This week in Media 1 our readings were about textual analysis, which is defined in Beginner’s Guide to Textual Analysis by Alan McKee as follows:

“When we perform textual analysis on a text, we make an educated guess at some of the most likely interpretations that might be made of that text.”

Textual analysis has been an interest of mine for a number of years – at least in an informal way. I’ve been reading and writing cultural criticism (particularly cinema and music) for a number of years, and have built up a working knowledge of the basics of textual analysis even though I never had a grounding in the fundamental terms and definitions. So this week’s readings have been particularly enjoyable.

Textual analysis is a methodology of reading and interpreting works (texts), but it’s less rigorous than the methodologies used in science. Using a standardised, repeatable set of tools and methods work well when considering questions/topics of the natural world, i.e. those that only have one answer, but in artistic fields there are multiple meanings that can be interpreted – and all of them can be correct simultaneously.

This is because there’s no such thing as a single “correct” interpretation of any given text we analyse. Meaning isn’t inherent in the text, it’s assigned by the interpreter based on context.

The accuracy or inaccuracy of a text is irrelevant to its interpretation, because viewers interpret texts as “accurate” only when they conform to the viewer’s world view, making this an unreliable measure by which to judge texts. Similarly, as we’ve learned in past weeks, editing is a process in which decisions are made, and therefore even seemingly objective or “truthful” works (like documentary films) go through a process where someone decides whether to include or discard certain elements. Therefore all media is subjective, even documentaries, because they reflect the point of view of their author just as much as works of fiction do.

There are three levels of context that can be helpful to use when analysing a particular text:

1. The rest of the text – i.e. the self-contained “universe” of the text. Some things make sense and are meaningful in the contexts of some texts but would be baffling or incongruent in others, depending on whether the text itself has been set up as an environment in which that thing could exist.
2. The genre of the text – conventions and expectations based on the type of text being analysed. This relies on the interpreter’s familiarity with conventions of genre – i.e. characters breaking into song during a musical. This can also include eschewing conventions of genre to build meaning, such as a song appearing in a non-musical film (e.g. Magnolia).
3. The wider public context in which the text is being interpreted – societal and cultural norms and cues that inform how texts are interpreted. I’ve explored this particular analytical context in the post Textual analysis, artistic intent and feminist film theory.

Within these contexts, semiotics is a way of labelling and making sense of different elements within a text (in semiotics these elements are called signs). Signs exist within a code, which can be thought of as the contextual language in which the signs are interpreted. Depending on the code, signs can be analysed in isolation, in terms of their place among surrounding signs, within a wider context that includes the signs found in other texts, or a combination of all of these.