Part one

1. Analytical reading and its concern

1. The Subject Matter of Analytical Reading

Analytical reading is a branch of language study, which aims at teaching the theory and practice of verbal art. It promotes a further development of the readers’ ability to use their skills for the purpose of practical communication; it widens their general outlook, enriches their background knowledge. It gives them an ability to read fiction critically, which enables them to derive greater aesthetic pleasure out of reading imaginative literature, i.e. analytical reading teaches to make a linguistic analysis of the literary work.

The aims of linguistic analysis are to make the reader understand:

• the literary work;

• the author’s intentions, views, and attitude towards the reality;

• the author’s attitude to the events and characters described;

• how different linguistic means (of graphical, phonetic, lexical and grammatical layers) used by the author to render his purpose;

• the educational and aesthetic values of the literary work.

1.2. Literary Work

A literary work is a fragment of objective reality arranged in accordance with the author’s vision [5, p. 6].

The literary work aims at cognizing and interpreting the world we live in. The means of cognition in literature is a re-creation of objective reality in the form of images drawn from reality itself. In other words, the relation between reality and literature is that of an object and its image.

In terms of an object-image relationship, the literary work always means a representation of a life situation, whose image it is [5, p. 6]. What appears as a result of such a representation is an imagined world, based on what the author has perceived and absorbed from objective reality.

The literary work, like any other kind of communication, involves not only the addresser (the author) but also the addressee (the reader) [5, p. 8]. When an author begins to write, he is urged on by a desire to impart his vision of the world and his attitude towards it to someone, i.e. to an addressee (a reader). His attitude may be expressed in different ways, so the reading of the work does not necessarily result in the reader’s direct perception of what the author has conveyed.

Thus, every literary work (or work of fiction) is a unity of two planes:

1. The plane of meaning (the obvious) is the plot of the work, a portrayal of the fact of the objective reality (events, actions, time, place, etc.).

2. The plane of sense (the implied) is the author’s message, his attitude to the events and characters described.

Interpreting a literary work and getting at the message of the text require additional mental, analytical work on the part of the reader: contrasting different facts, their generalization, thinking over the actions of the characters, analyzing what they say and how they do it. It makes the reader’s perception a creative effort[5, p.8] and helps to share the author’s aesthetic world.

A truly talented work of imaginative literature always affects the reader, reaching both his intellect and emotions. Here lies the social importance and educational value of the literary work.