Learning to Unlock Texts: Making and backing up arguments

This is part 2 in my series about textual analysis—you can read part 1 here if you missed it last month. We'll be takting a break after this until January, but then we'll be back into it with a look at different methods of analysing texts!

Every text has something to say about the world it in which it exists. In fact, they do say a number of things about the world. Sometimes the creator is purposeful about what they want to communicate, but a lot of these messages are unintended, or at least incidental. The underlying ideas of a work also range from being as plain as the nose on your face to being too subtle to pick out unless you look into them deliberately. Nevertheless, they are always there.

When we analyse texts, we’re looking at what they’re trying to communicate, but we’re also saying something about them, too. We may be commenting on how this novel is critical of certain power structures, or how that film is a lot more racist than the filmmakers seem to have thought it was; alternatively, we may be looking through the perspective of how well the text was able to convey the intended messages through techniques, and what other messages might have quietly slipped through. All these things that we’re saying about texts and that texts are saying about everything else are known academically as arguments, and for brevity that is the term I shall also use.