Literary Analysis and Essay Fundamentals

Literary Text Analysis

Key Themes in Literary Works

• Truth: The extreme difficulty in accessing or finding the truth, often obscured by circumstances.
• Violence: The execution of crime, its pervasive presence in daily life, and its role in revenge.
• Honor: A mechanism of revenge used to restore one's reputation.
• Religion and Beliefs: The influence of religious codes and personal convictions.

Historical Timeframe and Narrative Structure

The historical timeframe is often brief (e.g., 24 hours), with events revisited years later (e.g., 23 years after a reunion). Narration may occur even further in the future (e.g., 27 years later).

Narrative Technique:

• Reconstruction of a story through a first-person witness narrator.
• Functions as an eyewitness, providing facts from personal memory.
• Multiperspective viewpoint.
• Contradictory characters.
• Non-linear, circular, and chaotic time flow, utilizing repetition and anticipations.
• Abundance of dialogues and narrative fragments (e.g., objects, environments, characters).

Style: Blends oral, colloquial, or familiar language with a literary, cultivated register, featuring strong rhetorical nuances, irony, humor, fantasy, and sensuality.

Characteristics of Literary Texts

• No immediate practical purpose; aims to create beauty and aesthetic delight.
• Predominance of poetic function and aesthetic features.
• Focus on personal creation and expression.
• Addressed to a universal receiver (though sometimes incorporating complex or elaborate religious codes).
• Connotative, suggestive language with evocative power; often innovative and unusual.
• Seeks originality, novelty, and emotion.
• Employs rhetorical or stylistic devices.

Understanding the Essay Genre

Core Characteristics of Essays

• Theme: Free choice of subject matter.
• Subject: Any topic may be subject to an essay.
• Originality: Critical for effective expression.
• Author's Expression: The author expresses personal thoughts on a particular topic.
• Objectivity and Subjectivity: Combines both perspectives.

Essay Style and Tone

Lexicon: Connotative. Style: Often fun, friendly, fast, and attractive.

Tone: May be confidential (the author approaches the reader, avoiding emotional distancing typical of scientific, legal, or administrative texts), serious, humorous, or even satirical.

Scientific rigor and completeness may be sacrificed to give the text a lively and dynamic air and encourage its dissemination. Employs artistic style, literary resources, and figures, paying particular attention to how the message is conveyed.

Language and Structure

• Language: Educated use of language and complex sentence structures (without compromising readability).
• Brevity: Can be very brief or consist of several pages.

Audience and Purpose

• Target Audience: Broad, diverse, and cultured; typically a non-specialist reader. Technical terms are used sparingly, and always within a context that allows comprehension by the general reader.
• Intention: Not primarily designed to inform, but to persuade or convince.

Form and Functions of an Essay

• Form: Utilizes an expository-argumentative discourse, presented in a personal manner.
• Functions:
  • Representative: Exposure of a subject.
  • Persuasive: Convincing the reader of a specific point of view.
  • Expressive: The point of view is subjective, resulting from a personal interpretation.
  • Aesthetics: In the development of an underlying theme, emphasizing stylistic choices, thus classifying it as a literary genre.