We are imagining that we have written on the following texts:

Annunciation and zero-point field by John Burnside
The Flea by John Donne
The Otter by Seamus Heaney
Matty Groves, a traditional ballad
from Faith Healer by Brian Friel
from Hard Times by Charles Dickens

from Much Ado about Nothing by William Shakespeare
a transcript about a dinner party

These texts in one way or another all deal with 'love'.

You need to imagine that you have written an essay on how some of these writers have addressed the theme of love. This is question 1. (if you haven't these 'four kinds of analysis' in question1, you've got a problem!)

Question Two

Discuss the methods you have used to analyse these texts and evaluate their effectiveness.

We have been taught four key approaches to texts, although each one embraces a broad range of enquiry.

Close analysis focuses on the way a text is made of words. It follows Auden's idea that a poem is a "verbal contraption". Close analysis explores how such a "contraption" works and its effects. It recognises that the connotations of words have almost as much effect on the "contraption" as their meanings.

For example, in the poem The Flea, as we have seen, John Donne uses language in a complex way, where each phrase deserves close attention. A critic reading the poem from a point of view of close analysis will love the outrageous logic Donne applies, they will explore the dramatic voice of the poem, and they will identify and develop clear ideas about imagery.

For example, Donne calls the killing of the flea a 'sacrilege'. The word suggest a serious crime, and Donne is using outrageous logic to suggest that in killing the flea, which has sucked blood form both the man and the woman he loves, the woman is somehow killing the two of them. Close analysis invites us to take this further. The word 'sacrilege' implies a crime against religion or the sacred: Donne is claiming that the flea is the "marriage-bed" of the two, the place where their blood has been mingled and where some sort of genuine marriage has taken place. In calling the killing a "sacrilege", Donne is using the connotations of that word to reinforce his argument that the flea has already taken the woman 's virginity.

Close analysis reveals how a poem - or other closely written text - works. It is most effective when we believe that the author has some sort of control over the language choice, although it can work in all circumstances. It is most effective with literary texts like The Flea, The Otter and Hard Times.

Close analysis ignores facts about the author's life. As far as possible, the text is asked to stand on its own. This may limit our real understanding of the text. Without knowing something of Dickens' life or of early Victorian England, the extract from Hard Times is less interesting.

A second approach to texts will focus on context. The historical background to a text like Hard Times helps us understand Dickens' view: his criticism of the lifestyle demanded of factory workers and of the limitations to their freedoms - all hinted at in this extract - becomes all the clearer when we read the piece in its historical and biographical context. When we discover that Dickens visited Preston, we see that elements of this extract are journalistic and realistic. We also see in this extract the influence on the imagery of this passage of Victorian painting.

When we assess the "attitudes and values" of a text, we need, often, to understand them in their context. A nineteenth-century text may make assumptions about the role of women quite offensive to a twenty-first century reader. We don't "blame" the author; we appreciate the context in which he or she was writing.

In Annunciation and zero-point field, John Burnside takes a very modern approach to spirituality. The title itself mingles "old" ideas about angels with contemporary ideas about quantum physics: in doing so, Burnside is trying to discover a place for religious and spiritual values in a secular, scientific society.

Similarly, the genre in which Matty Groves is written - the 'border ballad' - leads us to expect an intense and bloody story which may owe its origins to factual history but which cannot be relied on to tell a true story: often we find that a genre's rules will have almost as much effect on the shape and style of a piece as the writer's individual intention or focus.

Thirdly, we might recognise that we will find more levels of meaning if we look at a text as a "psychological" piece. There are some deep truths which survive a story irrespective of its telling. (This is quite different form the approach of close analysis which focuses on the telling rather than the tale.) The many retellings of the Frankenstein story show that in essence this is a tale with a psychological significance. Matty Groves has survived in the oral tradition because there is a psychological truth in the triangular and violent relationship it depicts.

Finally, we must recognise that we need sometimes to be able to analyse texts which have no pretensions to being literary, texts such as transcripts of normal conversation. In analysing such texts we use a more linguistic approach, sometimes called stylistics: we look at interactional features; contextual features; phonology and graphology, and lexical and grammatical features. Such analysis will enable us to see more precisely what is being communicated in the transcript A; moreover, we can use this method to look at texts which imitate the natural use of language. Extracts from Much ado about nothing respond well to such an approach revealing the status of characters and their purposes in taking part in dialogue.

As you can see in my answer to Question one, by using these approaches both independently and in conjunction with one another, I have been able to discover appropriate layers of meaning in the texts.