Literary Text Analysis: Shape, Content, Communication
Shape Analysis
The analysis of literary language: We will examine the author’s use of various figures of speech and their purpose, always relating them to the text’s theme.
Metric analysis of texts in verse: Rhythm, measure, rhyme, breaks, enjambment, types of lines, and stanzas used.
Explanatory text linguistic peculiarities:
- Phonic Plane: For texts in verse, rhythm is characterized by (meter, accents). For prose, analysis of intonation, rhythm strings (euphony – pleasant words – and cacophony – unpleasant words), and stylistic devices (audio).
- Morphosyntactic Plane: Aspects such as accumulation of nouns, adjectives, etc., use of diminutives and augmentatives with expressive value, use of different tenses, syntactic disturbances, and prevalence of certain sentence structures (parataxis – simplifies the absence of expressive ties, coordination, and juxtaposition – and hypotaxis – subordination).
- Semantic Plane: Analysis of the lexicon used by the author, the presence of homonymous, polysemic, synonymous, and antonymous terms, etc., and the connotative (subjective) values of the text.
The Text as Communication
The issuer is the author, a cornerstone of literary communication; they create the message. The receiver is the reader of the work.
- Language functions that dominate the text:
- Emotional or expressive function: The message issued by the issuer refers to what they feel.
- Conative or appellative function: Corresponding to imperative and interrogative sentences.
- Referential function: To give information.
- Metalinguistic function: Focuses on the language code itself.
- Phatic function: Consists of interrupting, continuing, or terminating the communication.
- Poetic function: Mostly used in literature.
- Reaction that reading causes us as readers: Emotion, identification, rejection, etc.
- Dominant communicative intent in the text: Informative, persuasive, entertaining, etc.
Content Analysis
Theme and Plot: The plot can be developed in one or two paragraphs. In discussing the topic of a text, literary topics and motives that may appear will also be noted: locus amoenus, tempus fugit, etc. The type of text (expository, descriptive, argumentative) will be noted, as well as literary topics (locus amoenus – idealized place -, carpe diem – transience of life -, ubi sunt).
Text Structure
It is the way the author has written the text and how the different parts of it are interrelated. The structural design is to introduce classical development and denouement, but texts can be organized in other ways:
- Linear provision: Elements appear one after another until the end.
- Convergent provision: All elements converge in the conclusion.
- Dispersed structure: Elements apparently have no defined structure; it can become chaotic.
- Open and additive structure: The elements are added to each other and could keep adding more.
- Closed structure: Contrary to the above, etc.
Author’s Position and Point of View
The way in which the author intervenes in the text. This can take an objective and subjective, realistic or fantastic, serious or ironic stance.
Types of Narrator
- Third-person limited: The narrator refers to characters in the third person but only describes what can be seen, heard, or thought of a single character.
- Third-person omniscient: The narrator describes all the characters see, feel, hear, etc., and the facts that have not been seen by any character.
- First-person central: The narrator takes the point of view of the protagonist, who tells their story in the first person.
- First-person peripheral: The narrator adopts the viewpoint of a minor character who narrates the protagonist’s life in the first person.