Levels of literary text analysis

LEVELS OF LITERARY TEXT ANALYSIS

1. General characteristics of a text:

the author (biography, peculiarities of style, genre & type of works, place in world literature); theme (stated or implied); main idea; setting (place and time of action); characters (main and minor, dynamic and static); type of narration; the prevailing mood of the extract (lyrical, dramatic, pathetic, etc); plot structure/logical parts.

2. Lexical peculiarities.

a) semantic classes of words: monosemous/polysemous words; homographs, homophones, homonyms; synonyms/antonyms, set-phrases, idioms, phraseological units; abbreviations, proper names;

b) structure of words: simple, derived, compound, compound-derived;

c) lexico-semantic groups;

d) stylistic stratification of words: literary (archaic, bookish, formal, barbarism, borrowings, foreign words, neologisms, poetic, terms), neutral and colloquial (colloquial coinages, common colloquial, dialectal words, jargon, professionalisms, slang, vulgarisms etc.).

3. Grammatical peculiarities:

a) morphology: use of tenses and voices, mood, grammatical structures/patterns (possessive case, degrees of comparison, infinitives/participles/gerunds, structures with infinitives/participles/gerunds, sequence of tenses, etc); phrasal verbs (their meaning); peculiar features of parts of speech usage (articles, modals, nouns, pronouns, verbs, etc.).;

b) syntax: structure of sentences & their communicative types; homogeneous members of sentences.

4. Stylistic peculiarities

a) graphical expressive means (emphatic use of punctuation, a specific arrangement of printed

material, different types of print, and graphons);

b) phonetic figures of speech (alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia);

b) lexical figures of speech (allegory, allusion, antonomasia, epithet, euphemism, irony, litotes, meiosis/understatement, metaphor, metonymy, oxymoron, personification, periphrasis, pun, paronomasia, sarcasm, synecdoche, simile, zeugma, synonymic repetition, tautology);

c) syntactical stylistic devices (anticlimax, antithesis, apokoinu construction, aposiopesis, break-in-the- narrative, asyndeton, attachment (gap-sentence, leaning sentence, link), chiasmus, climax, gradation, detachment, ellipsis, enumeration, inversion, parallel construction, parenthesis, pleonasm, polysyndeton, repetition, rhetorical question, suspense, semantically false chains, synonymic repetition).

Useful phrases

The text under analysis/study is the excerpt /extract/ passage from a famous novel by .../ is taken from the novel... belonging to the pen of the famous/ well-known/ celebrated/ popular writer. N's manner of writing is characterized by......