3. Experimenting with texts

I. Non-technical methods

From David S. Miall, Reading Your Self (book in progress)

In this chapter we will leave theoretical implications largely in abeyance, and examine a range of methods for working on texts. The methods require little or no knowledge of the background of the text or of its technical features, although some methods could be used to begin an inquiry into such matters. Some methods requiring more technical information are described in the next chapter. The methods in both chapters can all be carried out on your own, but you may find that they offer a way of working that provides a congenial focus for two or more students working together, either straight away or after each student has had some time to try the method alone first.

It may seem to you that such methods don't respect the texts that are being studied. For some students any type of analysis may be disturbing, and leave them feeling that the text has been mutilated. To draw lines across the text, or divide it up in various ways, you might want to say, is to lose sight of the text. It is murdering to dissect. But the text itself doesn't change, of course. This complaint is a way of saying that your response to the text has been distorted or nullified. To guard against this, it would be helpful to develop your own response to the text more fully first, perhaps by undertaking the type of written commentary we examined in the previous chapter. What is at risk is your feeling about the text, perhaps your sense of a personal relationship with it. You may need to strengthen and elaborate the feeling by drawing out the concepts and issues that are hidden within it. Your response will then be more resilient in the face of alternative methods of analysis and discussion, and you will have a firmer basis on which to integrate any new insights generated by the analysis.

But you may also welcome the methods as a way of obtaining a foothold on a text. Beginning to study a text that is unfamiliar to you can seem intimidating, especially if you have the impression from your previous studies in English that you are expected to have some idea of what the text is about from one or two readings. The gap between your preliminary and perhaps confused ideas about the text on the one hand, and a useable statement of the text's significance on the other, may seem too wide to be bridged. Or you may have the impression that you should be able to offer a detailed comment on the technical features of the text -- its different types of language, or the presentation of character. Again, it is often impossible to know where to begin, unless you already have a good grasp of the text and know what you are looking for. So what can you actually do, faced with the text?

The first expectation (a view of the text) starts too high up; the other (an account of its techniques) too low down. What is required are methods that begin somewhere in between, that provide a point of entry to the text, and that -- among other things -- may help you to move towards one or other of these aspects (the whole picture or the fine detail). This is what the methods I describe can provide -- a starting point, which gives you something practical to do with a text when you don't know how else to begin. With the classes of students I have taught, I normally have students agree to try a range of methods like this in the first few weeks, so that they can gain experience in their uses and their limitations. After this I leave it to the students to decide which method to adopt for a given text, or they have learned by this time to devise a method of their own which addresses the questions they want to pursue. So you might bear in mind that not all the methods suit all texts by any means: you begin to acquire a sense of which methods are worth trying, according to what text is under discussion and what you want to discover about it. And after more experience you will want to devise methods of your own.

Most of the texts I have chosen to show the methods at work are short poems. This is because I can print a complete poem for you to read here, unlike a novel, a short story, or a play, and I don't want to make too many assumptions about which longer texts you have read. But I will also suggest how the methods can be used to good effect on longer texts or sections from such texts.

The methods I outline could be approached in any order as part of a systematic study of literature. But I start with "rewriting" since this demands little technical knowledge, and most of the suggested exercises also require only a preliminary understanding of the text. This is also true of the "structure plan" method and, perhaps to a lesser extent, of the "ideas and contrasts" method. In other words, if you are looking for a first way into understanding a text, these three methods may be a useful place to start. Other methods require more technical knowledge, and in introducing the methods in the next chapter I will be providing an outline of what you need to know in order to make use of them. If you are concerned about acquiring some technical proficiency in discussing literary texts (especially poems), you may prefer to turn straight to the relevant sections in that chapter, in particular "diction" and "meter." [Continued . . .]


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