Assignment 5

Summary of Peter Barry’s article Tackling Textuality – With Theory

In the article “Tackling Textuality- With Theory” from the paper The Use of English (Volume 52, Number 1, Autumn 2000), the author Peter Barry argues that the most common way of interpreting a text, referred to by Barry as ‘close reading’, in most cases are not enough to really be able to understand literary text and that literary theory therefore is needed. To explain this theory Barry first gives a thorough account of how the traditional ‘close reading’ works by listing ten ways of working with a text, where he includes methods like examining general patterns and patters dealing with details, similarities and dissimilarities, obvious meanings and hidden meanings, metaphors and literal meaning, how a literary work is divided into stages, what genre the work belongs to, and possible semantic changes. After listing all these ten methods Barry emphasizes the importance of them and states that they are necessary for literary criticism and therefore irreplaceable. Despite the importance of these, Barry further states that these elements however still are not enough to be able to do a thorough interpretation and claims that one must not only look at the text itself but also at elements surrounding the text to really be able understand it. This can, according to Barry however be done by means of literary theory where the relationship between a literary work and the four areas history, language, gender and psychoanalysis are examined. To explain how these four elements are an essential add to the’ close reading’ analysis Barry uses them when analyzing one of Shakespeare’s most famous sonnets, and thereby shows what an analysis of ‘close reading’ misses in terms of interpretation. In Shakespeare’s sonnet Barry connects and examines metaphorical meanings with contemporary historical events, ‘micro- patterns’ such as word order with the author’s hidden meanings, the author’s gender and contemporary gender norms effects on the text, and the hidden meaning behind the words connected to psychological processes. After this Barry goes deeper into the area that deals with language and something referred to as ‘deconstructive reading’. Deconstructive reading is according to Barry ‘ to show that the text is in war with itself’ which basically means to examine where and how the language in the literary work contradicts itself by looking at linguistic features that seem strange, changes in style and so on. To show how deconstructive reading works Barry further exemplifies it by analyzing the two ambiguous poems ‘Oread’ and ‘Transit’. By doing this he shows how much more one can understand by using ‘deconstructive reading’ as a tool for interpretation, which can be se as another argument to why literary theory should be used when analyzing a text. Finally Barry writes that using literary theory can bring forth problems that are hard to solve, to this problem Barry however has to tings to say: the problems will be there even if one chooses not to use literary theory and trying to solve them can actually be a very interesting and informative matter.

Keywords: Literary theory, close reading, literary analysis, destructive reading, texts