elucidate them.

Keywords:

Metaphors – He uses metaphors throughout the text to compare how we interpret literature. Furthermore, he emphasises the importance of detecting them when reading literature.

“The ten elements” – Barry claims that these elements are as indispensible when we are analyzing literature.

Meaning – Analyzing literature is to find the meaning behind written words. His text is dealing with how to do this.

Deconstructive reading- This conception is explained thoroughly in the text.

Significance