Assignment 4

A Summary of Peter Barry's "Tackling Textuality - With Theory"

Keywords:
Close reading
Deconstructive reading
Relationship between literature and language
Dissimilarity
Surface reading

According to Peter Barry, the author of the article "Tackling Textuality - With Theory" published in "The use of English" volume 52, number 1, Autumn 2000, teachers and literary critics must be able to read all sorts of texts. Barry proposes a check-list for tackling textuality and also emphazises the importance of close reading. Those ten check points are all needed during literary studies:

• Micro-patterns; we look for things to pair up or to contrast to each other. It is an overall structural pattern, a frame.
• Dissimilarity; what as first sight seems to be the truth in the text, but during a close rading could appear as the total opposite.
• Overt and covert content; being obliged to distinguish between what is written and what is covert. The meaning of the words, because everything is not always what it sems to be at first sight.
• Difference between meaning and significance; the meaning is inside the text and the significance shifts; it is what we feel during our reading.
• The genre; it could make the author do certain strategic moves with the text. For instance could the characters do or say things to accelerate the action depending on the genre.
• To read the literature as metaphorical: Barry mention it as an "interpretive move" whereas we first read the text as the truth, but during reading find some clues making us realize it being a metaphore. It is very common reading poetry, according to Barry.
• Reading the surface; how we often takes the surface reading as a truth. But we should go deeper in the text, otherwise we only see a part of the text.
• Micro-patterns; we look for patterns in the text and things breaking them because it is where the significant point is.
• Different stages in the text; a book or text is often divided into chapters, verses, acts or books. This makes the reader aware of certain points in the text, such as phases, incidents and conclusions.
• Semantic changes; we read during a certain linguistic period, but that period is changing. Some words have received another meaning over centuries and we must be aware of that as we read a text. Barry give an example in Shakespeare's "Henry V" where "womb" is meaning "stomach".

But those ten points are not enough according to Barry, and he gives four principles to use for looking both inside and outwards the text. He is pointing out those principles because even if close reading is the central part in literary studies and how we usually approach a text, it does not cover it completely. We have to look at the cultural context, gender and language as well as metaphors and genre.

The four principles are:

• Literature and history; the historical references when the text was written .
• Literature and language; the underlying meaning of the text, the undercurrents.
• Literature and gender; if the writer is a man or a woman.
• Literature and psychoanalysis; the mental process between literature and underlying emotions. The best way to conceal something is to disclose it, to "hide it in open".

The most important principle of those four is literature and language according to Barry. It is important because it render us as readers to use deconstructive reading. Barry explains it by using a cat as an example; the old style reading is like stroking the cat the right direction so it purrs and feels comfortable and gentle, deconstructive reading is like stroking the cat backwards so the cat hisses and no one knows what it its up to next. Barry says it is as "the text is at war with itself". The close reader makes peace with the text and the deconstructor fights.

Lastly, the intension with this reading is according to Barry; " Firstly, the complexities it gets itself knotted up in really are there. And secondly, trying to unravel them is enlightening, and sometimes even fun".