Literary Analysis at School - Return to Text

Prof. Anton Pokrivčák, University of Trnava, Slovakia, ID LLCE2018-405;      Abstract: As far as education is concerned, one may say that literature has not lost its importance. On the contrary, the general debilitating effect of the surrounding mass media machinery makes it of utmost importance that students are given a chance of real encounter with literary works, getting engaged in meaningful discussions and analyses. The twentieth century saw many approaches to literature, each of them being a reflection of particular social and cultural circumstances, in which the meaningful discussions were as if forgotten, at the expense of farfetched theorising, often about the issues which had very little in common with literature, using strange methodologies and arriving at strange and even funny results. There were also approaches, however, which remained within the literary field and used literary methodology. The aim of the paper is to point to the importance of return to the work with text in literary studies through the discussion of American New Criticism.

Key words: teaching literary analysis, literary criticism, New Criticism