The Art of Text Interpretation

If Literature Studies has reached concensus on one topic, it is on the baffling nature of poetry. My personal experience tells otherwise, and leaves me only baffled by the failure of scientific methodology to deliver.

Contrary to its findings, most poetry is crystal clear to attentive readers. And these pages demonstrate how to focus attention on the keywords.

Comments on this paper in general can be posted on this main page. Comments on specific details are welcome on the individual page of the chapter in question. Comments that contain a website link will be blocked without reading.

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Part One; The Art of Phrasing

Literary Criticism is the scientificly approved blindfold of Literature Studies. And its perpetual bafflement gives Emily Dickinson’s Snake an opportunity to crush its heel that simply is too good to miss.

  • just a case history
  • the problem
  • the working method

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Part Two; The Art of Making Sense

Offers a sound explanation for the failure of science. Keep therefore in mind never to take a complot theory seriously. But even the darkest cloud has a silver lining, and a step by step analysis of Dickinson’s Let down thy Bars, O Death proves poetry a kind of crosswords. Which is the simpler explanation of perpetual bafflement. 

  • the fruits of honest labour
  • the art of communication
  • analyze this

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Part Three; The Art of Song Writing

Because proof is in science a matter of predicting test results correctly, Part Three runs a few tests.

  • a bone chilling tale
  • murder by suicide
  • a fate worse than death
  • the german style of comedy
  • classical tragedy

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Part Four; The Art of Reading Attentively

Exposes the basic flaw that left a complete branch of science incapacitated. An that caused appalling results on a rather transparent sample of prose.

  • the turn of the screw
  • elementary
  • the closest literature studies ever got
  • the blindness that followed
  • the haunting of Bly
  • a fluttered, anxious girl out of a hampshire vicarage
  • place
  • action
  • time

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Comments on the paper in general are welcome on this page. The parallel chain of isolated chapters are designed to react on specific items in those chapters.