Skeleton of talk which was given at Dept of English Farook College, Calicut by Dr Koshy AV

1. Contexts/Frames for Reading
Poetry (& Fiction)
Talk delivered at Post Graduate & Research
Department of English, Farook College,
Kozhikode.
By Dr. Koshy A.V.

2. “ Reading maketh a full
man.”
- Francis Bacon

3. Political Analysis
● Local
● Regional or Zonal
● National
● International/ Global/Universal
● Intra -
● Inter -
● Multi -
● Trans -.

4. Nirbhaya Incident
● 'Delhi is unsafe for women at night.'
● 'Men from certain states are not law abiding.'
● 'North India may not be as safe as South India for
women at night.'
● India is 'patriarchal.'
● 'Women are not safe anywhere in the world mostly at
night, outside the home environment.'
● Tracing out the linkages between or among these
controversial, provisional viewpoints can be done by
making use of intra-textual analysis, inter-textual
analysis, an analysis including multiple viewpoints and
a viewpoint making transcendental conclusion.

5. Literary analysis
● In the same way that political analysis has
contexts and frames, literary analysis is also
possible only if we understand the contexts and
frames to maneuver them properly and deftly
for our purposes.

6. The need for context
● Jacques Lacan once said in a class:
“I am lying.”
● Was he lying, he asked the class.
● If we say yes, it is false because a lying man does not say
that he is lying and if we say no, it is also false as we do
not know what preceded him saying he is lying.
● In other words without the context of what he is talking
about we can only judge it on a linguistic and semantic
level.
● We can only evaluate the truth (or lie) of his statement if
we have the context, in other words.

7. Frame
● ...the frame is what "produces" the object of art,
is what sets it off as an object of art—an
aesthetic object. Thus the frame is essential to
the work of art; in the work of art... “Jacques
Derrida for Beginners,” James Powell.

8. Postcard from Kashmir by Agha
Shahid Ali
Kashmir shrinks into my mailbox,
my home a neat four by six inches.
I always loved neatness. Now I hold
the half-inch Himalayas in my hand.
This is home. And this the closest
I'll ever be to home. When I return,
the colors won't be so brilliant,
the Jhelum's waters so clean,
so ultramarine. My love
so overexposed.
And my memory will be a little
out of focus, in it
a giant negative, black
and white, still undeveloped. (Ibid. The stanzas are denoted by the capitals)

9. Contexts/Frames
● The traditional contexts of reading a poem
privileged the author.
● This is called the biographical approach.
● This means we read a poem in the light of its
connection with the author. What he was,
where he comes from, incidents in his life etc.,
are connected to the poem to make sense of it
and his intention, deciphered, influences the
meaning.
● In such a reading the reader is passive and

10. Illustration 1
● For instance, Agha Shahid Ali's poem makes
more sense if we know that “Agha Shahid Ali
was born in New Delhi, India in 1949... Though
a Kashmiri Muslim, Ali is best known in the U.S.
and identified himself as an American poet
writing in English... he taught at the University
of Massachusetts-Amherst, Princeton College
and in the MFA program at Warren Wilson
College. .. His poetry reflects his Hindu,
Muslim, and Western
heritages.”http://vijaypriya123.blogspot.com/20
14/03/postcard-from-kashmir-by-agha-shahid-

11. The historical and geographical
context
● Similarly, it helps to know that..in “Postcard
from Kashmir,” the speaker describes receiving
a postcard from his native land, “Kashmir,” a
region of the Indian subcontinent. Parts of
Kashmir are controlled by India and Pakistan,
and in fact disputes between India and Pakistan
about the territory are long-standing and have
often led to armed conflict.”

12. Privileging the external contexts I.
● So first we talked of how the author matters in
reading a text but then we spoke of how the
history or geography around a text matters.
● These are still matters extrinsic to the text that
critics till the twentieth century thought
important in interpretation along with other
works of the author that deal with the same
topic or works of others that do. This is called
looking at allusions or (sometimes making)
cross -references or intertextuality.

13. II
● You can say that this is a fact centred
approach.

14. The aesthetic approach
● Instead of this we can use aesthetic frames or
contexts to understand a poem.
● Formalism is one.
● Structuralism is another.
● A third is New Criticism which lead to the lemon
squeezer method which is famous in
classrooms even today across the world.
● New Criticism came first and then formalism
and finally structuralism.

15. New criticism and the lemon
squeezer method
● This shifted the attention away from the author
and what he may have meant or the history and
the geography to the text itself.
● A poem, for example, was seen to be a
construct of images, musical devices, figures of
speech, form structure, rarely genre and
meaning, consequently.
● Thus the poem we are looking at would be
thought of as one on identity, rootlessness and
alienation etc...only to conclude with.

16. New criticism or the lemon
squeezer method continued - 2
● We would thus ask questions like
● What are the figures of speech used. Why? To what
effect. Do they succeed?
● What kind of images are used in the poem? Why? To
what effect? Do they succeed?
● What kind of musical devices are used? Why? To
what effect? Do they succeed?
● The culmination is the question of whether the
meaning/s reached in the poem is helped by the use
of these poetic techniques for it to reach there.

17. Textual analysis
● From the author being the primary or sole
authority we see new contexts and frames that
are text centred emerging here.
● We can extend the previous questions to what
form does the poem use? Why? To what
effect? Does it succeed.
● What is the structure of the poem? Why? To
what effect? Does it succeed?
● We are still in aesthetic analysis but it is not
entirely free from the concerns of meaning.

18. A brief recapitulation
● Thus we can study a poem or short story/fiction
using a biographical frame or context, a
historical or geographical one, a close reading
context in terms of close textual analysis.
● We can also study it using a formalist or
structuralist frame or context.
● This is as far as analysis goes for graduate or
undergraduate courses though it may also
include time frame references (modernist) or
psychoanalytical ones in a mild form.

19. Psychoanalysis
● After Sigmund Freud's famous analysis as the
father of psychology of the play Oedipus Rex
and that of Lacan who studied Poe's Purloined
Letter or after Umberto Eco who brought in
ideas of the sophisticated and naive readers we
find that the reader becomes as important as
the author or the text and readers are of two
kinds, learned and laymen.
● The sophisticated reader not only reads
carefully but can interpret a text using tools
like/from psychoanalysis for the lay reader who

20. Schools of criticism and reading
● This is a very key shift in terms of the history of
reading as now not only the author or the text
but the critic also becomes important.
● The frames he places around it coming from
psychology, or Marxism or she, of feminism, or
a sociologist, of culture studies, or an ecologist,
of eco-criticism, of identity politics, of
modernism, of post modernism, of post
colonialism – all begin to matter and gives us
new or many lenses with which to look at a
work.

21. Reading and its contexts
● Let me rewind a little to Saussure. While we
can read a poem in terms of linguistics and
stylistics – two more contexts! - Saussure's real
contribution to the reader was in making us
understand that a poem is a sign that has
referents, signifiers, and an unsolvable signified
which means all the readings it has generated
and can genrerate.
● To make it simple: text, world, readers lay and
learned, meanings :) with the author, history,
time frame and geography all being part of the

22. Reading and its contexts - 2
● But what about readers who are not experts.
Which is what students and often teachers are,
unless they are in European Graduate School.
● To explain that we need to come to critics like
Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish who asked
questions like Is there a text in the classroom?,
introducing reader response theory, meaning
there are as many readings to a single poem or
story as there are readers and each time the
reading changes with even the same person.

23. Reading and subjectivity
● Wait a minute!
● Does this mean there are only readings and no
fixed meaning?
● Yes and no.
● Reading is a game but we play it like all games
with its rules. It is post modernist but not
entirely free of any reading being right!

24. Reading aright
● It is rooted in philosophy that a reading has to
be right ethically.
● What this means is we cannot read a text
against its grain unless it is ethical to do so.
● It is also not to stretch the meaning beyond
what the text allows linguistically.
● What this means is a word like ship can mean
camel or aeroplane or tranfer or carry but
seldom means say, air!

25. To conclude:
● Reading maketh a full man only if we know the
game, its rules, and the different contexts and
frames and look at a text using all the frames or
only one or some but taking from each only
what is necessary and remembering the fact
that author, context, text, critic, reader, readings
all matter.

26. The End
● “The text is a pre-text.”
● Enjoy the game of reading, playing by the rules
but also breaking them to produce new ones if
need be, so you love studying literature.
● Thank you.