Literary Contexts: Meaning And Importance Of Literary Texts

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Q1. LISTS AND NARRATIVE

In order for a list to become a coherent narrative, each item, person, time or place on the list must connect to the item before and after in some way. The interactions can be in many different ways, such as a phone book is in alphabetical order, however without a meaning behind the list, there is no text or context to the narrative. Without a context a text will always be just a list and not a narrative. However by giving more details about the list and giving the readers cues to connect the items or events can change a text list into a narrative.
Poststructuralism stresses that the meaning found in text is different for everybody as everyone brings their previous readings and understandings to the text. Under this …show more content…

Literary meaning in narrative, to me, can be anything in a text that moves the reader. Similar to Barthes punctum idea, that a small detail, can elicit an intense, sudden emotional response; a small change in the narrative could alter when a response is triggered, causing the reader to leave the text with a different understanding of the text and its meaning than previously read.
The meaning can be different depending on the time it’s read, who reads it, or even the place it’s read. Whether it’s the readers first time reading the narrative, their twentieth time, or they are the author coming back to revisit and edit before finishing the work; each reader when reading a narrative brings his or her own views and understandings to the text. Therefore texts develop intertextuality and can have a new and different meaning for each reader. Intertextuality also causes the meaning taken from a text to change when it is put into contact with other texts the reader has previously read and will eventually encounter. This also causes the texts meaning to constantly change as new texts are encountered. Along with intertextuality, hypertextuality can effect how meaning is found in a text. Hypertextuality refers to any relationship uniting a text to an earlier edition of that text. Because of this intertextuality and hypertextuality, even when an author or creator has finished the work to the best of their abilities, the work will never be “complete” as every new reader will bring a new point of view and ideas of what the meaning of the text truly

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