2016 Introduction To Literature Coursebook

Introduction to Literary Studies Instructor: doc. PaedDr. J. Javorčíková, PhD.
Part I :
ENGLISH LITERATURE FACT FINDER
Periods of English Literature
PERIOD COMMON TITLE OF THE PERIOD
428–1100 Old English Period
1100–1350 Anglo-Norman Period
1350–1500 Middle English Period
1500–1660 Renaissance Period

1500–1557 Early Tudor Age
1558–1603 Elizabethan Age
1603–1625 Jacobean Age
1625–1649 Caroline Age
1649–1660 Commonwealth Interregnum
1660–1798 Neoclassical Period

1660–1700 Restoration Age
1700–1750 Augustan Age
1750–1798 Age of Johnson
1789–1870 Romantic Period

1798–1832 Age of the Romantic Movement
1832–1870 Early Victorian Age
1870–1914 Realistic Period

1870–1901 Late Victorian Age
1901–1914 Edwardian Age
1914–1965 Modern or Modernistic Period
1965– Contemporary Period and Post-Modernism1
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Based on: Holman&Harmon, p. 175. Adapted by J. J.
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APPROACHES TO ANALYSING POETRY
W. Shakespeare Syllable: (vowel, consonant, diphtong) stressed – unstressed

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun
Line
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; Stanza: 2-line stanza = couplet
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red; 3-line stanza = tercet (triplet)
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
4-line stanza = quatrain
I have seen roses damasked red and white;
But no such roses see I in her cheeks; Verse rhymed – unrhymed (free verse)
And in some perfume there is more delight Rhythm
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
Intonation
That music hath as far more pleasing sound; Euphony
I grant I never saw a goddess go; Figures (Tropes)
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
Metre: foot: Iamb - iambic
Dactyl - dactylic
Trochee - trochaic
Dun = mouse coloured Anapest - anapestic
Reek = strong, bad smell
Damasked = irregularly coloured
Spondee – spondaic
Tread = walk, step
Petrarcan sonnet (14 lines): octave: abba abba cdcee OR cde cde
Shakespearian sonnet:
APPROACHES TO UNDERSTANDING POETRY

- conotative meaning vs. denotative meaning
1. Author (relevant details about life, movement, period)

2. Title – subtitle (its mening, symbolism, allusions)
3. Speaker (Who is the speaker? Who is the ideal audience of the poem?
4. Occassion (Setting, i.e. time and place or occassion, e.g. meditations during an autumn walk)
5. Verse form (rhymed – unrhymed – graphic experiment?)
6. Image patters (the 1st stanza speaks about...; the 2nd stanza describes...; the 3rd stanza depicts...)
7. Tropes (metaphors, similes, other interesting elements...)
8. Tone (melancholic, optimistic, loving, critical, other...)
9. Theme (What is the legacy of the poem? What does it teach us/show?) E.g. love conquers all; life is
worth living; death is not the end...)
TYPES OF POETRY (p. 51)
- Representative, creative, dramatic, descriptive, meditative, reflexive, politic, civic, didactic, etc.
- lyrical
Ode epigram Aubade Nonsense
Elegy epistle Psalm Story in verse
epitaph idyll Folk song/song
- epic: fable, epic, chronicle, historical song, ballad
Further reading: Franko, pp. 45-79, Sonnet: pp. 109-111
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TERMINOLOGY – LITERARY FIGURES (TEACHER’S COPY)

Figures of Speech – Tropes
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TERMINOLOGY – LITERARY FIGURES (TEACHER’S COPY)

Figures of Speech – Tropes
1 THE METAPHOR a) I want to buy a Styron.
2 THE SIMILE b) My purse yawns with emptiness.
3 THE PERSONIFICATION1 c) A rose /a cross /a dove /a unicorn /
4 THE SYNECDOCHE d) ...My love is a red, red rose... (Robert Burns)
5 THE METONYMY e) ...My love is like a red, red rose...
6 THE IRONY f) The policeman was chasing a lion on bicycle.
7 THE SARCASM g) Lend me a hand.
8 THE PUN h) ...over a disgusting meal: „Well, this was an

experience of lifetime“.
9 THE SYMBOL i) ...to a friend with a broken leg: „you’re a born
athlete!“
10 THE EUPHEMISM j) She passed away last night.
Identify:
1. Her dress was as plain as an umbrella cover (Joseph Conrad)________________ ;
2. The grass is itself a child; the produced babe of vegetation (Walt Whitman) _______________;
3. Scotland loses the World Cup. ______________ ;
4. The captain said: “All hands on the deck!” _______________ ;
5. C: „Waiter, what is this?“; W: „It’s a bean soup“; C: I don’t care what it was. I ask you what is it now.“
11 THE DEAD METAPHOR k) Remember the Alamo!
12 THE EXTENDED/SUSTAINED/COMPLEX l) ...the face of clock...

METAPHOR
13 CONVENTIONAL/TRADITIONAL m) Japan – the country of the rising sun.
/NATURAL SYMBOL
14 THE PRIVATE SYMBOL n) A heart/a cross/ a dove/ a raven
15 THE ALLUSION o) A tree
16 THE PERIPHRASIS p) ...marriage is a game of tennis, one may win,

one may lose...
1. Unable to meet my project deadline, I guess I have finally met my Waterloo ______________;
2. Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, so do our minutes hasten to their end (W.
Shakespeare)__________________ ;
3. I’ve been reading Shakespeare ___________________ ;
4. Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back, guilty of dust and sin (George Herbert) ___________ ;
5. We came back home hungry as wolves ________________ ;
6. Philadelphia is called the Athens of American __________________ ;
Further reading: Franko, pp. 15-25
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Pathetic fallacy is a special kind of personification when animals and things are shown as having human feelings: e.g. flowers weeping for
the dead
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TERMINOLOGY – STYLISTIC FIGURES (p. 25)
– SYNTACTIC FIGURES: asyndeton; polysyndeton

– SYNTACTIC – STYLISTIC FIGURES: accumulation
– FIGURES OF WORD ORDER: inversion
– FIGURES OF SIMPLE REPETITION: epizeuxis, palilogy (epanastrophe)
– FIGURES OF INCREMENTAL REPETITION: tautology, climax, anticlimax, bathos
– ELLIPTICAL FIGURES: ellipsis
– FIGURES OF THOUGHT: rhetorical question, answer, oxymoron, paradox, catachresis,
antithesis, hyperbole, litotes
1. THE ACCUMULATION a) Words are like leaves and where they most abound,
much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found.
(A. Pope)
2. THE INVERSION b) It’s one.
3. THE TAUTOLOGY c) Dear friends, fellows, colleagues, countrymen!
4. THE ELLIPSIS d) Honour your parents, love your country, be true to

your creed and brush the backs of your shoes.
5. THE BATHOS/ANTICLIMAX e)
He is the most unique young man...
FIGURES OF THOUGHT
6. RHETORICAL QUESTION/ ANSWER f) Are those happy days to be forgotten? No, never.
7. THE ANTITHESIS g) I am all ears!
8. HYPERBOLE (OVERSTATEMENT) h) Give me my liberty or give me my death!
9. THE LITOTES (UNDERSTATEMENT) i) ...My beloved enemy...
10. THE OXYMORON j) Go and live your death!
11. THE CATACHRESIS k) When he fell off the roof it didn’t do him any good.
1. O infinite virtue, coms’t thou smiling from the world’s great snare uncaught? (Shakespeare)
___________;
2. Seen Jo lately? ___________________;
3. People with children often long for peace, people with peace often long for children. ____________;
4. ...bittersweet memories overcame her... _________________;
5. Mr. McDonald isn’t short of a few pence. ________________;
6. She is 20. ________________;
7. I haven’t seen you for ages.! _________________;
8. His desktop was littered with papers, notepads, postcards, books and journals. __________________;
9. Something was GREAT but you say: It was not bad. __________________;
10. In spite imprisoned, he never felt more free in his heart... _________________;
11. Faith unfaithful kept him falsely true. _______________;
12. I’ve told you a thousand times not to do that!_________________;
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TERMINOLOGY – FIGURES OF SOUND
1 THE ANAPHORA a) ...the miles of roads to go,

the roads of dust to go,
the roads of snow to go,
and loads of things to know...
2 THE ALLITERATION b) The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves

(J. Keats)
3 THE EPIPHORA c) Don’t drink and drive!
4 THE ONOMATOPOEIA d) Something sinister in the tone

Told me my secret must be known;
Word I was in the house alone
Somehow must have gotten abroad,
Word I was in my life alone,
Word I had no one left but God. (R. Frost)
1. She was pretty as a picture. __________________;

2. „Bow, wow“, cried the wolf. ________________;
3. He was dead as a doornail. _________________;
Further reading: FRANKO, Š. Introduction to Literature. pp. 40-43
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MEASURES OF VERSE – METRE
Remeber: Our deepest perceptions are a waste if we have no sense of form. (Theodore Roethke)
Syllable: stressed – unstressed U
IAMBIC: deTROIT –– deTROIT –– deTROIT ....................most common in English, gentle
TROCHAIC: BOSton –– BOSton –– BOSton ....................powerful
ANAPESTIC: new roCHELLE –– new roCHELLE –– new roCHELLE
DACTYLLIC: BALtimore –– BALtimore –– BALtimore ...... sadness, decline
SPONDAIC: HONK KONG ....... rare
Usually stressed words: rhematic

Usually unstressed words: thematic: the, a, by, and, is, are, to, of...
1-beat line = monometer .............most typical for: folk songs, ballads

2-beat line = ______________meter ..............
3-beat line = ______________meter ..............
4-beat line = ______________meter ..............
5-beat line = ______________meter ............. most typical for: Shakespeare; when unrhymed: blank verse
6-beat line = ______________meter ............. Homeric epics
7-beat line = ______________meter ............
8-beat line = ______________meter ...........
9-beat line = octometer ...........
Identify metres and feet:

1.
By day the bat is cousin to the mouse, he likes the attic of an aging house. (T. Rhoetke)
2.
Words are like leaves, and where they most abound, much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found. (Pope, Essay on Criticism)
3.
Peter, Peter, Pumpkin eater, had a wife and couldn’t keep her! (nursery rhyme)
4.
Tyger, tyger, burning bright, in the forests of the night... (W. Blake)
5.
Solomon Grundy, Born on Monday, Christened on Tuesday, Married on Wednesday, Took ill on Thursday,
Worse on Friday, Died on Saturday, Buried on Sunday, This is the end of Solomon Grundy. (nursery rhyme)
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SHORT FICTION
- NOVELLE, SHORT NOVEL, LONG SHORT STORY, NOVELETTE
Approaches to analysing:
3. Setting, i.e. time and place
4. Narrator: 1st person (I narrator, „Ich“ narrator)
3rd person
Subjective/ intrusive narrator: omniscient narrator
innocent narrator
Objective/ unintrusive n.: Camera eye/clinical narrator/objective narrator
5. Characters (main character: hero, heroine, minor characters)

6. Plot: open – closed
7. Style /Language (colloquial, formal, pastiche, collage of styles...)
8. Theme (What is the legacy of the story? What does it teach us/show?) E.g. love conquers all;
life is worth living; death is not the end...)
9. Statement I remember
10. My evaluation
Identify the narrator:
a) If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll really want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy
childhood was like, and how my parents and all were occupied before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of
crap. (J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, 1951).
b) The door of Henry’s lunch-room opened and two men came in. They sat down at the counter.
„What’s yours?“ George asked them.
„I don’t know,“ one of the men said. „What do you want to eat, Al?“
„I don’t know,“ said Al. „I don’t know what I want to eat.“
Outside it was getting dark. The street-light came on outside the window. The two men at the counter read the menu. (E.
Hemingway, The Killers, 1928).
c) For two days Jim had wandered along the Shanghai waterfront. ... His only hope of seeing his parents again was to find
one of their Swiss or Sweedish friends. Although the European neutrals drove through the streets of Shanghai, Jim had not
seen a single British or American face. Had they all been sent to prison camps in Japan? (J. G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun,
1984).
Comment on the setting and the narrator:

There were eight Japanese gentlemen having a fish dinner at Bentley’s. They spoke to each other rarely in their
incomprehensible tongue, but always with a courteous smile and often with a small bow. All but one of them wore glasses.
Sometimes the pretty girl who sat in the window beyond gave them a passing glance, but her own problem seemed too
serious for her to pay real attention to anyone in the world except herself and her companion. (G. Greene, The Invisible
Japanese Gentleen).
TYPES OF STORT FICTION (p. 152)
SUB-GENRES MINOR FICTION BETWEEN FICTION NON-FICTION

AND FACTION (FACTION)
Short story Fable Essay (scholarly...) faction
Exemplum Parable Book review
Legend Bestiary Traveloque
myth Fairy tale Biography/memoirs
anecdote
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LONG FICTION
Structure of long fiction:
Climax anticlimax
/ /
Rising action (collision) falling action
/ /
Exposition resolution (denouement)
3. Genre
5. Narrator: 1st person (I narrator, „Ich“ narrator)
3rd person
omniscient narrator
innocent narrator
Camera eye /clinical narrator/objective narrator
6. Characters (main character: hero, heroine, minor characters)

9. Theme (What is the legacy of the story? What does it teach us/show?) E.g.
love conquers all; life is worth living; death is not the end...)
11. My evaluation
TYPES OF NOVELS (p. 130-150) – CLASSIFICATION ACCORDING TO:
1. HISTORICAL 2. THEMATIC 3. SUBJECT 4. TECHNIQUE OF 5. FUNCTION 6. ELABORATI-

CLASSIFICATION CLASSIFICATI- MATTER COMPOSITION ON OF THEME
ON
Picaresque n. n. of the soil Historical n. Epistolary n. Didactic novel Humorous n.
(erziehnungs-
roman)
Chivalric n. Family n. Fantastic n. Roman fleuve Tendentious novel Satirical n.
Gothic n. SCI-FI Anti-novel Bildungsroman Experimental n.
Pastoral n. n. of adventure Kuenstlerroman Journalistic n.
Detective n. Philosophical n.
n. of travel 7. STREAM OF
THOUGHT
Psychological n. Sentimental n.
Biographical n. Romantic n.
Autobiographical n. Realistic n.
Problem n. (thesis n.) Naturalistic n.
Roman á clef Existential n.
(schluesselroman)
Proletarian n.
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DRAMA
Structure of DRAMA (Gustav Freytag’s pyramid):
Climax = IN TRAGEDY = catharsis

/ /
Rising action (collision) falling action
/ /
Exposition resolution = IN TRAGEDY = catastrophe
3. Genre, no. of acts
5. Protagonists - antagonists

8. Theme (What is the legacy of the play? What does it teach us/show?) E.g.
love conquers all; life is worth living; death is not the end...)
10. My evaluation
TYPES OF DRAMA (p. )
COMEDY DRAMA MUSIACAL GENRES

Of manners, characters, morals Lyric – realistic – drama of the absurd Opera
Satiric melodrama Operetta
Romantic monodrama musical
Rogue Burlesque, farce, grotesque
Of situation/of intrigue Variety show, cabaret, vaudeville
masque Marionette show
Vocabulary:
- line
- replica
- director’s notes
- scene
- act
- soliloquy
- aside
- props
- scenery
- costumes (period, clown…)
- masks
- stage
- curtain
- specractors
- audience
- playbill
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LITERARY CRITICISM
How do we read?
STRUCTURALISM POST-STRUCTURALISM – POST-MODERNISM
1. Language is a system of signs 1. Language is asystematic

2. Writing is encoding, reading is decoding 2. Writing is encoding, reading is another encoding
3. Text has the meaning 3. Text has a meaning
TEXT 1 + READER 1 = MEANING TEXT 1 + READER 1 = MEANING 1

TEXT 1 + READER 2 = MEANING TEXT 1 + READER21 = MEANING 2
TEXT 1 + READER 3 = MEANING TEXT 1 + READER 3 = MEANING 3
PSYCHOANALYTICAL CRITICISM THE NEW CRITICISM

MARXIST CRITICISM READER-RESPONSE LITERARY CRITICISM
NEW HISTORICIST CRITICISM DECONSTRUCTIVE LITERARY CRITICISM
FEMINIST CRITICISM
MULTICULTURAL CRITICISM
FOUCALDIAN CRITICISM
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Part II : Introduction to Genology
WHY DO LITERARY GENRES MATTER?
Literary genre is for many reasons a fascinating category. Not only is it an attempt to approach pieces
of art systematically, but literary genres also reflect the dominating view of life and even lifestyles of
a selected period. Critics often point out that each epoch had its “characteristic” genre:
 The prevalent genre of antiquity was drama;
 The dominating genre of the Middle Ages was poetry;
 The most popular genre of present period is prose.
As understanding literature relies on understanding the context and interrelation of literary pieces,
attention will be paid to the genesis, transformations and experiments with literary genres in various
literary periods in order to point out the continuity of development and relationships between various
historical and contemporary genres.
WHAT IS A “LITERARY GENRE”?
Before we advance to the essentials of genology (the literary discipline focused on literary genres), it
is necessary to answer the basic question: what is a literary genre? The answer to this question is
surprisingly complicated:
The English word “genre”derives from the French term genre (meaning “kind”,“type” or “class”;
Cuddon, p. 342). It refers to acategory or sort (Žilka, 1984, p. 208) of a literary work. Genre represents
a normative aesthetic convention which serves as an invariant model for the creation of specific texts
which represent variant forms of the genre invariant (Žilka, 1984, p. 208). In order to illustrate this
ambivalent nature of genre, Chris Barker uses an illustrative metaphor: Genre is like jazz – it partially
follows and copies the pre-described form but it also improvises and enriches the original form. The
result is that the spectator perceives the original form as well as the improvisation based on the
original as a creative enhancement of the original (Barker, 2006, pp. 202–204).
Thus genre and its formal elements (such as the type of hero, conflict and resolution, to name a few)
alter, enrich (or diminish) with any new usage, and each deviation from the norm becomes a new
norm. The history and evolution of literary genres has been a subject of many studies, for example
those conducted by international scholars (George Steiner, Paul Hernadi, Rene Wellek and Austin
Warren, to name a few) and Slovak scholars (Július Pašteka and Tibor Žilka and many others).
WHAT IS GENOLOGY?
The research of literary genres is one of the oldest and most complex fields of literary inquiry. It is
carried out by several disciplines, primarily by genology (Latin: genus = type) and also by genre
criticism and genre scholarship, partially also by comparative criticism and a new type of rhetoric
discourse called New Rhetoric. The nature of the research of literary genres has changed several times
over its history. Historically, it encompassed:
 the normative historical research of literary genres (focused on normative taxonomy);
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 the decoding functions of literary genres, advocated by J. Hvišč (Hvišč, 1979, p. 37);
 the search for complex literary relations, advocated by N. Frye (Frye, 1957, p. 131).
An understanding of literary genre inevitably requires an overview of the genesis of literary genre in
the history of literature.
SOME HISTORICAL APPROACHES TO LITERARY GENRES
Historically, there have been numerous approaches to the essence of literary genre. The very first
attempt to systematically explore literary genre was made by Aristotle in Poetics (355 BCE). He
believed that there were three literary genres – tragedy, comedy and poetry, and that they have fixed
elements which should be identifiable. That his criteria for genres were so well formulated and non-
prescriptive is perhaps why they have survived to the present.
In the medieval period, the research of literary genres stagnated. Scholars were mostly searching for
petrified elements of genres and set strict categories for what is and what is not a certain genre.
A new evolutionary approach to genre was initiated by French scholar Ferdinand Brunetière in
1890, in his study L’évolution des genres dans l’histoire de la littérature. He set five basic phases of
the “life” of literary genres:
 Creation and existence;
 Differentiation (from other genres);
 Stabilization;
 Modification;
 Transposition (“death” of the original genre and creation, “birth” of a new one; Brunetière,
1890, p. 15).
The 19th century, however, was greatly influenced by the positivistic philosophy and overoptimistic
attempts to quantify research, even in humanities. Literary scholars were setting strict criteria on
literary genres and conducted vigorous debates on whether a certain piece of literature (e.g.The Lady
of the Camellias by Alexandre Dumas) containedpre-conceived elements (e.g. those of melodrama and
tragedy) or not. Needless to say, this period was the golden age for vigorous scholarly debates
searching for the “truth” about literary works.
Post-war literary scholarship was multi-layered; there were both conservative and liberal genologic
wings.
The orthodox, conservative view is represented by George Steiner, the author of the monograph The
Death of Tragedy (1963). He denies the possibility of the evolution of genres, namely of tragedy,
because, as he believes, tragedy was society-bound and the present-day society lacks the attributes of
the ancient polis (town, community), which mostly lay on the principles of a closed society (compare:
Karl Popper: Open Society). Thus, according to Steiner, no modern tragedy is possible.
Another “ultra-extreme” opinion on literary genres is represented by an Italian scholar Bernardo
Croce. Croce denies the existence of literary genres as they are not inherent to the literary piece but
only represent secondary, artificial aesthetic literary criteria.
There were also more tolerant attempts to organize literary genres. New literary pieces based on the
original genres were understood as enrichment of the original genre rather than its destruction. For
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example, notable scholars RenéWellek and Austin Warren respect the historical attempts at“pure”
genres (genre tranché), but for modern understanding of literary genres they set less normative
criteria. Modern theory of genres is more interested in search for a common feature among genres
(Wellek & Warren, 1966, p. 235).
Oscar Mandel attempted to systemize theory of genres and divided existing definitions of genres
(namely tragedy) into four groups:
 Definition according to formal elements (e.g. nobility of the hero, unity of time and place,
etc.). However, this approach has been rejected by many modern scholars as dated and
unreliable (R. C. Miller, Arthur Miller).
 Definition according to situation, focused on the essence of the situation depicted (e.g.
Aristotle’s fall from great fortune to ill-fortune). This approach has been recognized by Július
Pašteka and George Steiner.
 Definition according to ethical directions, focused on the overall meaning of the play and its
legacy for the spectator.
 Definition according to the emotional effect of the play (or work of art in general, note
JJ), based on the original Aristotelian imperative of fear and sympathy as navigational
emotions of a play. Paul Hernadi calls this type of definition by another name: “pragmatic
orientation” (Hernadi, 1972, p. 37).
Many scholars have the doubted the measurability of personal experience of a literary genre. However,
H. D. F. Kitto’s counterargument to these sceptical voices recommends “trusting” one’s literary
intuition: “If the meaning is the total impact of the play on the audience, how is it possible to say what
it is, since audiences vary from age to age? The answer is: If you trust the dramatist, if you will
consider the form of his play, patiently and with some imagination, as being probably the best possible
expression of what he meant, then you will be giving yourself the best chance of appreciating the
impact of what he was hoping to make on the audience for which he was writing” (1960, p. 7).
There are almost as many systematic and asystematic approaches to understanding genres as there
are genres themselves, and more will be developed. A scholar then faces the dilemma of which
approach to select to obtain the most objective results. Sometimes, the literary work itself invites a
specific method of research (e.g. some features of a classic genre are so obvious one cannot but trace
them systematically, as for example in Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman, 1949).
Other times, one just intuitively follows a certain type of genre and its elements and tries to interpret
them in the selected work of art. In the next chapter, you will learn about more methods and forms of
genological research.
FORMS OF LITERARY GENRES
The form of literary genres contributes to the meaning of the artistic piece.
Wellek and Warren (Wellek&Warren, 1966, p. 231), for example, recognize:
 Outer form of genre (e.g. its metric system); and
 Inner form of genre (e.g. approach, tone, aim or theme and type of audience).
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One should remember that in quality art, nothing is random, purposeless or left to chance. Each detail
has its significance within the broader context of a literary work and enhances its artistic impact on the
perceiver. The French sculptor August Rodin liked to sculpt his sculptures in the most solid shape
possible because he ascribed to the maxim that if a sculpture is pushed down a hill, everything that
falls off is redundant. The same is true for quality literary works, and the researcher’s role is to find the
importance of details as well as the whole.
THE METHODS OF GENOLOGICAL RESEARCH
According to a Slovak scholar Peter Zajac (Zajac, 1990, pp. 127–128), there are two basic approaches
to the analysis of a literary genre:
(1) the bottom-up method, and
(2) the top-down method.
(1)The bottom-up method (see Figure 1 below) starts with the analysis of individual genre elements.
These elements can at first be fragmentary and seemingly unrelated. Later in the course of the play,
novel or other kind of literary work they tend to unite into a meaningful unity (Zajac, 1990, pp. 127–
128).
(Figure 1)
(2) The top-down method starts with a pre-conceived genre hypothesis, which the researcher tries to
support withindividual elements, themes, and other literary features of the literary work. That means
one intuitively feels a play is a tragedy and then starts to systematically search for a broader system of
tragic elements (e.g. the nobility of the tragic hero, the moment of recognition, the presence of a
chorus) in the play.
Zajac understands both methods as complimentary and interrelated as long as they equally incorporate
two features: inner differentiation of literary works and their complex nature (Zajac, 1990, pp. 127–
128).
Nevertheless, both methods evoke the basic question of genologic research, which was first asked by
George Muller (Muller, p. 2):
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How can I define tragedy (or any other genre) before I know on which works to
base the definition, yet how can I know on which works to base the definition before
I have defined tragedy?
This type of argumentation is called “circular evidence” and is generally inacceptable in exact
scientific research. Robert B. Sewall, however, fully agrees with this sort of argumentation in literature
and, with regard to the specific nature of a literary genre, accepts itas a legitimate form of genological
research (Sewall, 1991, p. 175).
THE HIERARCHY OF GENOLOGIC TERMINOLOGY
In most literary scholarships, a tripartite structure of genre systems, starting from the most abstract
terms towards the most specific ones is followed (see Ivan Šuša: K terminologickej diferenciácii v
oblasti žánrovej klasifikácie z aspektu česko-slovenskej a talianskej teórie literatúry):
Literary type/kind (SK:

Literárny druh):
(general, high level of
Lyrics, poetry Prose Drama
abstraction)
↓ ↓ ↓ ↓
Genre (SK: Žáner) E.g. E.g. E.g.
(more concrete, Poem Saga, Tragedy,
lower level of abstraction) Novel Comedy,
Drama
↓ ↓ ↓ ↓
Genre variant (SK: E.g. E.g. E.g.
Žánrový variant): Ode Heroic epos, Melodrama,
(concrete, low level of
Elegy Novel of adventure, Grotesque,
abstraction)
Idyll Detective novel Psychological play
Unfortunately, many of these terms have more equivalents in various languages or they are misused.
For example, drama denominates both literary kind and genre, which might cause genologic problems.
Therefore, alternative terms for drama (as a genre) have been introduced (e.g. drama, drama as a
genre, SK: činohra); however, they are not abiding and scholars use them at random. This often causes
imprecision in genre classification.
DRAMA AND DRAMATIC GENRES
Drama in general denotes “any work meant to be performed on a stage by actors” (Cuddon, p. 237).
According to Aristotle, drama is an “imitated human action” (Cited in: Holman&Harmon, p. 154)2.
Recognized features of drama are:
1. Story,
2. Action,
2
In the theoretical part of this study, we greatly rely on two academic sources: J. A. Cuddon (A Dictionary of
Literary Terms, 1998) and H. C. Holman –W. Harmon (A Handbook to Literature, 1986).
16
3. Actors who impersonate characters of the story. Historically, there were many historical variants
and genres of drama:
ANCIENT DRAMA
In order to understand the genesis of drama, it is essential to understand its beginnings in ancient
Greece. The nature of the ancient plays was often interrelated with the type of theatre used for
performances:
Ancient theatres, called “amphitheatres”, had a circular shape enhancing acoustics. All-men actors
wore acoustics-improving masks (this isthe origin of the smiling and frowning masks, the famous
symbols of theatre). There were:
1. no curtains (thus the plays could not be divided into acts),
2. few props and
3. no spotlights. All these three features resulted in the verbal nature of the ancient plays,which
were very rich in verbal descriptions of visual and sensual aspects of the play such as space,
size, colours, textures and smells, as well as the emotional phenomena of the play.
In order to clarify the plot, ancient Greek dramas often employed achorus, a group of actors who
introduced the play, specifying its setting and main characters. At the end of the play the chorus
summarized the overall message of the play (Holman&Harmon, 1986).
Structure of an ancient play: The traditional structure of a play follows what is known as
(Gustav) Freytag’s pyramid:
17
There were two basic types of ancient genres:
1) Tragedy – based on the creation of the emotions of fear and pity, resulting in catharsis and
understanding both reasons for personal downfall of the individual and the overall social context of his
or her failure.
2) Comedy – based on alienation and emotional separation between the spectator and the character.
Roman drama differed from the Greek plays. The plays were more violent and more importantly,
they showed the acts of violence on the stage. Other Roman types of drama include for example Latin
closet dramas of Seneca (Holman&Harmon, 1986).
MEDIEVAL DRAMA
Medieval drama denotes all forms of drama in the Middle Ages; however, it generally refers to drama
of a religious nature, which influenced its subject-matter (stories of Resurrection, Ascension),
liturgical tone and language (mostly Latin) (Holman-Harmon, p. 291).
Medieval drama included various genres, such as:
 Miracle plays, (based on the lives of saints, especially Virgin Mary);

 Mystery plays, cyclic plays, moralities (later became secularized and some were even banned.
They are believed to be the basis for the later Elizabethan comedy).
RENAISSANCE (ELIZABETHAN) DRAMA
The aforementioned facts about the technical and artistic development of drama in the Western world
help us to understand more about the specifics of the English theatre. The first era to be discussed here
is so called the “Elisabethan Age”, a term used for the period of the Renaissance during the reign of
Elisabeth I of England (1558–1603). The name “the Elizabethan Age” sometimes also includes the
18
Jacobean Period (1603–1625). Another informal name of the period is “Merrie England”. This refers
to the overall successful and optimistic atmosphere of this period, rooted in colonial expansion and the
resulting societal developments, incorporating new technologies and materials brought from overseas
(Holman&Harmon, p. 291). In the Elizabethan times, drama proliferated. Some of the popular genres
of the period were:
 Pastoral plays (they developed from pastoral poems, usually describing the“pastoral” lives of
shepherds and descriptions of the countryside).
 School plays (popular Elizabethan plays practiced and performed at schools, one form of school
plays wasthe so-called “masque”).
 University plays (practiced and performed for the Queen Elizabeth by a group of academics
called “the University Wits”).
 Latin drama (these were mostly translations of Italian plays).
 Chronicles (these were essentially historical plays which drew inspiration from period chronicles,
such as Holinshed’s Chronicles).
 Elizabethan comedies (comedy, especially romantic comedies and court comedies, were popular
genres of the period; they often used misunderstanding and mistakingone character for another as the
central point of their subjects).
 Elizabethan tragedies (were as popular as comedies. Some variants of Elizabethan tragedy

include tragedy of blood and revenge tragedy, which lay on the principle of poetic justice. Elizabethan
tragedies often employed subjects such as the seven deadly sins and supernatural powers, and usually
ended in the death of most of the characters).
DRAMA OF THE JACOBEAN AND CAROLINE AGES
“The Jacobean Age” was significantly different from the libertine Elizabethan Age in its more
serious and contemplative tone and philosophical subjects. In this period, Shakespeare wrote his major
tragedies and tragicomedies, while Ben Jonson produced classic tragedies and realistic comedies, and
many other authors flourished.
“The Caroline Age” referred to the reign of Charles I of England (1625–1642). Drama of the period
includes many new forms such as the comedy of manners, the sentimental comedy and the domestic
tragedy (Holman&Harmon, p. 291).
THE DIVERSITY OF THE 19TH CENTURY DRAMA
The 19th century was significant for its technical improvements of theatrical techniques as well as for
formal and intellectual changes in the structure and content of plays.
Technical improvements included the invention of:
 Spotlights (which allowed theatres to focus on the most important character in each section of the
play),
 Curtains (which allowed plays to be divided into acts), and
 Other technical improvements (that allowed theatres to bring large objects, sounds, and other
effects to the stage). However, all these inventions also contributed to a diminishment of the role
19
of language, and plays became much less verbal and much more visual than in previous dramatic
eras.
Some of the most significant genres of the period include:
 Melodrama (a play based on romantic plot, idealized characters and a romantic happy ending or
extremely unhappy ending. In melodrama, the logical course of the plot is subordinated to
sensational emotions, and thus melodramatic characters often find themselves in dramatic
situations – lost in the desert without water, in the wilderness without matches, etc. Modern
variants of classical melodramas are soap operas). Romantic tragedies were among the successors
of melodramas.
 Problem plays (were similar to melodramas; however, the logic of plot now played a much more
important role. The plot revolved around a specific “problem”, such as immigration to the USA,
unwanted pregnancy, or dilemma between obeyingone’s parents and the pursuit of happiness).
Problem plays later inspired modern social, psychological and political dramas.
 Verse drama (was only distinguished by its verse form, popular with folk audience).
20TH CENTURY “MODERN” DRAMA
English modern drama is so multi-layered that it invites many methods of classification (see: Štefan
Franko : Theory of Anglophonic Literatures. 1994), such as:
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
HISTORICAL THEMATIC SUBJECT TECHNIQUE OF FUNCTION ELABORATI-ON
CLASSIFICA- CLASSIFI- MATTER COMPOSI- OF THEME
TION CATION TION/GENRE
Angry Young Family play Historical play Modern play Didactic play Humorous play
Men–drama after
1956, when John
Osborne’s play
Look Back in
Angerpremiered.
“New wave” of Social play Fantastic play Postmodern play Entertaining play Satirical play
British drama
1st wave of Political play SCI-FI Total theatre Experimental

British drama play
2nd wave of Detective play In-Yer-Face Journalistic play

British drama
3rd wave of Psychological 7. STREAM OF

British drama play THOUGHT
4th wave of Biographical Sentimental play

British drama play
Romantic play
Realistic play
20
Naturalistic play
Existential play3
This list is by no means complete and new genre variants are perpetually being created. What is more,
many modern genres purposely overlap with other genres, creating hybrids.
The reasons for the creation of new genres are various. Many were created “in opposition” to the
traditional genres, in order to provoke and disturb the reader. One of the modern genres that purposely
contradict features of traditional realistic plays is “In-Yer-Face” theatre. In-Yer-Face theatre uses both
shocking language and shocking images to physically and emotionally discomfort the spectator and
make him or her think about the issues in debate. John Osborne, one of the “Angry Young Men” and
the author of iconic play Look Back in Anger (1956), inspired this genre. Other new genres include
New Jacobean Theatre, Theatre of Urban Boredom and many others.
PROSE AND ITS GENRES
Prose derives from the Latin prosa or proversa oratio (straightforward discourse). It is distinguishable
by a direct, unadorned form of language, written or spoken, in ordinary use (Cuddon, p. 705).There are
many ways to categorize this literary kind. More traditional sub-genres of fiction include exemplum,
legend, myth, fable, parable, bestiary, fairy tale and anecdote. More realistic or life-based subgenres
include essays, reviews, travelogues and memoirs. These are sometimes referred to as faction (Franko,
p. 152).
The most obvious division is into short fiction (e.g. short story, fairy tale and anecdote) and long
fiction (here we recognize several types of fiction). These are distinguished by their most significant
phenomena, e.g. according to their historical affiliation, theme, topic discussed, style and techniques
or manner of writing. Selected sub-genres of novels are (Franko, pp. 130–150):
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
HISTORICAL THEMATIC SUBJECT TECHNIQUE OF FUNCTION ELABORATION OF
CLASSIFICA-TION CLASSIFI- MATTER COMPOSI-TION THEME
CATION

(Erziehungs
roman)
Chivalric n. Family n. Fantastic n. Roman-fleuve Tendentious Satirical n.

novel
Gothic n. SCI-FI Anti-novel Bildungsroman Experimental n.
Pastoral n. n. of adventure Künstlerroman Journalistic n.
Detective n. Philosophical n.
n. of travel 7. STREAM OF
THOUGHT
3
Based on: Štefan Franko : Theory of Anglophonic Literatures. 1994. Simplified by J. J.
21
Autobiographical Realistic n.
n.
Problem n. Naturalistic n.
(thesis n.)
Roman à clef Existential n.

(Schlüsselroman)
Proletarian n.4
POETRY AND ITS GENRES
Poetry comes from the Greek word poétés (doer, creator). As Cuddon has it, “it is a comprehensive
term which can be taken to cover any kind of metrical composition. However, it is usually employed
with reservations, and often in contra-diction to verse.”Originally, poetry was composed in verse in
order to allow for easier memorization. Old celebratory poems usually contained several hundred
lines. They often celebrated the deeds of a king or warrior (e.g. Beowulf). In the 19th century, Walt
Whitman was among the first who experimented with free verse.
Modern poetry nowadays lends itself to multiple classifications5:
1. Historical classification: English poetry written after 1945 may be divided into several
formal and informal literary groups and movements. Two major ones are: The Group and The
Movement. Minor movements include: The Review, The Mavericks and The Martians. Some
poets, for example Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, repudiated any label and therefore, they
are called “misfits”.
2. Thematic classification: “Traditional” themes in English modern poetry include war poetry
(represented by John Betjeman), poetry dedicated to family or loved ones (Roger McGough)
and philosophical themes (e.g. the meaning of life – Philip Larkin).
3. Classification according to the technique of composition: The most typical classification is
rhymed vs. unrhymed poetry and traditional vs. experimental poetry. Experimental poetry may
include several types of experiment. Some of these include acoustic and even three-
dimensional experiments.
All these types of classification add to (4) genological classification of poetry. The “genre” of poetry
sometimes depends on its form (such as sonnet), theme (elegy) and even on its graphic and visual
elaboration (such as in calligrams). Some traditional poetic genre variants include:
 Ode(s) are one of the oldest verse forms. They derived from ancient chorus songs, originally
accompanied by music. The aim of odes was to increase the emotional impact on the
spectator. In English poetry, there are three types of odes: (1) Pindaric, (2) Horatian and (3)
Irregular. One of the most notable English authors of odes was John Keats.
 Idyll(s) (also Idyls) usually contains narrative and pastoral qualities. Thematically and
stylistically, idylls often idealize life in the countryside, both literally and metaphorically.
4
Based on: Štefan Franko: Theory of Anglophonic Literatures. 1994. Simplified by J. J.
5
We again rely on Štefan Franko : Theory of Anglophonic Literatures. 1994.
22
 Elegy (Elegies) is a formal poem, usually on a serious topic such as death. Perhaps one of the
most famous elegies is Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written on a Churchyard. [References:
Holman&Harmon, p. 168]
 Sonnet(s) are easily recognized by their form (they consist of 14 lines) and content (usually
love and various hurdles of love or philosophical meditations on the passing of time, aging,
gaining experience, etc.). The addressee of a sonnet was usually a fair lady, youth or a rival
poet. The last couplet of lines was called “the antithesis”, a kind of contrasting statement to
what has been claimed in the preceding lines. There were Italian (also called Petrarchan) and
English (Shakespearian) sonnets. [References: Holman&Harmon, p. 476]
Limerick(s), sometimes described as folk poetry,is a short, humorous nonsense poem, especially
in five-line anapaestic meter with the rhymeschemeaabba. It goes back to the early years of the
18th century, popularized by Edward Lear (1812–1888) in his first Book of Nonsense in 1845, (he
wrote 212 limericks). The name originally refers to the City or County of Limerick in Ireland. The
earliest known use of the term “limerick” is an 1880 reference, in a Saint John, New
Brunswick newspaper, to an apparently well-known tune an apparently well-known tune
(Anonymous, 2015, p. 1)
(Anonymous, 2015, p. 1)
There was a young rustic named Mallory,

who drew but a very small salary.
When he went to the show,
his purse made him go
to a seat in the uppermost gallery.
(Tune: Won’t you come to Limerick).
 Clerihew is a form similar to the traditional limerick, a humorous verse which uses a name of
well-known person at the end of the first or second line. The inventor of this form was
Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875–1956). His form includes four free verse lines with an
irregular prose-like rhythm with two pairs of rhyme (aabb). It is usually biographical and
pokes fun mostly at some famous people, but it is not abusive or satirical. The first line may
consist solely of the subject’s name. A modern literary example is:
Ted Hughes,
Sylvia’s muse
Was rather good-looking.
Let his wife do the cooking. (Bentley, 2015)
 Acrostic poem(s) are forms of writing in which the first letter, syllable or word of each line
spells out a word (usually a name) or a message. Acrostics were commonly used throughout
antiquity, medieval “dark ages” and the Renaissance, finally reaching modern times. They can
be easily detected in English and German literary language, but they are rare in other
languages. During the Renaissance acrostics were used as “codes”, in which the authors tried
to conceal the message instead of revealing it. Acrostics were also written by famous English-
writing literary figures such as Edgar Alan Poe (1809–1849) and Lewis Carroll (1832–1898).
Acrostics are many times more complex, not only making words from initials but also creating
so-called double acrostics:
23
Unite and untie are the same – so say you.
Not in wedlock, I ween, has the unity been.
In the drama of marriage, each wandering gout
To a new face would fly – all except you and I
Each seeking to alter the spell in their scene.
(anonymous, Double Acrostic). (Espy, p. 15)
Modern poetic genre variants include:
 Concrete poetry, (also called calligraphs, calligrams, visual, concrete or shape poetry. A
calligram is a type of shape poetry that uses the form of the letters to add to the meaning. The
image is a visual demonstration of the theme presented by the text of the poem. In modern
English poetry, Roger McGough (b. 1937) uses calligrams to put forward the subjects of his
poems, which often depicted modern problems of a man in the present-day world, such as
isolation, collapse of communication, consumerism and many others (McGough, 2015):
40 – LOVE
40 – love
middle aged
couple playing
ten nis
when the
game ends
and they
go home
the net
will still
be be
tween them
 Found poem is a poem created from prose found in a non-poetic context. The form is
patterned on the rhythm, rearranging the lines to appear as a poem. In general, the context
from which the lines are taken or found is e.g. advertisements, product labels, newspapers etc.
24
(Anonymous, 2014).
Haiku (traditional Japanese extremely short poetry that states three lines of five, seven and five
syllables respectively, in order to set a clear image of an emotion. Haikus were popular among English
and American writers who set themselves against the established rules, e.g. Jack Kerouac (Kerouac,
2003):
Snow in my shoe
Abandoned
Sparrow's nest
 Sound poems combine acoustic and formal experiments. The best example of a “sound
poem” is a poem by Ian Hamilton Finlay (Finlay, 2015), called Siesta of a Hungarian Snake:
Siesta of a Hungarian Snake
s sz sz SZ sz SZ sz ZS zs ZS zs zs z
 Three-dimensional poetic experiments combine poetry and visual arts. See Finlay’s poem
called The present order is the disorder of the future:
25
.
“The present order is the disorder of the future”
(St Just) – Little Sparta (Finlay, 2015).
This list of genres includes only the most interesting examples. Needless to say, nearly every new
poem flouts an established rule, and experimentation with literary genres is by no means complete.
Each new play, poem, novel and short story partly uses the features of traditional genres and partly
alters them to invent a new artistic model. That is also the reason why artists, professional critics as
well as art lovers should be aware of the basis, genesis and principles of literary genres. In the next
chapter, you will explore samples of various significant authors who have significantly contributed to
the theory of genres or shifted the limits of then-known genres.
Part III : GUIDE TO ORGANIZING LITERARY STUDIES

Failure to produce an academic literary analysis might stem from various reasons including
lack of methodological tools and terminology. This chapter will help students to
methodologically organize literary studies and to approach a literary text from theoretical and
systematic platform. Information in this chapter is complemented by Appendix A (Periods of
English literature), Appendices B and C (focused on literary terminology) and Appendix D
(practical guide to analysing selected English pieces of literature).
3.1 ANALYSING PROSE
26
Prose is perhaps one of easier genres as the language it uses oftentimes resembles everyday
language people use in communication. Analysis of prosaic literary genres, however, is only
seemingly easy; not only general readers but also students of literature often feel they do not
quite know how to organize and handle issues in the literary text and how the analysis of
individual elements of the text could bring them to a better grasp of the meaning of the text. In
such cases, when one feels one cannot get oriented within the text, it is essential to select
a systematic methodology of analysis that would guide the reader to understanding the text.
There exist a vast body of literary handbooks, guides and dictionaries that offer systematic
lists of issues and terms that should help the reader. When analysing a short fiction (including
novella, short novel, long short story, and novelette) most of them recommend to follow a
similar structure:
1. Author (Relevant details about his/her life, movement, period);

2. Title and subtitle (Meaning, symbolism, allusions; explain why the author was selected
this particular title);
3. Genre (Select its sub-genre, for example: picaresque novel, gothic novel, family novel,
historical novel, utopian novel, fantastic novel, Sci-fi, the novel
of adventure, detective novel, the novel of travel, psychological
novel, biographical novel, autobiographical novel, the epistolary
novel, the anti-novelthe philosophical novel, the humorous
novel, the satirical novel, the experimental novel, the romantic
novel, the realistic novel, the naturalistic novel, the existential
novel.
4. Setting (Time and place);
5. Narrator (1st person/'Ich' narrator, 3rd person narrator, objective narrator, subjective
narrator, Camera Eye narrator, un/intrusive narrator; also
specify the 'narratee');
6. Characters (Identify and characterize the main character (hero, heroine); minor
characters);
7. Plot (Traditional or non-traditional structure). Traditional structure often follows the
triangular pattern:
Climax (anticlimax)
27
/ \
Rising action (collision) Falling action
/ \
Exposition Resolution (denouement)
8. Language and style (Language: colloquial, formal, pastiche, collage of styles, other);
9. Theme (Legacy of the piece: e.g. love conquers all; committed life is worth living; death
is not the end, etc.);
10. Statement I remember (The idea that caught your mind or heart and explain why);
11. My evaluation (Your view of the story).
3.2 ANALYSING POETRY
Analysis of poetry utilises many procedures used when analysing prose, for example
information about the author and symbolism of the title. The form of poetry differs from the
form of prose and that affects many aspects of interpretation. For example, the setting is often
obscure, defined by emotions rather than by objective data and therefore in poetry we define
the occasion (upon which the poem has been written) rather than the setting (when and where
it was written). Also, the traditional narrator is replaced by the speaker, the person who
speaks the poem to an imaginary audience. Also, it is oftentimes difficult to re-tell the plot of
the poem and therefore, we analyse image patterns of individual stanzas. Much of the
meaning also lies in figures of speech, figures of sound and many others; thus it is inevitable
to analyse the tropes and their contribution to the poem. To conclude, when we analyse
a poem, attention should be paid to the following aspects of the poem:
1. Author (Relevant details about his/her life, movement, period);

2. Title and subtitle (Its meaning, symbolism, allusions);
3. Speaker (Who is the speaker of the poem? Who is the ideal audience of the poem?
4. Occasion (Time and place or occasion of the poem, e.g. meditations during an autumn
walk);
5. Form of the poem (Does the poem represent some of the well-known types of
poems? Some traditional and popular forms of lyric poetry are: ode, elegy, epigram,
epitaph, epistle, aubade, idyll, folk song and ballad. Forms of epic poetry include
28
literary epics, heroic epics, folk epics, historical epics, mock epics and other variants.
Dramatic poetry is usually written in a verse form.
6. Verse form (Rhymed — unrhymed — graphic experiment (concrete poetry) or other

type of form. The metre of the poem depends on the combination of stressed and
unstressed syllables.
Iambic metre (deTROIT – deTROIT – deTROIT) is the most common in English and is
supposed to evoke a gentle, soothing mood.
Trochaic metre (BOSton – BOSton – BOSton) gives impression of powerful lines.
Dactyllic metre (BALtimore – BALtimore – BALtimore) brings up emotions of sadness and
decline.
Anapestic metre (new roCHELLE – new roCHELLE – new roCHELLE) and Spondaic
metre (as in HONK KONG) are rare in English.
Usually stressed words: rhematic: nouns, adjectives, verbs.

Usually unstressed words: thematic: articles, auxiliary verbs, prepositions, particles: the, a, by,
and, is, are, to, of.
7. Image patters (What does the 1st/2nd/3rd stanza speak about?);

8. Tropes (Metaphors, similes, other interesting elements; read more in Appendix B);
9. Tone (Melancholic, optimistic, loving, critical, neutral, other);
10. Theme (Legacy of the poem);
11. My evaluation.
3.3 ANALYSING DRAMA
The form of drama inevitably affects its meaning and legacy for the reader. Majority of plays
are written in a dialogic form and lack the person of a narrator (of course, there are
exceptions). Most dramas were written to be staged and thus are difficult to read. Also, words
are the least important on the stage and much of the meaning lies in gestures, movements and
mimics of actors. When analysing a play, the following aspects would be paid attention:
29
1. Author (Relevant details about life, movement, period);
2. Title and subtitle (Its mining, symbolism, allusions);
3. Form of the play (Specify also the number of acts and the genre. There are three basic
genres of drama: comedy, tragedy and tragicomedy. Other subgenres include comic genres
(e.g. comedy of manners, comedy of morals, comedy of situation, comedy of intrigue, rogue,
masque, burlesque, farce and various satiric comedies). According to the manner and style of
writing, drama can be lyric, realistic or absurd. Musical genres include opera, operetta and
musical.
4. Setting (Time and place or places);

5. Protagonists and antagonists
(Characteristics of main and minor
characters);
6. Plot (Traditional or non-traditional structure). Traditional structure of a play follows
the so called Gustav Freytag’s pyramid:
7.
Climax = IN TRAGEDY = catharsis
/ \
Rising action (collision) Falling action
/ \
Exposition Resolution = IN TRAGEDY = catastrophe
8. Language and style (colloquial, formal, collage of styles);

9. Theme (Legacy of the play);
10. Statement I remember (The idea that caught your eye Explain how can you connect);
11. My evaluation (Your view of the play).
3.4 FURTHER NOTES ON THE STRUCTURE OF LITERARY ANALYSIS
Even though the aforementioned structures seem quite understandable even to a common
reader, there are some issues that might raise interest of a more professional reader and we
would like to discuss these in greater detail.
30
1. The Author:
Students of literature frequently ask how important the author and his or her biography are for
the study of a specific literary piece. There are at least two answers to this question varies
according to the critical method of analysis.
First, we might assume that the author and his life, i.e. place of birth, studies, personal life and
literary contacts help us to understand the piece better. Historical literary criticism, for
example, follows this stream of thought and closely inspects the author’s personal and
professional life.
Other types of literary criticism, for example the New Criticism defend very opposite
argument; author’s life has nothing to do with the piece as its interpretation lies entirely on the
reader. French literary critic Roland Barthes pioneered this idea when he published his
critical essay The Death of the Author (1967). Thus, the relevance of the author’s life depends
on the type of analysis we need to use.
2. Title—subtitle (its mining, symbolism and allusions):

Full title and subtitle can be a very useful source of information about the plot and the theme
of the piece, however, sometimes it also reveals information about the genre or the other
details such as, for example the sub-title of the play Waiting for Godot—Tragicomedy in Two
Acts. The title functions as attention-getter or deliberate mind-teaser as in John Fowles’ short
story The Enigma. The title can also reveal a lot of information about the setting (e.g. David
Lodge’s s novel Small World indicating the shrinking nature of the globalised world of the
20th century) and protagonists (e.g. John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger appealing to the
young generation of the 1950s known as the Angry Young Men). The title can also be meant
ironically as in the short story The Invisible Japanese Gentlemen by Graham Greene. In this
short story, the invisible Japanese play a minor but significant role when a seemingly
observant main character fails to notice them and thus reveals her self-centred nature. Other
times, the title refers to a symbol or motif only marginally mentioned in the story (e.g. the
short story The Fishing-boat picture). The title of a piece may also play a social function; for
example gave birth to a phrase that umbrella-ed the whole movement or generation (just like
Look Back in Anger enhanced the phrase 'Angry Young Men'). The precise and complete
wording of the title can be thus very indicative in interpreting the literary piece and placing it
into the right historical and cultural context.
31
3. Genre is a relatively tricky category nowadays. Originally, there were three basic literary
genres, poetry, prose and drama. Later, these genres evolved into many sub-genres. However,
the present-day tendency toward overlapping or experimenting with genres. This experiment
is most typical for postmodern literature.
In short fiction, experts distinguish short story, fairy tale and anecdote. More traditional sub-
genres of short fiction include exemplum, legend, myth, fable, parable, bestiary, fairy tale and
anecdote. More realistic or life-based subgenres include essays, reviews, travelogues and
memoirs. These are sometimes referred to as faction (Franko, p. 152). In long fiction we
recognize several types of fiction. These are distinguished by their most significant
phenomena, e.g. according to their historical affiliation, theme, topic discussed, style and
techniques or manner of writing. Selected sub-genres of novels are (Franko, pp. 130-150):
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
HISTORICAL THEMATIC SUBJECT TECHNIQU FUNCTION ELABORATI-
CLASSIFICA- CLASSIFI- MATTER E OF ON OF
TION CATION COMPOSITI THEME
-ON
(erziehnungs-
roman)
Chivalric n. Family n. Fantastic n. Roman fleuve Tendentious Satirical n.
novel
Gothic n. SCI-FI Anti-novel Bildungsroma Experimental n.
n
Pastoral n. n. of adventure Kuenstlerrom Journalistic n.
an
Detective n. Philosophical
n.
n. of travel 7. STREAM
OF
THOUGHT
Autobiographical n. Realistic n.
Problem n. (thesis n.) Naturalistic n.
Roman á clef Existential n.
(schluesselroman)
32
Proletarian n.
4. Setting (time and place):

The setting is a term that is hard to translate to Slovak language as it means two things, time
and place. In most traditional stories, this information is absolutely essential for physical
allocation of the plot and thus, authors make them clear in the very opening lines. Oftentimes,
it is quite obvious where and when the piece is set. For example, A. Sillitoe informs the reader
about the setting at the very beginning of the short story Uncle Ernest: ‟Empty-bellied Ernest
was ready for his breakfast, so walked through a café doorway, instinctively lowering his
head as he did so, though the beams were a foot above his head” (Sillitoe, 1988, p. 115). Later
Sillitoe gives hints about the specific decade of the story, which plays greater importance than
first expected by the reader:
Ernest remembered little of his past, and life moved under him so that he
hardly noticed its progress. There was no strong memory to entice him to
what he had gone by, except that of dead and dying men, straggling
barbed-wire between the trenches of the first world war (Sillitoe, 1988, p.
116).
However, for artistic reasons, the setting sometimes might be less evident and more obscure.
For example, in his play Waiting for Godot, Beckett does not specify the setting adequately.
He only gives indirect innuendos and the reader has to speculate about the temporal timeline
of the play:
VLADIMIR: (gloomily). It’s too much for one man. (Pause. Cheerfully.)
On the other hand what’s the good of losing heart now,
that’s what I say. We should have thought of it a million
years ago, in the nineties. [...] Hand in hand from the top of
the Eiffel Tower, among the first. We were respectable in
those days. Now it’s too late. They wouldn’t even let us up
(Beckett, p. 7).
From this short utterance, the reader learns several useful objective hints that indicate the time
when the play is set. First, if seems Vladimir and Estragon have been friends or partners for
33
some time as they refer to earlier days when they were ‟respectable”. Vladimir also makes
reference to ‟the nineties”, to the Eiffel tower and to being ‟among the first” who attempted
suicide there. As the Eiffel tower was built in 1889, on the one hundredth anniversary of the
French Revolution, the reference brings the reader’s mind the 1890s. Thus it wouldn’t be
diving too deep into speculations to assume that Vladimir and Estragon are in their forties or
fifties. The 'now' of Waiting for Godot is then the beginning of the 20th century, presumably
the period shortly after the First World War, the 1920s or 1930s. Such unclear information
about the setting of the play might indicate the author’s plan—perhaps to make the play more
universal and applicable to various times. To conclude, identification of the setting needs an
observant reader with reading experience, especially in cases when the setting is deliberately
unclear or unspecified.
5. Narrator is ‟...anyone telling a story [...] by using his own voice or a character or a group
of characters who ‟have their own voices and who [...] may narrate” (Cuddon, p. 535).
According to the style and type of narrative, we can distinguish various types of narrators.
Most frequently used are the first person narrator (I/‟Ich‟ narrator), third person narrator,
omniscient narrator and the innocent narrator. An example of first person narrator could be J.
D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye:
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll really want
to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like,
and how my parents and all were occupied before they had me, and
all that David Copperfield kind of crap (Salinger, p. 4).
Holden, a teenage rebellious youth, who is the main character of this novel speaks to an
imaginary listener. His use of informal, slang and even taboo language revels he does not treat
the listener with much of a respect or, rather, he demonstrates his outsiderism and detachment
from the ‟prim and proper” society. A similar undermining tone has been achieved by Alan
Sillitoe in his short story The Fishing-boat Picture. The main character in the opening lines of
the story reveals that
[He has] been a postman for twenty-eight years. Take that first sentence:
because it’s written in a simple way may make the fact of my having
34
been a postman for so long seem important, but I realize that such a fact
has no significance whatever. After all, it’s not only my fault that it may
seem as if it has to some people just because I wrote it down plain;
I wouldn’t know how to do it any other way (Sillitoe, 1987, p. 135).
Both Salinger and Sillitoe share the same self-depreciating tone as if they were revealing their
most private thoughts of themselves. John Fowles in his bestselling novel The Collector also
uses first person narrator, this time, however, to show the inside of a mentally disturbed
character who ‟collects” women he kidnaps in order to keep them entirely his own: ‟I was
like mad when I got out. I can’t explain. I didn’t sleep the whole night. It kept coming back,
me standing and lying there with no clothes on, the way I acted and what she must think”
(Fowles, 2004, p. 98).
The third person narrator describes the characters in a more detached way. In his short story
The Invisible Japanese Gentlemen, Graham Greene shows a third-person subjective
narrator, a writer himself, who notices even small details and makes his own speculations
about the couple sitting at the next table:
There were eight Japanese gentlemen having a fish dinner at Bentley’s.

They spoke to each other rarely in their incomprehensible tongue, but
always with a courteous smile and often with a small bow. All but one
of them wore glasses. Sometimes the pretty girl who sat in the window
beyond gave them a passing glance, but her own problem seemed too
serious for her to pay real attention to anyone in the world except herself
and her companion (Greene, 1997. p. 118).
Greene’s narrator proves to be extremely observant and sensitive to details upon which he
draws conclusions about the character’s mental state and mood.
Ernest Hemingway, an American novelist, represents an extreme use of the third person
objective narrator. In order to depict situations in most objective way, he often reduced
himself to very short, lucid and cogent descriptive sentences, and also often absconded with
adjectives as in his short story The Killers:
35
The door of Henry’s lunch-room opened and two men came in. They sat
down at the counter.
‟What’s yours?” George asked them.
‟I don’t know,” one of the men said. ‟What do you want to eat, Al?”
‟I don’t know,” said Al. ‟I don’t know what I want to eat.”
Outside it was getting dark. The street-light came on outside the window.
The two men at the counter read the menu.
(Hemingway, 1928).
Other authors also explored this method and used what is called the ‟camera eye”, an
extremely objective narrator. On the other hand, an omniscient narrator tends to ‟get inside
the head of characters”; not only has he known intimate details or facts of their life but also
their inner thoughts, wishes or imaginations as Graham Greene in Our Man in Havana:
The pink, grey, yellow pillars of what once had been the aristocratic
quarter were eroded like rocks; an ancient coat of arms, smudged and
featureless, was set over the doorway of a shabby hotel, and the shutters
of a night-club were varnished in bright crude colours to protect them
from the wet and salt of the sea. In the west the steel skyscrapers of the
new town rose higher than lighthouses into the clear February sky. It was
a city to visit, not a city to live in, but it was the city where Wormold has
first fallen in love and he was held to it as thought to the scene of
a disaster (Greene, 1971, p. 53).
The reader thus learns not only the physical appearance of the town (colours, shapes, smells)
but also its public and personal history, even its emotional value for the character. Innocent
narrator can be a child or a handicapped person who, with regards to their limited emotional
or intellectual experience, cannot grasp the real meaning of the situation observed and
therefore, comment in a limited or otherwise inadequate way:
My father has gone fishing with the dog. Mr. Lucas came for dinner
and stayed for tea. He ate three slices of black forest cake. We played
Monopoly. Mr. Lucas was banker. My mother kept going into jail. I
36
won because I was the only one concentrating properly. My father
came in the front door and Mr. Lucas went out of the back door. My
father said he had been looking forward to the black forest cake all
day. There was none left. [...] I let the dog sleep in my room tonight,
it doesn’t like quarrelling (Townsend, pp. 40-41).
Thus, for the reader it is quite obvious Adrian’s mother is having an affair and flirts with her
neighbour, Mr. Lucas, but Adrian, due to his lack of emotional experience does not get it. In
Townsend’s fiction, a lot of humour stems from similar situations.
To conclude, the narrator or the method of narration can greatly add to both the form and the
content of the literary piece.
6. Characters (main character: hero, heroine, minor characters):

A Character seems to be the least complicated literary term, as it is most frequently defined
as any individual who appears in the piece of writing. However, many modern British writers
put this statement to test. For example, Samuel Beckett in his absurd drama Waiting for Godot
introduced a character (Godot) who never shows up on the stage; what is more, spectators are
seriously underinformed about any of his personal traits; yet all the lines in the play relate to
him and thus he is a relevant character in the play. Beckett further explores the idea of
a character that is absent in the literary piece in his play... Another dramatist who can abscond
with characters on the stage is Lyndon Brook. In his one act play Score, he shows the game of
tennis, a match of mixed doubles. However, the spectators can only see one of the pair,
husband and wife Harry and Sheila. The other couple only exists through their utterances and
references to them or their style of writing.
7. The plot of a prosaic piece can be very complicated or a relatively straightforward one. Its
simplicity or complexness often revolves from the style of writing (read further) that can be
chronological, retrospective or put forward through various flashbacks or flashforwards.
Also, the author may use various digressions as for example Kazuo Ishiguro in his novel
Remains of the Day. The plot may be open—after finishing the piece, there are still un-
answered questions to tease the reader. A special, very complicated type of plot has been
developed in roman fleuve (also known as ‟river novel” or stream novel). Roman fleuve
usually consists of several volumes (tetralogies, pentalogies) that may be read in any order. It
also employs a wide number of settings and characters to display a wide historical view of
37
a period or event. Dance to the Music of Time is perhaps the most famous English roman
fleuve.
8. Language and style:

In a literary piece, form is equally important to the meaning. Thus understanding the language
of a piece is inevitable for understanding of the legacy of the piece. Traditionally, literature
used language that has been ‟artistically enhanced” (Aristotle, p. 81), usually by various
tropes (metaphors, similes, periphrases, etc.—read more in Appendix B). However, modern
pieces tend more towards ‟realistic” language as spoken by man in the street. Thus language
of fiction can be formal or informal (e.g. colloquial, even vulgar, argot). The language of
fiction can also combine traditional forms of utterances; especially Postmodernism
deliberately breaks barriers between traditional forms, uses collages of styles, for example
pastiche).
Style of narration: Traditional narratives tend to bring a story, thus, they were formally
developed into expositions, rising actions, climaxes, falling actions and conclusions. This
however is quite untypical for Postmodern and oriental narratives that do not focus on single
story line but on more story lines, just like in the Scheherazade story. Salman Rushdie in his
story The Prophet’s Hair follows a variety of characters, plots and sub-plots combined by
digressions and narrator´s notes without a satisfactory ending.
9. Theme is perhaps the most important output of writing. Many students tend to forget that
most authors do not write only to tell a story but to share an idea and to help readers to live
better. Thus the whos, whens, whys of the piece are less important than the overall
contribution of the piece. Therefore, a reader should ask when reading a book or a poem: after
reading this book, how can I live better? What will change in my life? How will I better
understand the people, world and myself? That is the legacy of the literary piece.
10. Statement I remember is a category that reveals a lot about the reader. There are
proverbial lines and replicas from books and films that many people remember by heart; for
example ‟Hasta la vista, baby” (Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator); Don’t shoot,
there are people here (The Good Soldier Schweik), to name a few. When reading a piece, try
to think why a particular part resonates in you (how and why can you connect with it) or, vice
versa, why it leaves you cold.
38
12. My evaluation is a follow-up category to the previous one. Here you can sincerely
express your educated opinion of the piece as well as your personal views.
39
Part IV: Structure of an analytical essay
Handout 1 Modern British Drama: Instructions for the final

essay: Personal and Literary Critique
You will write a personal and literary critique of a play we´ve read for class (if otherwise, see
the teacher).
Basically, you will be introducing the topic of a play, summarizing its content, analysing the
setting, protagonists, the theme and the other relevant literary features of the play, responding
personally and critically to the play and concluding your thoughts.
This essay must include the following information:
1. TITLE – a good attention-grabber (See the handout for help).
2. An INTRODUCTION of the TOPIC. The Introduction should include the author’s name
(given fully only once, referred to thereafter only by Last name), the title of the play (in
italics) and the year of its publication (in brackets). The introduction should also include
any background information helpful to your readers: brief yet lucid explanation of the
historical context of the play, brief biographical information about the author and the
times in which the play was written) and, most importantly, an explication of author´s
goals (i.e. the THEME as you see it) for the play. Do not forget that THESIS is your most
important, key statement for the reader that should introduce your general standpoints.
(See the handout for help).
3. A short SUMMARY of the play. Your summary should give the most important
OBJECTIVE information about the play; however, it is NOT the gist of your research.
Mention the genre and the form of the play, the setting, protagonists, language, style,
tropes and the ending of the play (Max. length: 2-3 paragraphs). (See the handout for
help).
4. An ANALYSIS of the play, where you will discuss:

a) genre and form of the play;
b) the setting and its significance for the play;
c) protagonists and, if applicable antagonists of the play, symbolism of their names,
characters, motivation and significance for the meaning of the play (app. 3-5
paragraphs);
d) language, style and tropes (if applicable) that add to the meaning of the play;
e) the THEME of the play, which should reflect a broader meaning of the play. This is an
f) important part of your essay and should show your creative yet academic approach to
the interpretation of the essay (3-5 paragraphs);
40
NOTE: The analysis should contain at least 1 direct and 1 indirect quote for the play referred
to in the Works Cited page.
5. A CRITICAL RESPONSE to the play. Try to find at least ONE critical response to the
play in particular or subject-matter (THEME) in debate (that illustrates your point or is
relevant to what you write about). Clearly state whether and to what extend you agree
with the author of the critical response (or not). You can make your critical response a part
of the ANALYSIS section or a separate section. This part should contain at least ONE 1
direct and 1 indirect quote referred to in the Works Cited page.
6. A PESONAL RESPONSE to the essay (its THEME), in which you respond to the views
of the author of the play:
a) Do you enjoy reading of the play? What about it did you find particularly well done?
b) Can you personally connect with the play? Why? Include your PERSONAL
EXPERIENCES and VIEWS that have shaped your opinion. You should be
explaining how this play resonates, for example, with your past experiences or your
own beliefs. In thinking of your life, use 5W´s and H (Who? What? Where? When?
Why? How?) to (generate specifics about events in your life and about issues,
positions and philosophies you agree with or are concerned about) NOTE: As this is a
personal response, in this section you will be using “I“. (app. 2-X paragraphs). (See
the handout for help).
7. A CONCLUSION will generally summarise your major points you have made in your
essay without repeating the same ideas (or introducing bran new ones). (app. 1-2
paragraphs).
8. BIBLIOGRAPHY listing ALL sources used in your essay. We are going to follow the
norm valid for research essays (including your bachelor and diploma theses) in Slovakia.
(See Katuščák and classroom handouts).
This applies only to selected programmes – see the lesson plan to check the deadlines:
FURHTER NOTES: In the middle of the term there will be a WORKSHOP, allowing you to
improve your essay. Bring the first draft of your essay (min. 3 printed and stapled copies).
Any failure to bring 3 copies of your draft (e.g. draft not printed, no copy or only 1 copy
available, unexcused absence in the class) will affect your final grade (minus 10% off the
grade for the activity missing and other activities related to it!). After the workshop, using the
comments from your peers that are beneficial to you (feel free to disregard comments that are
not useful – this is your paper) REVISE your paper.
Print up the final draft before you go to bed on the day before it is due. Any delays will affect
your grade (grade (minus 10% off the grade for the essay!).
9. HAVE FUN!
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Handout 2 How to Write a Personal Response
A PERSONAL RESPONSE is exactly what is says: personal. It draws from your very unique
personal experience (related to intimate topics such as relationships among people, parents
and children, men and women, employers and employees, etc.). The reason why we like (or
dislike) a piece of writing is also personal: it reveals our personal preferences, priorities, not
speaking of general knowledge. Your personal response is what makes your essay
extraordinary and original.
How to write better: think as a writer: Best writers (and public speakers) of then employ the
method of 5 W+H: Who? What? Where? When? Why? And How?. In their descriptions, they
often employ 5 senses: sight, hearing, smells, touch, taste and often the 6th one – sense of
humour. See: An allegory of five senses. Still Life by Pieter Claesz, 1623:
Find sensoric references in the following text:

Within two minute, or even less, he had forgotten all his troubles. Not because his troubles were one whit less
heavy and bitter to him than a man´s are to a man, but because a new and powerful interest bore them down and
drove them out of his mind for a time; just as man´s misfortunes are forgotten in the excitement of new
enterprises. This new interest was a valued novelty in whistling (…). It consisted in a peculiar bird-like turn, a
sort of liquid warble, produced by touching the tongue to the roof of the mouth as short intervals in the midst of
the music. The reader probably remembers how to do it if he has ever been a boy. Diligence and attention soon
gave him the knack of it, and he strode down the street with his mouth full of harmony and his soul full of
gratitude. He felt much as an astronomer feels who has discovered a new planet.
Works Cited
CLAESZ, Pieter. 2014. An allegory of five senses. Still Life. In 1623http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense
MT
Handout 3 How to pick a (chic yet academic) title of your essay
The TITLE of your essay is like a LABEL on a tin in a supermarket. It sells the content of your
essay. Thus, it should be revealing, illustrative and catchy to distinguish your essay from all
the others and distinguish you as a unique and witty writer.
42
[1]
Pick a title which appeal to you most:
 Unemployment
 On some reasons of unemployment of young people in present-day era
 Why young people cannot find a job?
 Three generations of families where nobody has ever worked? That must be
Buckingham Palace! [2]
 J. O. B. or P. H. D.?
Works Cited
[1] Campbell´s Soup (photo). 2014. In http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell_Soup_Company
(fair use policy).
Downloaded: January 14, 2014.
[2] 2014. Courtesy of Sickipedia.org. In http://www.sickipedia.org/celebrities/royalty/iain-duncan-smith-in-
some-parts-of-britain-there-are-1443440#ixzz3Dsp6Erse
43
Handout 4 How to Write an Introduction
1. Every person has somebody they admire a lot.
2. For some it is their teacher, famous pop-

star or a renowned politician.
3. For me it is my
mother.
Questions:
- How does the first sentence connect you and your reader?
- Which sentence gives examples? Are they important?
- Which sentence is the thesis? Can you assume what is the essay going to be about?
Exercise: Complete missing sentences:

1. Most people wish to be exceptional at least in one little thing.
2.
3.
Identify problems. There is something seriously wrong with this introduction.

1. Many people in many countries eat various types of food.
2. Some eat strawberries; others eat pasta, local food or dine out in restaurants.
3. I, for example, really like ice cream.
Read the following introductions. Identify how the authors:

a) connect with their reader
b) give examples
c) state their main idea (thesis)
Sample introduction A
Modern history has shown us the evil that exists in human beings. Assassinations are common,
governments use torture to discourage dissent and six million Jews were exterminated during World
War II. In Lord of the Flies, William Golding describes a group of schoolboys shipwrecked on an
island with no authority figures to control their behaviour. One of the boys soon yields to dark forces
within himself, and his corruption symbolises the evil in all of us.
Sample Introduction B
Life is a box of chocolate – you never know what you’ll get,” says a famous character in even more
famous film. But who is the chocolate-maker, arranging all those toffees and snowballs in to the box
and thus “pre-making” the choice for us? The ancient Greeks believed in moira, an omnipotent
44
power, stronger than the gods themselves, which affected lives of individuals to the point that their
personal efforts inevitably ended in the preconceived alternative. In modern times, many thinkers and
artists also experiment with the idea of such a powerful force in present-day situations. John Guare,
an American playwright of colour transferred the ancient fate into the modern American surrounding
and observed how negatively it had affected the life of the protagonist of his play Six Degrees of
Separation, Paul Poitier.
How to write an Introduction – Quick and Easy
THINK OF THE PLAY YOU LIKED

(e.g. Look Bak in Anger)
DECIDE WHAT WAS THE THEME

(e.g. social and historical changes that can lead to personal tragies and crises)
WRITE YOUR THESIS STATEMENT: John Osborne in his play Look Back in Anger
demonstrated how social and historical changes led to many personal tragedies.
EXPAND YOUR THESIS: John Osborne, A British playwright and an Angry Young Man in his 3-act play Look Back
in Anger demonstrated how social and historical changes led to many disastrous personal tragedies and crises.
Sample Introduction C
People who read books of history about political and social turmoil tend to forget how these great
changes influenced day-to-day lives of individuals. For example, everybody remembers the Nazis
seized Italy but few understand that they were the first in the history that made the Italian traffic run
on time. The American space program gave the mankind not only the first man on the moon but also
aluminium folio and the frying pan. John Osborne, a British playwright an Angry Young Man in his
play Look Back in Anger (1956) also demonstrated how social and historical changes, namely the
Butler Education Act of 1944, had led to many personal tragedies and how its main protagonist Jim
Porter struggled with social and emotional paralysis.
45
Handout 5: More on Introductions:
Read the following introductions and discuss:
1. What is the essay going to be about?

2. Where can we add modifiers to avoid overgeneralisations? (modifiers: many, most
(people), often, more or less, frequently, or inverted commas “...“).
3. How could the author make the readers visualise more?
1. Beauty is Only Skin Deep
Since the beginning of mankind people have been slaves of their physical appearance.
Some of us are lovely, attractive and beautiful and some of us are not.
In the past few decades, physical appearance became even more important than ever before,
but as we know or should know, beauty is only skin-deep. Actually, the physical beauty is
superficial and is not as important as person’s intellectual, emotional and spiritual qualities.
2. Man is the Measure of All Things
“Man is the measure of all things“ of things which are, that they are; and of things which are not, that they are
not.“
This quote is known from the archaic period and still seems to be applicable in various
present-day situations. When examining the quote more closely, we might be able to say that
happiness also varies from person to person. Everyone can be happy and we just need to find
what or who is making him so.
3. Beauty: Advantage or Handicap?
When you walk along the street, you meet a lot of people. These may be men and women, the elderly or
youngsters and, of course, more or less attractive individuals. However, faces rarely show the true character of
people. If you want to find a good friend, which of these characteristics would you choose? Would it be the
physical beauty or the beauty of one’s heart and mind? For a true friendship, physical beauty is irrelevant and
what really matters is altruism, emphaty and assertiveness.
Handout 6 How to Write a Conclusion
A conclusion:
 Does not merely summarize what had been said before;

 Does not state any new ideas;
 Points out why is the topic in debate important nowadays and for the reader in particular. It could reveal a broader, more general
meaning of your essay.
There are many ways how to conclude your thoughts. One of these is a “hook“, i.e. a reference to your introduction.
Sample introduction:
46
The Role of Civilisation in Eliminating the Inborn Evil
Modern history has shown us the evil that exists in human beings. Assassinations are
common, governments use torture to discourage dissent and six million Jews were
exterminated during World War II. In Lord of the Flies (1953), William Golding describes
a group of schoolboys shipwrecked on an island with no authority figures to control their
behaviour. One of the boys soon yields to dark forces within himself, and his corruption
symbolises the evil in all of us.
Sample conclusion:
Through Jack Merridew, then, Golding shows how easily moral laws can be forgotten. Freed from grown-ups
and their rules, Jack learns to kill living things, defy authority, and lead a tribe of murdering savages. Jack’s
example is a frightening reminder of humanity’s potential for evil. The “beast“ the boys try to hunt and kill is
actually within every human being.
- How effectively does the conclusion summarise the essay? Can you restate the main ideas
discussed in the essay?
- Comment on the last sentence. Whose opinion does it state?
Based on: Langan, John. 1997. English Skills. Boston : McGraw’s Hill, 1997. P .244. ISBN 0-07-036447-8
47
Handout 7 How to Write a Summary
A summary:
 is lucid, cogent, to the point;
 presents only FACTS, not OPINIONS, ANALYSES, etc.;
 is COHERENT and COHESIVE;
 discusses major issues in the play in logical order;
 clearly states how the play ends.
Compare and discuss strong and weak points of two summaries (referring to the play
Mother Figure):
A.
1. Mother Figure depicts an evening of Lucy Compton, a rather unusual mother of three
minor children (Sarah, Nicolas and Jamie) whose husband is mostly gone for
business.
2. Children keep Lucy so busy that she has not been anywhere for months and that is
perhaps why she stopped putting on nice dress or make-up but also why she lost
contact with adults.
3. Lucy´s concerned neighbours, Rosemary and Terry Oates who visit Lucy also find her
very peculiar: she treats them like children, refuses to serve coffee or let Terry watch
football. Moreover, she uses childish gibberish instead of adult language.
4. First, Terry and Rosemary are puzzled but later the play gains slightly absurdist
overtones when the neighbours seem to take up the game and let Lucy bossy them
around.
5. At the end of the play Lucy finally lets Terry and Rosemary leave without any
explanation of her bizzare behaviour.
B.
1. Lucy is a mother of three children: Sarah, Nicolas and Jamie.
2. Her neighbours visit her to see if everything is ok.
3. Lucy does not go out very often. Because she is so busy, she looks very badly.
4. Terry and Rosemary are quite shocked at the sight of Lucy.
5. They begin to behave like children, too.
6. I think that Lucy thought that Rosemary and Terry are her children too. And that she
wanted to educate them as well.
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Handout 8 How to Quote Effectively
An effective quote is 3-partite just like an Oreo cookie©:
Identify: top cookie – filling – bottom cookie:
...The play Waiting for Godot is a play about absence. What is missing in the text is perhaps
even more important than what is present there. Samuel Beckett articulates these thoughts
most intensely by the closing lines of this renowned piece:
DIDI: Let’s go.

GOGO: Let’s go.
They don’t move. (Beckett, p. 266).
Didi and Gogo’s motionlessness symbolises paralysis as an endemic disease of civilisation.

Indeed, more people nowadays admit that they prefer reading about Paris Hilton’s extended
eyelashes and habitually skip pages about warfare in Darfur or Myanmar...
Bibliography:
Beckett, Samuel. 1953.Waiting for Godot. In: Collection of Absurdist Plays. (ed.). Mark
Routlege. London : Random House, pp. 212-266. 1966. ISBN X-8033-8031
[1] Beckett, Samuel. 1953.Waiting for Godot. In: Modern British Drama (ed.). Jana
Javorcikova. ‹http://www.matej.bel.university_MBD/Beckett› Downloaded: November 10,
2006
Works Cited:
The entire metaphor was borrowed with the kind consent of Melissa Kindle, a teacher at
MCTC, Minneapolis.
Oreo cookies (photo). 2014. In http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oreo
49
Handout 9 Instructor´s Comments - Explanation
My comments of your writing usually contain some of these internationally recognized

abbreviations. Please learn them and use them in your Peer Responses:
Abbreviations
G – grammar
S – Style
L – Logics
WW – Wrong word
WO – Word order
Vary phrases – find a synonym

Re-word / re-phrase – the content works, improve the structure
Improve transition – text does not flow
Condense -- shorten
Absolute don’t’s in your essay:
1. Don’t start with conjunctions: But, And, Because…Prefer However, Nevertheless,

Moreover, What is more, On one hand – one the other hand
2. Don’t use bold, *indents, emoticons ☺ and underlining
3. Don’t plagiarize: Miss Piffs, the interviewer, is the essence of efficiency.
4. Don’t use fragments: The author shows many ways how to abuse power. Even the
seeting which represents no possiblity to run away.
5. Don’t mix tenses. Use either past simple (less dynamic) or present simple (more
dynamic) in your summary: He is easily impressionable. He refused to apologize to
Rosemary and he refuses to drink his orange juice.
6. Don’t use cliché words, such as “typical family“ or “normal life“. After all, what
is a “typical family“ or “normal life“? If you absolutely cannot withdraw from
these, use inverted commas “…“.
7. Don’t use tautologies: I am going to explain how Pinter uses language.
8. Don’t use titles: Mr. Brook
9. Don’t cummulate rhetoric questions. Frayn leaves the play open – but why is he
doing so? And how? Moreover, what should readers think?
10. Don’t overuse passive voice. Be active!
50
Handout 10 How to Evaluate Sources
You will use at least one outside source. Given the amount of information available, one
should try to avid dubious and unreliable sources. In order to do so, always:
 use (dot)edu pages;

 avoid or minimise the use of (dot)org and (dot)com pages;
 cross-reference the author (3 cross references are usually recquired; find the most
information about the author:
- is s/he a recognized author in his field? Does s/he publish
internationally?
- is s/he biased in any way?
- is the article written with a specific purpose?
- does the author deal with counterarguments of the issue in debate?
Pre-Writing
1. Which play would I like to write about?
2. What is the theme of the play? (1 word minimum – 1 sentence maximum)
3. How can I connect with this theme? Write the story/personal response:
4. Write a sample 3-point introduction: Title:
1st sentence (general connector with the reader, referring to your topic):
2nd sentence:
THESIS:
51
Part V : Some notes on literature: what is literature and how to analyse it:
PSYCHOLINGUISTIC ASPECTS OF LITERARY ANALYSIS:

A SURVEY OF THEORY AND RESEARCH PROBLEMS
Jana Javorčíková
Abstract: The article deals with the survey of theory and research problems related to the literary analysis. The
author debates the role of literary analysis in the context of most recent research, basic and advanced approaches
to literary analysis and also the problem of objectivity in literary analysis, borrowing from psycholinguistics, and
postmodern and deconstructive literary criticism. The objective of the study is to balance objective and
subjective approaches to literature and to define their roles in an EFL classroom.
1. Introduction
Lexicology works on the level of a word. Syntax works on the level of a sentence. Literature however works on
the level of several related sentences or, rather, on the level of thought and related thoughts. In spite of the
intellectual difficulty of literature, it is generally assumed that literature is to be utterly understood by anybody
who is beyond literate. That however, is often overrated. In this article, we would like to raise awareness of those
phenomena that make reading literature difficult and examine those that possibly facilitate it. The focus of our
attention is primarily aimed at but not necessarily restricted to university students of languages.
1.1 What is a literary text?

Seemingly, everybody has already encountered what one considers a “literary” text, be it a novel, poem or a
screenplay. Scholars, however, struggle hard to define what a literary text is. Paraphrasing the work of two
scholars, Warren and Wellek, who among the first raised awareness of this problem, most readers understand,
when the term literature is discussed, that it means mostly traditionally respected books of prose, poetry and
drama. Thus writings of Shakespeare, Milton and Pope are literature; bus tickets, graffiti, inaugural addresses
(however poetic or well-written) are not.6 Nevertheless, there are many documents that fall in between these
categories, for example, George Orwell’s political pamphlets. Moreover, recent years have dramatically
broadened the traditional types and media of writings. For example, there are various forms of computer and
internet-related documents, such as zines (internet journals), blogs 7 and internet novels called hypernovels and
internet poetry that have not been known before, and literary scholars still have not reached the final verdict
whether these new genres qualify as 'literature'. What then is the difference between a literary and non-literary
text?
Cuddon defines literature as “...a vague term which usually denotes works which belong to the major genres:
epic, drama, lyric, novel, short story, ode”.8 This definition, however, ignores many of the modern genres formed
by a new medium that, perhaps in a short time, might also belong to the body of literature. Thus we might need
to go back to the first definition of literature by the first literary critic, Aristotle, who in the Poetics tried to
define tragedy (one of the first literary genres) “...as long as [it] employs language artistically enhanced”.9
Eagleton further explains that “...literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates [it]
systematically from everyday speech.10 It is thus language that makes the difference between literary and non-
literary text. Eagleton uses this example to illustrate his point: “If you approach me at the bus stop and murmur
'thou still unravished bride of quietness', than I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary.
I know this because of the texture, rhythm and resonance of your words are in excess of their abstractable
meaning—or as the linguists might more technically put it, there is a disproportion between the signifiers and the
signified. Your language draws attention to itself, flaunts its material being, as statements like 'Don’t you know
6
Wellek – Warren, 1966, 10-22.
7
A blog, a blend of the term web log, is a type of website maintained by an individual with regular entries of
commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video; entries are commonly displayed
in reverse-chronological order and are often interactive (What is a Blog: In
˂http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog˃.).
8
Cuddon, 1998, 472.
9
Aristotle, 1968, 11.
10
Eagleton, 1994, 2.
52
the drivers are on strike?' do not”.11 The context and the language that draws attention to itself are thus two quite
reliable phenomena that help to decide between literary and non-literary texts.
Apart from these two most obvious characteristic features of a potentially literary text, language and intuitively
understood genre, there we assume is also the third important feature – the meaning of the text read. With
regards to the most recent postmodern, poststructuralist doctrines, that is a subjective, not an objective and thus a
tentative category. The meaning of a word derives from the personal understanding of a complex of three
phenomena, defined as “semiotic triangle”:
Semiotic triangle (Fig.1.):
REFERENCE (Engl.: CONCEPT, Slovak: POJEM)

(What we imagine when we hear or read the word 'book')
---------------------
SYMBOL REFERENT
(The word 'book') Physical object — book
The symbol (the word) and the referent (physical object) both bring up the reference, i.e. the concept of book
which includes a wide range of individual variants (e.g. the Bible or Dickens’ A Christmas Carol or a cookery
book, etc.). Thus, when we see a leaflet, a thick book or, say, a telephone directory, we understand these as
individual variants of the reference 'book' and when we see a wooden chair, bar stool or an upholstered chair, we
are still able to understand that all these represent the generic concept of a 'chair'. We can understand this system
provided that we understand all its parts. That means we know the referent (its shape, colour, texture, size,
purpose, usual use, etc.), we also know the word that denotes the referent (for example 'chair') and we understand
the generic reference, concept. Then we completely understand the word and its combination with other words,
and, possibly, we understand 'the meaning' of the word or the text. Structuralism thus is quite an optimistic
system of thought that believes in the perfect understanding of words and texts. Consequently, it stands for a
satisfactory and sufficient interpretation of the meaning of a text. The relationship between the text and the
reader, according to the classic theories of interpretation of the text, inspired by the Positivism, can be also
expressed in three maxims:
1. Language is a system of signs.

2. Writing is encoding, reading is decoding.
3. Text has the meaning.
TEXT 1 + READER 1 = THE MEANING

TEXT 1 + READER 2 = THE MEANING
TEXT 1 + READER X = THE MEANING
Many literary critics, especially the Postmodernists, oppose this idea. The Post-Structuralists and Postmodernists
deny the perfect interpretation of texts, especially the literary texts that often use words in unexpected and
unusual ways and enjoy ambiguity. Their thoughts can also be summed up in three maxims:
1. Language is asystematic.
2. Writing is encoding, reading is another encoding.
3. Text has a meaning (i. e. one of many possible meanings).
TEXT 1 + READER 1 = MEANING 1

TEXT 1 + READER2 = MEANING 2
TEXT 1 + READER 3 = MEANING 3
TEXT 1 + READER X = MEANING X
US linguist Roman Jakobson12 explains this multiplicity of interpretations. He believes that between the
addresser (the writer and the text) and the addressee (the reader, the perceiver of the text), enter four more
elements that modify or completely change the meaning: context, message, contact and code. If we try to restate
11
Ebd., 2.
12
In Selden, 1993, 3.
53
these ideas for understanding the literary text, then the communication between the writer and the reader is
'barriered' by the context, writing and the code—usually a language and style familiar both to the writer and the
reader13:
CONTEXT
WRITER WRITING READER
CODE
Selden14 further writes, “...if we adopt the addresser’s viewpoint, we draw attention to the writer and his or her
'emotive' or 'expressive' use of language; if we focus on the 'context', we isolate the referential use of language
and invoke its historical dimension and the point of its production; if we are principally interested in the
addressee, we study the reader’s 'reception' of the 'message', hence introducing a different historical context [...].
The different literary theories also tend to place an emphasis upon one function rather than another.” Selden 15
further diagrammatically distinguishes between dominant theories:
MARXIST (emphasize historical

context)
ROMANTIC- READER-ORIENTED
HUMANISTIC FORMALISTIC (concentrate on
the nature of writing in isolation) (emphasize the impact of
the text on the reader;
STRUCTURALIST confront
(emphasize writer’s life
and mind as expressed in (emphasize codes that construct the his/her experience;
his/her work) meaning)
note by J.J.)
Grasping and understanding a literary text, thus means to embrace a complex of areas, including language, genre
and assumed meaning, accepting that we can merely approximate the meaning encoded by the author.
1.2 How to approach a literary text?

People who read professionally (this category includes but not limits itself to university students preparing for
their exams, editors, journalists, researchers, librarians and registrars, for example) do not enjoy the privilege to
turn a book down if they are not immediately grabbed by it. Their role of “professional readers” exceeds mere
reading for pleasure and thus, they need useful tools to master the art of getting a meaning from the text. That
however this is much more complicated process than it is generally understood and it is historically rooted in the
ability of the first people to decode animal tracks. Psychologist John C. Marshall notes:
“...the core mechanism traced in reading any modern orthography evolved very early in the
development of Homo sapiens. This mechanism interprets the conceptual significance of
two-dimensional signs [... and] two-dimensional representation suffices for recognition and
interpretation. The importance of recognizing two-dimensional signs arises from their role
in tracking. A human community that could not interpret the marks left by animals would
not survive very long.”16
However old the process of reading is, it has nonetheless never been natural and easy to do. Kennet Newell
illustrates this difficulty by drawing a comparison between speaking (which most healthy children start naturally,
after they had been exposed to speech for some time) and reading (which has to be painfully learned letter by
letter). Newell further provides a cognitive analysis of the listening or reading procedure of humans in which he
stresses one’s struggle for the meaning:
“...they [readers] home in on the sensible analysis of a sentence”, on the other hand, by
doing a “breath-first” search for the interpretation of each word, ´entertaining, however
briefly, several entries for an ambiguous word, even unlikely ones, which are somehow
filtered out before they reach consciousness.” On the other hand, humans do a “depth-first”
13
Ebd., 4.
14
Ebd., 4.
15
Ebd., 4.
16
Marshall, In Newell, 2011, 43.
54
search for the syntactic pattern or “tree” of a phrase, clause or a sentence. The human brain
“somehow gambles at each step about the alternative most likely to be true and then plows
ahead with that single interpretation as far as possible”. If the brain comes across words that
cannot be fitted into the tree, it backtrack[s] and start[s] over with a different tree”. 17
Several disciplines nowadays explore the effectiveness and quality of reading, for example: reading and
functional literacy studies. Reading literacy focuses on the understanding of literary texts. 18 Various scholars
have attempted to name the phases through which the reading/understanding process goes in the process of
reading, such as decoding (reading for mere information, such as reading a thermometer,19); interpretation
(search for a possible meaning, in a sense of unfold, unravel, or unweave) and explication (choosing between
different possible explications of the literary work, in the sense of tease for multiple meanings or implications 20).
A reader of literary texts has to be a “reader-explicator”21 as literary texts often purposely enjoy ambiguity.
Newell notes,
“...while reading the text ´John had not worked in months. He grabbed his gun and went to
the bank,´ it is the pragmatic inference process that allows the understander to conclude that
John wanted to rob the bank [...][However,] John might well have been a bank guard who
has just recovered from a lengthy illness and was preparing for his first day back on the
job.”22
Renowned writer, critic and psycholinguistics-enthusiast David Lodge also ponders on the difficulties with
grasping “the meaning” of the literary text:
“It is my own experience that the moment of perceiving the pattern is sudden and
unexpected. All the time one has been making the tiny provisional notes, measuring each
against one’s developing awareness of the whole, storing them up in the blind hope that
they will prove useful, and then suddenly one such small local observation sends a shock
like an electric charge through all the discrete observations heaped up on all sides, so that
with an exciting clatter and rattle they fly about and arrange themselves in a certain
meaningful order”23
These observations however should not bring the reader of this study to scepticism over literary analysis.
However problematic the process of reading and generating the meaning is, Newell notes, “humans are better
than computers because they unconsciously eliminate many of the ambiguities (and so come nearer to
consensus”).24
Historically, some scholars doubted the process of literary analysis as a subject to a systematic study. As early
as in the 18th century, Johann Martin Chladenius, for example, pointed out “It cannot be denied that a probable
interpretation can be made where a certain one is not possible, but this would be too difficult to put into rules
since a rational theory of probability has not yet been sufficiently developed.”25 Others, such as Fowler, call for
some discipline that would enhance systematic analysis of literary analysis: “Such experiences need
investigating with the aid of much more sophisticated tool than critics generally have at their disposal”.26
The process of literary analysis, we assume, can be a subject to a systemic study. The science that
explores the process of understanig denotative and connotative meaning of words as it is rooted in
human psyche is called psycholinguistics. Psycholinguistics27 (the term was coined in the 1940s and
became popular after the publication of Charles E. Osgood and Thomas A. Sebeok’s
Psycholinguistics: A Survey of Theory and Research Problems; 1954) is an interdisciplinary field, co-
studied by different sciences such as psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, and speech and
17
Newell, 2011, 48. The definition is based on the original observations of Steve Pinker.
18
Javorčíková-Vajdičková, 2016, 69).
19
Newell, 2011, 45.
20
Newell, 2011, xiii.
21
Ebd., xiii.
22
Ebd., 49.
23
Lodge, 1984, 85.
24
Newell, 2011, 47.
25
Chladenius, 1742, In Newell, 2011, 67.
26
Fowler, 1971, 256.
27
For the brevity of this article, a synthetic definition has been generated from various sources by the author;
Encyclopaedia Britannica, wiki: Psycholinguistics, 2016, 1-2.
55
language pathology. Psycholinguists study many different topics, but these topics can generally be
divided into answering the following questions:
(1) how do children acquire language (language acquisition)?;
(2) how do people process and comprehend language (language comprehension)?;
(3) how do people produce language (language production)?; and
(4) how do people acquire a new language (second language acquisition)?
Subdivisions in psycholinguistics are also made based on the different components that make up
human language. Thus, psycholinguistics deals with many linguistic areas such as Phonetics amd
Phonology (research focuses on how the brain processes and understands these sounds); Morphology
(is the study of word structures, e.g. singulars and plurals); Syntax (the study of the patterns which
dictate how words are combined to form sentences); Semantics (examining the actual meaning of
sentences) and Pragmatics (analysing the context context and its role in the interpretation of
meaning).28
Many notable scholars (René Wellek) and even writers (David Lodge) were in their career also inevitably
interested by the issue of the meaning and how it is generated in texts. Wellek understands the difficulty in
stating the meaning of a text. In the following passage, he poignantly describes the moment of decoding “the
meaning”:
“In reading with a sense for continuity, for contextual coherence, for wholeness, there
comes a moment when we feel that we have ´understood, that we have seized on the right
interpretation, the real meaning. It is a process that [...] proceeds from attention to a detail
to an anticipation of the whole and back to an interpretation of the detail”. 29
Translating these thoughts to the context of this exploration of the issue of literary analysis, it is obvious that
literary analysis is an entirely subjective matter and is not something that comes easily and naturally to anybody
but is a subject to struggle and perhaps revelation. The best illustration of this subjectivity is perhaps the issue of
literary symbols. Some traditional conventional (i.e. those that are understood and consented by most readers
give or take their general knowledge) symbols are: “Heart” = a symbol of love; “Skull” = a symbol of death;
“Dove” = a symbol of peace; “Cross” = a symbol of religion, also death; and “Wall” = a symbol of separation.
On the other hand, unconventional symbols are those that the author uses in an innovative, personal way. Let us
explore Seamus Heaney’s poem Scaffolding30:
Masons, when they start upon a building,

Are careful to test out the scaffolding;
Make sure that planks won’t slip at busy points,
Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints.
And yet all this comes down when the job’s done
Showing off walls of sure and solid stone.
So if, my dear, there sometimes seem to be
Old bridges breaking between you and me
Never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall
Confident that we have built our wall.
In this poem, Heaney uses several symbols, with their meaning unique only for this particular poem: “Bridges”
and surprisingly also “Wall” in this poem serve as symbols of partnership, love; and “Scaffolding” represents
quite unusually a symbol of mutual understanding and empathy that has been developing throughout years.
Readers understand from the context of the poem that Heaney here uses a conventional symbol “Wall” = a
traditional symbol of separation, in a new interpretative way, as a symbol of bond and partnership. It is a popular
strategy of modern poetry and literature in general that often deliberately intensify ambiguity in order to provoke
readers to think, perhaps even hoping that insoluble mysteries are remembered the longest. Another modern
English poet Ian Finley also experiments with form, genre, and the meaning of his poems. In his famous three-
dimensional poetic experiments (Fig. 2.) Finley combines poetry and visual arts:
28
Ebd., 2016, 1
29
Wellek, In Lodge, 1984, 84-85.
30
Heaney, 2016, 1.
56
.
“The present order is the disorder of the future” 31
After thorough analysis of the poem, however, it turns out that the poem allows both optimistic and pessimistic
interpretation. Pessimistic interpretation finds enough grounding in observing that in spite of present-day order,
in the future, life will be more complicated and disorderly. Optimistic interpretation on the other hand may stick
to the observation that one should not be too “obsessed” by keeping oneself orderly as any search for perfection
will be found unsatisfactory in the future.
The last example we would like to use to demonstrate the multiplicity of grounded interpretations in literature is
a caligram by Roger McGough, entitled 40-LOVE32:
40-LOVE
40- love
middle aged
couple playing
ten nis
5 when the
game ends
and they
go home
the net-
10 will still
be be
tween them
Similarly to poems by Heaney and Finlay’s poems, 40-LOVE allows both positive and negative interpretation:
Love at 40 is possible; the two people may not accord totally but they enjoy common hobbies (tennis), or, on the
contrary, love at forty completely diminishes and is replaces by hobbies and social life instead. Further analysis
of this poem would be a subject to psycholinguistics, analysing why certain group of readers responds more to
negative connotations of the poem (“net” = a symbol of separation, “40” = middle life crisis, “tennis” = a
“snobbish” sport) while others see the positive connotations (“40” = in one’s prime; “40-LOVE” = love at 40;
“tennis” = symbol of common tie between the couple).
31
Finlay, 2015, 1.
32
McGough, 1992, 130.
57
Now let us proceed to practical outcomes of these thoughts for students for literature and other professional
readers. In order to understand the “consensus” on a literary text, one needs to go through the three stages of
reading (decoding, interpreting and explication); familiarize oneself with the text, selecting the most probable
meaning and critically acclaiming the text. Some of the tools that help readers to get organized with the text are
included in various “how to summarize and analyse literature” manuals available in great numbers in literary
handbooks and recently also online. In the next part of the study, we will provide a sample of literary summary
and analysis manual that help to grasp the meaning of a text.
1.3 What is a literary summary?

As one of many definitions has it, “...a good summary should give an objective outline of the whole piece of
writing. It should answer basic questions about the original text such as “Who did what, where, and when?”, or
“What is the main idea of the text?”, “What are the main supporting points?”, “What are the major pieces of
evidence?”. It should not be a paraphrase of the whole text using your own words. A reference should be made
to the original piece either in the title (“A Summary of...”), in the first sentence, or in a footnote or endnote.”33 A
good summary should be cogent and lucid, giving only the “objective”, non-judgemental and non-analytical
statements about the text. Quality literary readers usually provide their readers with a set of navigational
questions, helping them to get organized in the text. These questions usually include some of the following:
1. Who is the author of the piece? (include also his/her dates of birth and death if applicable).
2. What is the full title of the piece? (was it inspired by a famous inspirational source?).
3. When was it published and why (if relevant, e.g. does the piece fit into any literary movement or trend
of writing?)?
4. What is the genre of the piece (alternatively, what genre does it approximate the most?; Does it
combine several genres?)
5. Does the piece consist of a single part or of several parts, volumes, etc.?
6. What is the setting of the piece?
7. Who is the narrator (Is there one or more narrators, is the narrator reliable? If applicable: who is the
narratee?).
8. Who are the main characters? (Who are protagonists and antagonists?).
9. Who are the minor characters?
10. What is the language of the piece? (Is it peculiar in stylistic, syntactical, phonological or other aspects?;
Is the language artistically enhanced?).
11. What is the basic plot of the piece?
12. Is there any closure to the plot?
1.4 What is a literary analysis?

After understanding the basic facts about the literary piece, a professional reader proceeds to a literary analysis.
Most sources agree on the definition of a literary analysis as “Literary analysis focuses on how plot/structure,
character, setting, and many other techniques are used by the author to create meaning.”34
Literary analysis can be based on the following or similar questions (adopted from a learning advisory centre 35):
1. How does the title relate to the book?
2. How believable are the characters? Which character do you identify with?
3. What makes the protagonist sympathetic, or unsympathetic?
4. Why do certain characters act the way they act? Does she have an ax to grind, a political ideology,
religious belief, or psychological disorder?
5. What does the character mean when he says "..."? How does the author use certain words and phrases
differently than we would normally use them? Does the author make up new words and, if so, why?
6. Are the plot and subplots believable and interesting? What loose ends, if any, did the author leave?
7. How is the book structured? Flashbacks? Multiple points of view? Why do you think the author chose
to write the book this way?
8. How does the arrangement of the book help or detract from the ideas it contains?
9. What types of symbolism do you find in this novel? What do these objects really represent? How do
characters react to and with these symbolic objects?
33
How to Write a Summary, 2016, 1.
34
How to Write an Analysis. 2016, 1.
35
Petit, 2016, 1-2.
58
10. What themes - motherhood, self-discovery, wilderness - recur throughout the book?
11. How is the setting of the book important to the theme?
Thinking outside the book

12. What is the author's worldview?
13. Does this book fit into or fight against a literary genre? Does this book typify a regional (southern,
western) novel?
14. Does the book address broader social issues? Does the author take a stance on, for example, anarchy
versus capitalism? How is a particular culture or subculture portrayed?
15. Where could the story go after the book ends? What is the future of these characters' lives? What would
our lives be like if we lived in this story?
16. How does this book compare to other books you've read? Would it make a good movie?
After thorough analysis, there usually follows an interpretation of the broader context of the work according to
one of literary critical theories. Let us remind some of them:(1) New critical theories (New Criticism); (2)
Russian formalist theories (Russian Formalism); (3) Reader-oriented theories; (4) Marxist theories; (5)
Structuralist theories; (6) Poststructuralist theories; (7) Postmodernist theories; (8) Postcolonial theories; (9)
Feminist theories and many others36.
Conclusion
Postmodern and deconstructive approaches to literature allow maximum reader’s freedom; however, many
readers take this as a burden rather than a blessing. The goal of reading is not more to establish “the truth” of the
text but to reach a “consensus”. Literary discourse means a literary dialogue and perhaps, measuring the weight
of various arguments and counterarguments. That is perhaps the best navigational tool for teachers of literature
as well as professional readers.
Conclusion: The research outcomes of the study clarify three approaches to literature: literary summary, literary
analysis and grasping the meaning of a literary work from a psycholinguistic point of view. The author accepts
the multiplicity of literary interpretations as a valid and reliable approach to a literary text, with regards to most
recent poststructuralist and psycholinguistic findings. Multiplicity of grounded literary interpretations is thus an
indispensable tool to approach a literary text in the EFL classroom.
Key words: literary summary, literary analysis, psycholinguistics, conventional symbols, unconventional
symbols
Bibliography:
ARISTOTELES. (1968): Poetics. London : Prentice Hall, 1968. 307 p.
CUDDON, J. A. (1998): The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. London : Penguin,
1998. 991 p. ISBN 9 780140 513639.
EAGLETON, T. (1994): Literary Theory. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota, 244 p. ISBN 0-8166-1238-2.
Encyclopaedia Britannica (2016): Psycholinguistics. 14.9.2016. [cit. 14.9.2016]. Available at:

<https://www.britannica.com/science/psycholinguistics>.
FINLAY, I. (2015): Present order... 14.9.2016. [cit. 14.9.2016]. Available at:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Hamilton_Finlay>.
HEANEY, S. 2016. Scaffolding. 14.9.2016. [cit. 14.9.2016]. Available at:

<https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/scaffolding>.
How to Write an Analysis? (2016): 14.9.2016. [cit. 14.9.2016]. Available at: <www.bucks.edu/.>.
36
More on critical apprehension of a literky work can be read in: Javorčíková, 2012, Contemporary Literature
Written in English, 10-22.
59
How to Write a Summary? (2016): 14.9.2016. [cit. 14.9.2016]. Available at:
<http://user.keio.ac.jp/~hjb/How_to_write_a_summary.html>.
KUŠNÍR, J. (2005): American Fiction: Modernism-Postmodernism, Popular Culture, and Metafiction. Stuttgard
: Impreso, 2005. 218 p. ISBN-10 3898215148.
LENČOVÁ, I. (2008): Literárny artefakt vo výučbe cudzích jazykov. Banská Bystrica: FHV UMB, 2008. 208 p.
ISBN 978-80-8083-572-9.
MARSHALL, J. C. (2011): In NEWELL, K. B. (2011): A Theory of Literary Explication. Cambridge :

Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2001. 215 p. ISBN 978-144383204.
MCGOUGH, R. (1992): 40-LOVE. In Chapter and Verse. Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1992. 138 p. ISBN
0 19 421713 2.
NEWELL, K. B. (2011): A Theory of Literary Explication. Cambridge : Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2001.
215 p. ISBN 978-144383204.
OTRÍSALOVÁ, L. – GAZDÍK, M. (2012): English Canadian Literature in Slovak Translation : the story of
underrepresentation. In Canada in Eight Tongues. Brno : Masarykova univerzita, 2012. ISBN 978-80-210-5954-
2.
PETIT, K. (2016): Questions for Analysis of Literature. 10.9.2016. [cit. 10.9.2016]. Available at:
<www.cusd80.com/cms/lib6/. https://www.ccri.edu/writingcenter/pdfs/litanalysis.pdf>.
SELDEN, R., WIDDOWSON, P. (1993): A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory. Lexington :
University Press of Kentucky, 1993. 244 p. ISBN 0-8131-0816-0.
ŠIPOŠOVÁ, M. (2009): On the Research Findings Related to English Teachers’ Questioning Strategies in he
English Classroom. In TRANSCOM 2009. Žilina: University of Žilina, pp. 71-78. ISBN 978-80-554-0036-5.
ŠTULAJTEROVÁ, A.
WELSCH, W. (1994): Naše postmoderní moderna. Praha : Zvon, 1994. 156 p. ISBN 80-7113-104-0.
LODGE, D. (1984): Essays in Criticism. London : Routlege, 1984. 320 p. ISBN 0 41529003-1.
WELLEK, R. – WARREN, A. (1966): Theory of Literature. London : Penguin, 1966. 375 p.
Contact:
Doc. PaedDr. Jana Javorčíková, PhD.
Matej Bel University
Faculty of Arts
Department of English and American Studies
Tajovskeho 40
Banska Bystrica 97401
Slovak Republic
jana.javorcikova(at)umb.sk
60
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2016 Introduction To Literature Coursebook

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Introduction to Literary Studies Instructor: doc. PaedDr. J. Javorčíková, PhD.

PERIOD COMMON TITLE OF THE PERIOD

428–1100 Old English Period

1100–1350 Anglo-Norman Period

1350–1500 Middle English Period

1500–1660 Renaissance Period

1660–1798 Neoclassical Period

1789–1870 Romantic Period

1870–1914 Realistic Period

1914–1965 Modern or Modernistic Period

1965– Contemporary Period and Post-Modernism1

APPROACHES TO ANALYSING POETRY

W. Shakespeare Syllable: (vowel, consonant, diphtong) stressed – unstressed

APPROACHES TO UNDERSTANDING POETRY

1. Author (relevant details about life, movement, period)

TYPES OF POETRY (p. 51)

- epic: fable, epic, chronicle, historical song, ballad

Further reading: Franko, pp. 45-79, Sonnet: pp. 109-111

TERMINOLOGY – LITERARY FIGURES (TEACHER’S COPY)

TERMINOLOGY – LITERARY FIGURES (TEACHER’S COPY)

1 THE METAPHOR a) I want to buy a Styron.

2 THE SIMILE b) My purse yawns with emptiness.

3 THE PERSONIFICATION1 c) A rose /a cross /a dove /a unicorn /

4 THE SYNECDOCHE d) ...My love is a red, red rose... (Robert Burns)

5 THE METONYMY e) ...My love is like a red, red rose...

6 THE IRONY f) The policeman was chasing a lion on bicycle.

7 THE SARCASM g) Lend me a hand.

8 THE PUN h) ...over a disgusting meal: „Well, this was an

11 THE DEAD METAPHOR k) Remember the Alamo!

12 THE EXTENDED/SUSTAINED/COMPLEX l) ...the face of clock...

15 THE ALLUSION o) A tree

16 THE PERIPHRASIS p) ...marriage is a game of tennis, one may win,

TERMINOLOGY – STYLISTIC FIGURES (p. 25)

– SYNTACTIC FIGURES: asyndeton; polysyndeton

2. THE INVERSION b) It’s one.

3. THE TAUTOLOGY c) Dear friends, fellows, colleagues, countrymen!

4. THE ELLIPSIS d) Honour your parents, love your country, be true to

7. THE ANTITHESIS g) I am all ears!

8. HYPERBOLE (OVERSTATEMENT) h) Give me my liberty or give me my death!

9. THE LITOTES (UNDERSTATEMENT) i) ...My beloved enemy...

10. THE OXYMORON j) Go and live your death!

Introduction to Literary Studies Instructor: doc. PaedDr. J. Javorčíková, PhD.

TERMINOLOGY – FIGURES OF SOUND

1 THE ANAPHORA a) ...the miles of roads to go,

2 THE ALLITERATION b) The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves

3 THE EPIPHORA c) Don’t drink and drive!

4 THE ONOMATOPOEIA d) Something sinister in the tone

1. She was pretty as a picture. __________________;

Further reading: FRANKO, Š. Introduction to Literature. pp. 40-43

MEASURES OF VERSE – METRE

Syllable: stressed – unstressed U

IAMBIC: deTROIT –– deTROIT –– deTROIT ....................most common in English, gentle

TROCHAIC: BOSton –– BOSton –– BOSton ....................powerful

ANAPESTIC: new roCHELLE –– new roCHELLE –– new roCHELLE

DACTYLLIC: BALtimore –– BALtimore –– BALtimore ...... sadness, decline

SPONDAIC: HONK KONG ....... rare

Usually stressed words: rhematic

1-beat line = monometer .............most typical for: folk songs, ballads

Identify metres and feet:

Further reading: Franko, pp. 77-107

- NOVELLE, SHORT NOVEL, LONG SHORT STORY, NOVELETTE

5. Characters (main character: hero, heroine, minor characters)

Identify the narrator: