Comentario de texto en lengua inglesa

19/02/2018
Pablo García Rubio
Clase 2
What a text is
“Text” derives from Latin <texere> (to weave). A text is like a textile, a piece of
cloth woven together. The woven-together nature of the linguistic text is formed
by cohesion and coherence (which unite elements of the text).
o In texts, meanings are woven together across sentence boundaries
- COHESION refers to realized syntactic relations that unite elements of the
text
o Cohesions links something with what has gone before.
- COHERENCE refers to semantic relations which don’t need to be realized
linguistically.
o Cohesion means one item pointing to another.
o Instances of cohesion and coherence allow for textual analysis and
interpretation.
Cohesion has two manifestations: lexical or grammatical. Lexical cohesion
involves lexical repetition or semantic affinity (ex. “topography, beaches, dunes,
mountains, plains”).
Text are written witnesses of events, actions or thoughts. Written texts move
through time and space, and are paths to the past and other places. Literary texts
can give the illusion of a possible (but not real) world. They usually have a known
author, who can modify pre-existing discourses and genres. These literary texts
require a reader to come to life.
Analysis technique 3: the search for local cohesion and coherence
Araby
Joyce was an Irish author who was influential in modernist literature. He was born
in Dublin, educated in Jesuit schools and eloped to Europe after studying in
Dublin college. He published a novel of education or bildungsroman (A portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man), but also a book of short stories (Dubliners) and the
novel Ulysses in 1922. Araby is the third short story in Dubliners.
NORTH RICHMOND STREET being blind, was a quiet street except at
the hour when the Christian Brothers’ School set the boys free. An
uninhabited house of two storeys stood at the blind end, detached from
its neighbors in a square ground. The other houses of the street,
conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown
imperturbable faces.
Examples of cohesion and coherence: lexical repetition: “Street, house, blind,
houses”. Semantic affinity: “street, house, neighbor”. Also “quiet streets,
uninhabited house, imperturbable faces”.
- The fragment established an initial setting.
- There is affinity between “gazed at one another” and the last part of the text:
“gazing up into the darkness”. It’s a cohesion between both extremes of the
text. We can say that there is considerable cohesion and coherence.
- The houses are conscious” (5), and they have neighbors (houses don’t have
neighbors) and that faces are imperturbable (6). This is a rhetoric figure of
speech (personification) because it gives human traits to houses and faces.
- There are two principle thoughts procedures: analysis (which means
describing and dividing something into parts) and synthesis.
Jeff’s commentary:
Published in Dubliners (1914), James Joyce’s Araby relates the narrator-
protagonist’s first amorous disappointment in youth. The fragment for analysis
(first paragraphs) and interpretation opens the story and foregrounds the text’s
spatial order, particularly by means of local cohesion and personification.
The local cohesion is twice lexical (“street, house”). Grammatical cohesion
emphasizes the latter pair (“its neighbors, them, one another”).
Personification of the street, houses and the Christian Brothers’ School is
abundant and evident (“being blind, quiet street, gazed, stood, neighbors,
conscious”). By using “blind” and “gazed”, the textual opening prefigures the
story’s end, where the expression of amorous disappointment is resonant:
Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and
derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.
Attributes of texts:
COHESION > PROGRESSION > THEMATIZATION
- COHESION is the process by which sentences are stitched together into
continuous texts. Individual links are cohesive ties.
- Texts have to be COHERENT: they stay on one topic and do not jump
unexpectedly from subject to subject.
- Texts must not repeat the same point constantly; they preserve a developing
argument. Propositions in a cohesive text have to make a progressive
sequence of ideas. PROGRESSION also means that we usually interpret
sentences as chronologically related.
- THEMATIZATION is the organization of the text to draw attention to its most
important elements: the themes.
 The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed. Our shouts
echoed in the silent street. The career of our play brought us through the
dark muddy lanes behind the houses where we ran the gauntlet of the
rough tribes from the cottages, to the back doors of the dark dripping
gardens where odours arose from the ashpits, to the dark odorous stables
where a coachman smoothed and combed the horse or shook music from
the buckled harness. When we returned to the street light from the kitchen
windows had filled the areas.
There is cohesion between this paragraph and the first one: the "houses and
streets also appear in this one. There is lexical repetition of “odours”: this implies
that sensory perception is manifest. There is also repetition in “dark dripping
gardens, dark odorous stables, dark muddy lanes”. Again, semantic affinity also
appears here (houses, garden…)
- “Lights” (penultimate line) appears in very clear contrast to the darkness.
- Metaphors are present in “our bodies glowed”.
- “Our play… brought us… we ran… we returned”: The order of genre and the
presence of character is prominent.
- The thematization of this fragment involves playing as a child.
Or if Mangan’s sister came out on the doorstep to call her brother in to his
tea we watched her from our shadow peer up and down the street. We
waited to see whether she would remain or go in and, if she remained, we
left our shadow and walked up to Mangan’s steps resignedly. She was
waiting for us, her figure defined by the light from the half-opened door.
Her brother always teased her before he obeyed and I stood by the railings
looking at her. Her dress swung as she moved her body and the soft rope
of her hair tossed from side to side.
- “Her figure defined by the light”: Her character is portraited by light.
Homework: Read the motifs of light, darkness and language in Araby (17-19),
what is a genre (11-16). Coursepack