21/09/2010

GUIDELINES FOR TEXTUAL ANALYSIS

STEP 1

Consider the title and see what expectation it creates about the possible content of the poem.

Example: "Just consider in the title I expect the poem to be about something happening in spring, probably when spring has just started ("early spring")."

STEP 2

Read the poem at least twice in order to be sure to have understood what it is about.

-Look for the new words

-Be able to translate each line

Try to find some connection between the content of the poem and the title.

STEP 3

Write the denotative analysis of the poem (in your own words say what the poem is about).

Example: "The poem is expressed by a speaking voice, in the first person, who says he or she heard the notes of nature that were sitting in a groove. The speaking voice was in a good mood, thinking of something pleasure, when suddenly his or her mind was crossed by some sad thoughts.

STEP 4

Structure analysis: you describe the component parts of the text and say what the function of this part is.

Example: "The poem consist of (is made up of, is it arranged into, is organized into) six quatrains (it is a stanza consisting in four lines each) where the poet at first provides the reader with the description of a pleasure spring landscape and in the last part invites him or her to reflect on the relation between man and nature.

The poem is partly descriptive and partly reflective. The reflection invited is anticipated in the refrain of the second stanza ("what man has made of man")."

STEP 5

Connotative analysis witch consist in:

a) Phonological level (all that concerns sounds devices: kind of vowels and consonants, rhyme scheme, rhythm, assonances and alliterations, pauses and punctuation, run-en-lines, end-stopped-lines). Explain what is the effect that them produce and explain how the choices made had meaning to the text.

b) Semantic level (consider word choice: concrete, abstract, Latin or Anglo-Saxon words. Semantic fields, metaphorical use of words, are words recurrent?, what verb tenses are used?). Explain what is the effect created and explain how the choices made had meaning to the text.

c) Syntactical level (words order): deviations of the norm, punctuation, inversion.

d) Level of the figures of speech: not simply similies, metaphors (synecdoche, metonymy, personification, oxymoron, paradox, hyperbole), rhetorical use of the verbs.

STEP 6

Draw your conclusions on the basis of the text.