Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The systematic study and analysis of literature dates back to the beginnings of literary “text production”; even the earliest forms of oral literature were practiced in a context of descriptive and prescriptive aesthetics. With the rise of written literature emerged a canon of rules that could be applied to text in order to evaluate its adherence to poetic norms and values, and very soon quantitative and qualitative methods of text analysis were applied in textual exegesis. But the analysis of literature is traditionally seen as a subjective procedure. Objectivity, based on empirical evidence, does not seem to figure prominently in studies that elucidate meaning from literary texts. In most studies, however, some kind of exemplary textual sampling does take place, and scholars occasionally arrive at value judgments that are based on the observation of frequent occurrences or the absence of certain textual features. The exact number of occurrences and/or their distribution in long texts is difficult to establish, because literary texts, in particular novels, make a thorough analysis of every single word or sentence almost impossible. Empirical evidence that is truly representative for the whole text is extremely difficult to come by, and mainstream literary scholarship has come to accept this limitation as a given fact:A simultaneous possession by the reader of all the words and ... log in or subscribe to read full text