THE SUGGESTED SCHEME OF THE ANALYSIS OF A MANSFIELDIAN TEXT.

1. Intriguing introduction with a promise of the things which you are to dwell upon

(the essentials of experimental modernistic prose, a typically Mansfieldian story).

2. A summary of the text (purely the facts, no analysis).

3. Conceptual analysis of the text (themes – the sensitive revelations of the human behaviour in the most ordinary situations; problems – the sphere of the everyday and the trivial which we perceive as new insights and discoveries; artistic principles – to convey much while saying little; vision of the world and of the life – a mystery that can’t be solved, a river flowing from nowhere to nowhere).

4. Artistic analysis of the text (every item is to be proved and illustrated):

1) general slant of the text (pathetically ironic);

2) plot (loose, inconsistent presentation of facts);

3) a new vanishing author whose presence is permanently felt (choice of words, SDs, techniques of presentation);

4) a new unheroic but multi-dimensional, vanishing and contradictory character (indirect means of characterization, the inner life of the personages);

5) discrepancies between the points of view of the reader (the role of the participant and the interpreter); of the author (implicitly present), of the character (can’t understand the complexities of the world) – the false perspective technique;

6) shifting time (flashbacks, daydreams);

7) the narrative techniques (favourite techniques are: the uninterrupted monologue with the interlocutor being felt, the represented speech, the interior monologue, the fusion of voices);

8) the text’s structural design and new compositional techniques (the middle from the beginning technique, the missing links in the chain technique, the art of montage, the cinematic effects, the depth of the context technique, the context of continuing life);

9) application of artistic methods (impressionistic, oppositional, symbolic);

10) the choice of the vocabulary (domesticated and unobtrusive, but semantically charged, the current idiom of her time, all the particularities of the conversational English);

11) imagery (tropes and figures of speech - traditional ones perform manifold functions; epithets - mere attributes; details turn into symbols, make the text cohesive; metonymy prevails over metaphor, is connected with the emphasis on the detail; aposiopesis create the authenticity of true conversational speech; irony – in line with her attitude to life and people; understatement – purely British feature of character, not to be overpathetic; contrast – to show life based on oppositions, to underlie the false perspective technique; antonomasia – the means of characterization);

12) artistic syntax (inversion, ellipsis, interpolation, breaks in the narrative chain, parallelism, repetitions, detachments, climax, anticlimax, all structural types of sentences, parataxis, rhythmicality);

13) artistic punctuation and graphics (dots, dashes, all kinds of punctuation marks, italics – perform various functions on different levels of the text);

14) ultimate effect of the story (implicit, oblique, impersonal, suggestive, associative, light, kaleidoscopic, tremulous, melodious, emotional, but not on the surface; sketchiness, fragmentariness, authenticity, immediacy, lively conversational speech).

5. Conclusion:

1) brief characterization of the author’s artistic system (in accord with her principles and views), her unique style (graceful, elegant, subtle, poetic, lyrical, deceptively simple with deep-running ideas) and her innovations in the realm of a short story (on different levels);

3) the analyst’s attitude to the text analyzed.

NB: in your analysis try not to separate the message of the author from the techniques employed to bring this message to the readers; start with the ideas of the text and show how they are created by the writer with the help of examples which you should analyze on different levels; your task is to prove that this is a truly modernistic text and it contains all the features typical of Katherine Mansfield.

Date: 2016-01-14; view: 961