How to analyze literary works

The analyzer always has a difficult task: in which direction to carry out the intended work, either analyzing the formal side, or the semantic, meaningful. The second direction very often becomes predominant, since for the average reader the main thing is still the meaning of the work, and not how it is done.

Several ways of analyzing a literary text are possible. This can be a complete, so-called philological analysis of the text, or a regular, so-called culturological analysis.

Title of the work:

The title of a work of art always strives one way or another, but to give the reader an indication of what special emphasis needs to be made in the subsequent development of the text. This applies to both prosaic and poetic texts. If the title is not made as such in the poetic text, then the semantic content is so vast (even for the author) that it is impossible to conclude it in a single concise phrase (in relation to the text as a whole) (and therefore the initial name of such a poem is traditionally considered the initial line).

However, it is possible that the author intentionally seeks to confuse the reader, which is typical, for example, of Dadaism, or the "exposure" of versification, which is typical of Futurism, but in this case it is not the author’s desire to complicate the path for the reader to meaning, but one of the principles of poetics as a whole.

Genre:

An important component in the analysis of a work of art is the definition of its genre identity.

So in prose, the genre will determine the scale of the depicted. If the reader has a story, then it goes without saying that the work touches on some particular, concrete problems (for example, the theme of loneliness in Chekhov's story "Tosca"). If the reader defines the genre of the work in front of him as a novel, then the scope of events will be much larger in it, and, based on this, the abundance of interconnected semantic layers will indicate the “comprehensiveness” of the work, its claim to universality (for example, the theme of the spiritual path a hero revealed in the images of Prince Andrei and Pierre Bezukhov, the theme of the struggle between the spiritual and the bodily in human nature, "a people's thought" by the definition of Tolstoy himself, an exposition of the author’s conception of history).

The same approach is necessary for the poetic text. For example: if a poetic text is an odic work, then of course its purpose and essence is to glorify the person to whom it is addressed. If this is an elegy, then the basis of the work is some unsteady “thoughtful” experiences and, in essence, the text is a self-analysis (relatively speaking) of the lyrical hero.