A summary of “Tackling Textuality – With Theory” a text written by Peter Barry

Teachers and literary critics need to define texts and tea-leaves. To be able to do that Peter Barry, the author of this text, gives us a check-list of the process when we deal with texts without any specific underlying theory.

We are to look for an overall structural pattern that provides a structural frame or backbone for the text. Is there any similarity beneath the apparent dissimilarity? Does the text that we read have a different content than it appears to have? That is, we need to distinguish between overt and covert content.

We need to know the difference between “meaning” and “significance”, where meaning is a part of the work something that is not changeable, and significance is unavoidably variable. Further on we want to find the genre or literary type of the text to be able to know how it affects the content of the work. We also look for metaphors when reading, especially poems. We read the surface of the work precisely, that means we recognise the importance of the exact literal words. There are different patterns in texts, both structural patterns, as mentioned above, but also micro-patterns such as series of words with the same tone or register, that we want to distinguish. Readers also identify stages and phases within a literary work, phases that are formally marked by for example books, chapters or verses. And last we need to be aware of that in different epochs of time the significance of words changes.

Peter Barry says that the check-list is something essential and that we can not do English without them, but nevertheless it is not enough. In addition to this we also need four major aspects of the relationship between literature and the world beyond; that is literature and history, literature and language, literature and gender and finally literature and psychoanalysis.

To clarify what he means, Peter Barry uses the Sonnet 73’ of William Shakespeare and “Transit”, a poem written by Adrienne Rich. Over and over he shows where he finds questions that we can resubmit to the check-list or to the four different relationships between the literature and the world outside.

And to explain; “why to do it?”, he gives two reasons; first, the complexities it gets itself constricted up in really are there, and second, trying to solve them is enlightening and sometimes even fun.

Keywords:
language
pattern
enlightening
distinguish
genre
metaphors
significance