ENGBL1
Proficiency
Marja Nordh


Exercise 5

1. Peter Barry explains us how we usually work when we are interpreting texts. In his article “Tackling Textuality – With Theory” (The use of English Volume 52, Number 1, Autumn 2000) he gives examples of what we find in texts while close reading them.
In his check-list he points up the way readers note similarities in written language. It is illuminating how important close reading is for interpretation. It can really turn the first meaning of the text up side down, and show the reader a total opposite conclusion of the characters in a novel.
He also claims the importance of following and interpreting different patterns in a text. He emphasizes readers to be watchful where and when the pattern is broken. This way of broken the pattern is generally the most significant point in a text. As he says, what really catches the eye of a viewer is not the perfection of a strict pattern, but what makes the pattern broken.

Using the text of Shakespeare Barry makes us aware of the importance of how words are linking up with each others. Sonnet 73 is – according to Barry – full of clues between literary and the world around us. The poem, about an elderly man still wanting to love and feel beloved, contains a lot of contradictions. Barry encourages readers to not only look in to the text but also outwards from the text. He has four text principles that he thinks illustrates what is missing in modern literature analyses. He also encourage us to see not only what is obvious in a text but also what is missing and how the words collocate, as in the phrase: “yellow leaves, or none, or few”, which does not follow the common pattern with gradual diminishing.

One fascinating way to see a poem as sonnet 73 is as Barry points out, the connection between literature and psychoanalysis. He appeals to different mental processes that we as readers can use while we read poems like this. The poems conveyed message of an old man trying to still find some love can also been translated through psychoanalytic terms as a man revealing his weak parts in order to create doubts about what he really is: A man almost dying or a strong, still passionated man, hungry for love.

2. I think there are several phrases in the article which should be quoted directly. For example the headings of the check-list are very good summaries of the whole idea of how we do literature analyses. They give the reader quick, short, information what the ordinary literature analyze is about.
After the check-list there is a paragraph about what is missing in that list. The second paragraph, beginning with: “And yet, equally, they are never enough. What, then, is missing?”
I think this paragraph hits the main point of the whole article: What has to be done to the literature analyses of today, to make it better and should be quoted as it is.

3. I think Peter Barry’s article was very fascinating. Even to a “non- analyst” without so much experience it made sense. It was interesting to follow the traditional way of looking on texts and astonishing to see how much there are to be conveyed just by a simple sentence of a text!

I think also that the article was well structured: As a reader you could follow the main points of how we do conventional literary analyses and what according to Barry is needed to make analyses better. The text was at first sight, though, quite heavy and difficult to read. It consists of many long, informative sentences and demands an alert reader. But after using Barry’s own advice about close reading the text several times, it becomes easier.
I think it is a very informative and interesting article.