Literary analysis is a task done at
a professional level by literary scholars. The scholar dissects a poem, book,
or author and explains through writing or speech their thoughts on the
motivations, aims, and meaning of the work(s) or individual. Many scholars and
others in the art community assume that the audience for such pieces comprises
of people who have a long history in literature and pre-existing knowledge of
literary concepts. It can be argued, however, that literature is a more
accessible and understandable than scientific journals (which assume much about
the knowledge of the reader). Gregory Lynall is an English studies professor at
the University of Liverpool who, in this case, is writing about Jonathan Swift.
This article was obtained via Academic Research Complete on the UW- La Crosse
website. The official style was instantly recognizable.
It would seem that
Lynall prescribes to the belief that scholarly writing is written for scholarly
readers. The abstract itself is enough to make an English major furrow their
brow. Here’s a taste:
“Swift began
writing poetry at a time when the occult doctrines of the Renaissance had in
general lost their philosophical and cultural power, yet he still chose to
infuse some of his verse with allusions to these increasingly marginalized
traditions”.
The stuffy tone is appropriate. After
all, if you don’t use uncommon terms that have vague meaning, then you must not
know what you’re talking about. That’s sarcasm, of course, nothing is lost with
this, simpler, translation:
Though Swift began
writing after the heyday of the Renaissance, he still used literary techniques
of that age in some of his works.
This translation is not as simply
stated as possible, but it is significantly easier to understand. It allows for
more clarity without the loss of meaning. In another example, Lynall says, “Furthermore,
the image of the bubble also evokes the poem’s general anxiety about the moral
vacuity in contemporary life”, which could be more simply said: The bubble reminds
us of the moral emptiness in current times. It keeps the message and gains the
understanding of readers who have never come across the rare term “vacuity”.
Those readers may be equally as interested as a fellow critic, but won’t be
able to draw out the meaning of the criticism without a dictionary.
The
reason this article is particularly interesting to me is my future work. If I
am to dissect a piece of literature and write on how it applies to our world,
it should be understood by the vast majority of those who read it. The activity
system of literary analysis has the goal of helping anyone interested to more
deeply understand the subject matter at hand. The game that Lynall and writers
like him play (knowingly or unknowingly) makes literary analysis more about
appearing to make good points than actually making good points. The value of
articles like Lynall’s become more focused on entertainment than information
with each rare word used. They are only blocking the highway of understanding
with their unnecessary use of near-dead words. A good analysis should
communicate its message clearly, not shows the reader how large the author’s
vocabulary is.
-Ryan Churchill
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