ELTWeekly Vol. 3 Issue#103 | October 31 | ISSN 0975-3036

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A Study of Literary Analysis: Application of Poststructuralist Approaches to Sylvia Plath’s Literature

by

Mohammad Saber Khaghaninezhad, Ph. D student of TEFL, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran

Sahar sadat Hadigheh, Shiraz University of medical sciences, Shiraz, Iran

Abstract

The development of literary analysis is becoming increasingly interdisciplinary, inter-textual, historically, socially-aware and politically-motivated. This study is an attempt to show how literary analyses/criticisms rely on a number of interrelated and competing theoretical, methodological and ideological positions. It is also an account of the development of critical practices of literary analysis which implicitly inculcate that close reading is an integral part of literary practices. Hence, three key types of poststructuralist literary analysis/criticism, (i.e., textual, feminist, and political) have been implemented for Sylvia Plath’s (a modern American poet) literary works to illustrate the application of these theoretical foundations in practice and also to imply the possibility of interpreting the literary pieces of a single poet through quite different approaches.

Key words: textual analysis, poststructuralist, political analysis, feminist analysis

1- Introduction

Understanding the world is not simply a matter of end-stopped, closed-off classification of a dichotomy between object and subject. To Heidegger (1971, p. 123), language is not about representing something; ‘it performs real actions in the world of beings’. Analysis sets out to understand the whole of a text from its details, and the detail of a text from its whole (the hermeneutic circle). This is an important point to understand, because it creates a method of reading and re-reading. Understanding is a dynamic activity, an interaction or dialogue which is never fully completed, never finished, never closed off. Understanding, therefore, is not an activity which people can perform perfectly; it is not something that is done; it is a part of being, of existence, of language. In this sense it becomes anti-rationalist, almost mystical, and art and therefore literature assumes a status where the truth of the world speaks for itself (Eagleton, 1983). Language shows rather than tells. Telling concentrates on the idea of language as referential; showing concentrates on the idea of language as manifestation. Analysis therefore focuses not on the expression of language, but on what it means for language to speak.

What is therefore crucial about this way of thinking is that it foregrounds not the individual subject, but an interaction, a struggle, a play, where understanding and meaning can never be fixed. The ego is therefore decentred, and reality becomes a play of languages, where neither voice can ever be determined as correct or incorrect. And it is here that we have a central, fundamental contrast to the traditional empiricist preoccupation with fixed, determinate, unchanging meanings of text, for, there is a preoccupation with indeterminacy and with changing, dynamic, meanings of text. (more…)