Philological text analysis is usually widely used in teaching students who are educated in the field of native and foreign languages. When performing such tasks, future specialists show all the knowledge they have accumulated over the five years of their stay at the institute.
Relevance
Philologist Bakhtin said that the text is the basis of all the humanities, without which they simply would not exist. Therefore, an attentive attitude to this source of information is a necessary quality of all people, one way or another connected with the scientific community. Moreover, this statement applies to present and future philologists.
World of images
Analysis of a literary text (namely, such material is usually considered in the classroom) is always associated with its interpretation based on a certain understanding of the means of expression and other units contained in it. Therefore, always, speaking of such material, it should be understood that most often the existence of only one interpretation is impossible. Multiple versions are associated withthe main feature of works of art is figurativeness.
Often, a specialist in philological text analysis also deals with the versatility of a text. This is how not only the world of fiction works, but even simple colloquial speech. Usually it contains text and subtext - explicit and hidden information.
The purpose of philological text analysis
Engaged in such activities, a student-philologist learns not only to reveal its structural features in the text, but also to see the hidden in it.
In the preface to many textbooks in this discipline, it is said that by completing such tasks, future philologists acquire the ability to understand works not literally, but to see hidden meaning behind certain images.
First stage
Experts recommend that before you begin to actually interpret the text, that is, to reveal the message that its author concluded in it, as much as possible to analyze its structural components. The more carefully this work is done, the easier it will be in the future. Since, trying to guess the writer's intention, the researcher has to rely on knowledge about the technical side of writing a work. Accordingly, the more details the student knows about the structure of the text, the more detailed he can then analyze its meaning.
Ways of interpretation
Philological analysis of the text, as already mentioned, consists in the discovery of the constituent parts of the work, includingthe content in it of various expressive means.
Different scientists, speaking about the methods used by the researcher in the philological analysis of a literary text, called them either "shuttle", or "cyclic". Speaking in this way, they essentially meant the same thing: the constant interaction of content and form and their interpretation. This means that in carrying out such work, the student must also go from form to content and vice versa.
Honesty
Also, many experts urge researchers who carry out philological analysis of the text to show due respect for the author and his ideas. This means that when performing such a task, the student should try to find the true meaning laid down by the author, and set it out in his work. A big mistake is made by those who distort ideas, ascribe false conclusions to a writer or poet. As a rule, this happens when the author's point of view is not close to the researcher. But even in this case, such conclusions are a gross mistake. Sometimes such conclusions are made intentionally.
For example, Charles Darwin's famous work on the origin of animal species has been cited for many years as an example of anti-religious prose. However, its author not only did not seek to oppose his ideas to Christian philosophy, but openly said that they only confirm the truth of Holy Scripture.
An example of a philological analysis of a literary text
As an illustrative example of such parsing of the text, you can carry out similar workwith a poem by the Silver Age poet Arseniy Tarkovsky "I'm sick of the words…".
First, you need to provide a small biographical information about the author. He is known to be the father of another outstanding Russian Soviet artist - Andrei Arsenievich Tarkovsky, who used his father's poems in some of his films, including the famous "Stalker".
In this film, the protagonist performs the work "Here the summer has passed." We can say that it is an epigraph to the whole picture, because it reveals the idea of a person understanding his life. The same happens with the characters of the film throughout the story.
Out of time
In the poem of Arseny Tarkovsky there is no indication of the place and time of action. Most of the verbs here have an unfinished form. The author's thoughts seem to hang in some timeless space, the location of which is also not indicated. Therefore, it can be assumed that Arseniy Tarkovsky did not accidentally use this technique. Most likely, he wanted to point out that the problem to which his work is devoted is eternal. Like all examples of the poetic genre, this creation of Arseny Tarkovsky has a certain poetic rhythm, which is partly created by repeating the same words. Also in this essay there is a rhyme.
Keywords and subject matter
As already noted,The poem in question has no title. Perhaps the author deliberately does not give a direct indication of his main theme. Thus, he encourages the reader to independently and more carefully than is usually the case when studying poetry, to think about unraveling the main idea. So he makes the theme of the work more relevant, brings it closer to the reader. In addition to creating a clear, rhythmic pattern, the repetition of certain words performs another function. With the help of this technique, the poet puts some words in a "stronger" position compared to others. Also, they tend to be at the end of a line, which also makes them stand out. What words does the author emphasize?
Here is a list of the keys of this poem: words, speech, widowhood, kinship, madness, answer. Almost all of the above words are nouns. Why? Because it is this part of speech that denotes things, that is, objects of the real, and not the fictional world. On the other hand, almost all of the above lexical units denote precisely abstract phenomena: kinship, madness, and so on. So, we are talking here, after all, not about the material, but about the spiritual world. About the sphere of feelings and relationships. To be more precise, here the contradiction between man and the surrounding nature is considered. The poet questions the value of speech, comparing it to the inaudible conversation of trees.
This work can be attributed to the genre of lyrical poetry.
Explicit references to other works of literature, citations of other authors are not contained here.
This brief analysisthis work cannot be considered an unconditional model, since various philologists recommend that the study of the text be carried out according to plans that sometimes differ greatly from each other. Nikonina's manual on this subject lists the following stages of a holistic philological analysis of an epic text.
- First of all, it is necessary to determine the genre of the work, based on the canons prevailing in world literature.
- Next, highlight the main structural parts of the text.
- After that, it is necessary to study the text in order to identify indications in it of the time and place of the events described.
- Then, as a rule, the images of this work are considered. It is necessary to indicate how they interact: they are opposed, compared, complementary, and so on.
- Having completed the previous points of the plan, you should begin to study the intertextual space created by the author. That is, it is necessary to identify references to other well-known or little-known examples of literary creativity. There may not be clear hints of connection with the content of other works in the book. However, there are texts that abound with such examples. For example, Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita contains many such references. Even the names of the heroes can be regarded in this way. Azazello (found in the Old Testament), Margarita (this is the name of one of the heroines of Goethe's Faust).
In Babenko's manual "Philological text analysis" a slightly different plan is given.
Conclusion
In thisThe article considered the issue of a holistic philological analysis of the text.
This material may be interesting and useful for students of "language" faculties of various universities. A study of a poem by Arseny Tarkovsky is given as an example of a philological analysis of the text.
