LITERARY ANALYSIS

LITERARY ANALYSIS

When you make a literary analysis of a text you try to understand why the reader gets a certain experience out of reading the text. How does the author accomplish to convey this? What methods does he use to create excitement so that we read on? How does he describe characters? What kind of language does he use? You can divide the analysis into certain elements:

TEXT ANALYSIS	Composition – Divide the text into parts Plot – action. Important – and surprising - turn of event Narrator – who tells the story? Use of symbols and images, e.g. My love is a rose (metaphor) Characters – principal character/subsidiary characters Setting – place (where) time (when) Theme – what important subject(s) does it deal with. What message? Structure - How can the story be understood as a certain kind of literary structure that builds up suspense and character in such a way that the reader keeps on reading?
PSYCHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS	How does the author describe the main character? Subsidiary characters?Is it possible to use a psychological model to analyse the character(s), e.g. Freud’s model of personality?
SOCIOLOGICAL ANALYSIS	Social conditions at the moment the text was written Social circumstances of time and place The characters’ background: Social class, family background, culture Type of society in which the story takes place: Agricultural, pre-industrial, industrial, modern, postmodern? Does the story take place during of after a war that has had an impact on the characters? What is the economic background: Boom or depression? Is there unemployment or full employment?
Links:	General Guide to literary analysis Lots of detailed advice

Of course, texts are very different, and perhaps it is not possible to find all these elements in the text you are working with. It should, however, be possible to make a text analysis in all texts. You may want to make a more detailed study of:

COMPOSITION: Is there a certain kind of progress in the story? How is it indicated in terms of time and place. Does the authour use flash backs? How elaborate (udarbejdet) and time consuming is the plot (main action)?

CHARACTER: Analyse the development towards maturity of the main character, if there is one. Does the author use metaphors to illustrate a character’s state of mind? E.g.: Descriptions of weather, animal sounds, plants, landscapes. How does the author make constrasts in the descriptions of main characters so that an element of conflict is introduced? How is the conflict handled?

LANGUAGE: Linguistic elements: Style, use of metaphors and images.

THEME: What life/death or other problems does the text attempt to deal with? And how does it deal with it: Is the author moralistic, or does she step aside and let the reader decide? How does the author work with symbolic elements to tell us something deep and important about the theme, e.g. the island in "Lord of the Flies" as symbolic of human society, the "beast" as a projection of man’s inner fear.

NARRATOR: Is the story told in 1^st person narrative or a 3^rd person narrative? What is the effect of doing one or the other? Does the 1^st person narrator imply that the author has to be present on the occasions described in the text? Is a 3^rd person narrator of the omniscient (alvidende) type, who can go in and out of characters´s brains and "mind-read" them and present the results to the reader?

STRUCTURE: The story can be seen as a certain kind of structure with certain relationships between its elements. If character A is a nice person, perhaps character B must be a bad person. Otherwise, there is no conflict, and nothing interesting will happen. In the same way there must be a plot. Otherwise, there is no action, nothing happens, and the story is boring. So you must try to analyse the structure by making a kind of sketch of the characters and the relationships between them, a possible time line, the build up of the conflict, the resolution of the conflict, etc.
    For instance, Hanif Kureishi's story Strangers when we meet starts in the following way:
"Can you hear me? No. No one can hear me.
            Nobody knows I am here.
            But I can hear them.
            I am in a hotel room, sitting forward in a chair, leaning my ear against the wall. In the next room is a couple. They have been, talking, amicably enough". The three main characters are introduced: Rob the narrator(young, actor, refined), Florence (Rob's mistress) and Archie (Florence's husband, middle aged, successful businessman, unrefined). The plot: Florence and Rob want to go to a seaside resort to have some time together. The husband (perhaps) finds out about it, and he insists on coming along. Rob only finds out about this on the platform in the railway station. So he goes along in the expectation that the husband will vanish. He doesn't, however, and Rob has to put a good face to what is going on, and he has to deal with his jealousy.