Assignment 6

Paraphrases

“Firstly, then, what do we do when we interpret a work of literature in the usual ‘close reading’ situation without making any specific use of literary theory?” – First of all; how can we understand a text with just close reading and not use any literary theory?

“We will always need these ten elements of interpretation” – We can not really understand a text without these ten elements.

“That is the ways the words collocate, as a linguist would say…”- A specialist in linguistics would explain it as how to put the words together…

Quotations

“Close reading”
“Literature and language”
“Literature and history”
“Literature and gender”
“Literature and physchoanalysis”
“This necessary looking outwards from the text is why we have and why we need literary theory”
“gendered social norms”
“Deconstructive reading is like stroking the cat the wrong way”

Review

I thought Peter Barry’s article was very interesting and I agree on several arguments. But I do think the start of the article was a bit unclear; the introduction was a bit hard to understand. I was not sure of what the paradox actually was to start with.

I agree with his argument that traditional literary training is not enough to see the different aspects in a text. You really have to consider the language, history, gender and use a bit of psychoanalysis just as Barry suggest in his article. He convinced me!

Even though the article was interesting and mostly well written, I sometimes thought it was a bit hard to understand. If I was Barry I would have divided up the text in smaller paragraphs and stuck to the subject. He sometimes went on and on about things that was unneedful to make his point; especially in the end of the text. Sometimes the text felt very “heavy” and also… a bit boring.

Work cited

Barry, Peter. “Tackling Textuality – With Theory” The Use of English Volume 52, Number 1,
Autumn 2000


Linda Cooper