Introduction to English Literary Studies
Poetry and Versification in Practice:
Emily Dickinson: 712. [Because I could not stop for Deathâ¦]
E. A. Poe: Annabel Lee
Katalin G. Kállay
Vocabulary - equipment: not for its own sake, but to be put into practice in the experience of reading.
Complex experience: is analysis the best way to relate to it? (Taking a text apart, technically examining small details - like a dissection - might fill us with fear: can we put it back together again?)
Literary analysis: necessary not for the sake of description but for the sake of discovery/surprise! Its aim is not to kill the text but to bring it alive even more, to come to terms with our own reading experience.
There are no set rules for the process, it may differ from text to text, might change from reading to reading. There is no single "correct" solution, rather multiple ways of approaching and interpreting a text.
Aim: to open a dialogue we enter into, to discover more and more possibilities of meaning and to find a stand for the unique experience.
Some basic devices: text ( context; context ( text
Possible steps to take:
1.Context is necessary in order to understand more (about the age, the author, the literary trends of the period, the style, possible allusions, former authors' influence, later authors' references, other readers' experiences, etc.) Again a danger: killing the text with too much of context in the analysis!
[Dickinson, Poe: 19th century, love and death: classic main topics. Both poets: isolated from the company of others, self-imposed exile, wrote for themselves, out of a spiritual need, not for the sake of communication.
Dickinson: spiritual impersonal confessions, concrete situations -- abstract concepts! Secluded lifestyle, observation, contemplation. Death: one of...