An Introduction To The Structural Analysis Of Narrative By Roland Barthes

The context of the plot found in “The School” presents the readers with the timeless question of the meaning of life. However, this question does not seem to present itself immediately to the reader. In order to appreciate Barthelme’s work in this piece, it is crucial that one utilizes the New Criticism’s approach to reading. New Criticism was first developed in the 20th century and it makes reading and interpreting literature a systematic activity. New Criticism as an analytical tool helps the readers to understand and gain insight into all forms of the written works through sheer understanding and by reading closely. This means that our focus

New Criticism posits that in order to understand a work, one must focus solely on the work looking at, for example, its figures of speech among other elements and how such add to the organic unity (the coming together

To create a piece of fabric, small textile fibers are crisscrossed, stitched, and sewn together. If unraveled, the individual fibers remain, but as a whole, they function collectively to make a larger and more significant piece. This is known as weaving, and it is argued by some literary researchers that this process of weaving can be figuratively applied to procedures of writing by way of intertextuality―the composition theory that claims all texts refer to other texts. From this assertion, James E. Porter’s “Intertextuality and the Discourse Community,” argues originality is nearly impossible to achieve, as no thought originates without influence from other sources; however, after examining the essays “All Writing is Autobiography” by Donald

By connecting, considering and concluding the response gained from literary works, the reader can obtain a deeper, analytical understanding of these techniques and tools used by the authors of the various literature forms. For this assignment, I have chosen to compare and contrast two separate literary works from “Journey into Literature” (Clugston, 2010), with similar themes. . The poems I will discuss are “The

of literary and poetic devices, and combined with the social context, form the changed voice of the

New historicism is premised upon an ideological attempt to wed the practice of history and literary criticism. In this type of textual analysis, the literary work is juxtaposed with historical events (characteristic of the time period in which the work was produced) in an effort to understand the implications within the text. This line of inquiry serves to recover a "historical consciousness" which may be utilized in the rendering of literary theory. "Poems and novels came to be seen in isolation, as urnlike objects of precious beauty. The new historicists, whatever their differences and however defined, want us to see that even the most unlike poems are caught in a web of historical conditions,

“In a comparative study of texts we see that the connections between texts are realised through the different textual forms used by each composer.”

Literature has been a part of our cultural inheritance that enriches our lives from centuries. Every literary work carries such great historical, social, intellectual importance and deepens our understanding of our society as well as our history. History plays a basic role in shaping any kind of literary works: every play, poem, novel we read is either affected by the people surrounding the author, the political context in which it was written or the society that shapes the entire work. As Roland Barthes argues that the author “can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original” meaning that he is always the product of his time and that he always writes what she or he learned from that particular time in history.

Ever since Hunter Jordan died, Ruth and James were heavily affected. In order to combat this, they both use different ways to grieve over his death. To begin, Ruth, James’ mother, rides her bike to grieve for her husbands death. To show proof, James says, “She would ride in slow motion across our street… It was her way of grieving,” (7). As one can see James believes his mother rides her bicycle to grieve for her deceased husband. In addition, James also notes, “it was something [the bike] my stepfather found on the street in Brooklyn and hauled home a few months before he died.” (5). To explain, James says that his stepfather found the bike and brought it to Ruth a few months before he died, so Ruth uses it to remind her of her husband. Furthermore, another way Ruth grieves is in church. James says, “she would occasionally do something in church that I never saw her do at home… she would bow down her head and weep.” (50). As one can see, Ruth cries in church to grieve for her husband because if her kids see her, they would think she is crying because God makes her happy.

Erik Larson uses repetition to tell his readers how much it would take for Olmsted to complete his task on time and how stressful it was. Larson uses the would “if” to communicate to his readers that there is a chance that everything could work out but “if” one of these does not, then they fail. By repeating “if” repeatedly Larson’s readers understand that there are many different things that, in order for the fair to be complete on time, need to go right. So by using this repetition Larson communicates to his readers how stressed they were about the fair. Therefore, this repetition that Erik Larson uses allows his readers to understand how stressed they all were about all the factors that needed to go right in order for the fair to be completed

Truly justifying a story’s value; for it to be considered successful, the narrative must be engaging for the reader. A back-story identifies the depth of significant characters complexities and foibles, understanding the circumstances they are faced with. The emotive thread that weaves the shape our understanding of the characters inevitably unveils the bigger picture of the story.

New Historicism is a school of criticism that is “influenced by structuralist and post-structuralist theories, [and] seeks to reconnect a work with the time period in which it was produced and identify it with the cultural and political movements of the time” (Purdue Owl). With this school of criticism, every work that is created is considered a product of the moment in history that it references. Historical criticism insists that readers need to understand

In modern literary interpretation, the correspondence of the authors intention with the meaning of the work, is considered paramount to discerning the ‘true’ literary meaning of a work . E.D. Hirsch a renowned literary critic argues that to correctly interpret a text, the interpret must consider the author and the text’s “inner” and “out horizon”. To discover the inner horizon, the interpreter must look at the culture and background of the work and author so they can understand the logic, belief systems, and historical context that bound the work. The addition of the outer horizon allows the reader to consider the author’s intention in writing the piece. Hirsh establishes that a literary interpretation can be considered the most probable, if the reader considers the plausibility of the interpretation based on the context established from the text’s horizon, coherence .

A dialogical work is often related to history of past use and meaning and thus the novel tends to be constructed as a dialogue among unmerged souls of perspectives.

the whole novel: “the linguistic pattern of choices realizes a primitive pattern of cognition, which in turn is the key to the tragic vision of the novel.”(Leech & Short, 2001: 32) Halliday being the widely acknowledged precursor of functional stylistics, the eminent German linguist-critic Leo Spitzer (1887-1960), is likewise father of literary stylistics. In his insistence that the smallest detail of language can unlock the “soul” of a literary work, he maintains the task of stylistics is to provide a hard-and-fast technology of analysis: I would maintain that to formulate observation by means of words is not to cause the artistic beauty to evaporate in vain intellectualities; rather, it makes for a widening and deepening of the aesthetic taste. It is only a frivolous love that cannot survive intellectual definition; great love prospers with understanding. (Leech & Short, 2001: 2) A question which is often asked in this connection is “At which end do we start, the aesthetic or the linguistic?” The image used by Spitzer of the “philological circle”, the circle of understanding, however, seems to suggest there is no logical staring point. Spitzer argues that the task of Linguistic-literary explanation proceeded by the movement to and fro from linguistic details to the