The Nature and Purpose of Literary Analysis

For the millennia during which literature has existed, scholars, intellectuals, and lay people have unceasingly engaged in the act of analyzing it. Whatever the variety of analytical approaches to literature might be, literary analysis is in itself a universal necessity when approaching a text, and cannot be escaped on some level. Literary analysis enables readers to fully grasp the core abstractions which an author has bestowed upon his work. Furthermore, it is indispensable in rendering the literature relevant, both to the individual's own life and to an understanding of the universal human condition.

When any author creates a work of literature, he does so starting with a set of basic intellectual premises, fundamental assumptions that permeate the entirety of his work. The author has chosen to create a work of literature as a vehicle for transmitting those premises to his readers. On their own, as floating abstractions detached from the empirical observation and the detailed logical reasoning which led to their derivation, the author's premises cannot be readily communicated to a reader who does not grasp them already. An author who holds individualism as a basic premise, for example, will find difficulty in communicating it by simply stating, "I believe in individualism." If, however, he offers a lucid analysis of the superiority of individualism over the alternatives, filled with realistic examples of why this is so, then his convictions become far more persuasive. Better yet, he might write a story, a series of rationally structured fictional events, which a reader could approach as if it were a concrete experience. All knowledge, at its root, is derived from sensory experience and observation. Thus, a work of litearture, by recreating an environment of observation through the events and descriptions within it, aims to allow the reader to tap into the source of the premises the author seeks to communicate. Thereby, the reader is given the foundation from which to proceed in understanding and identifying with the author's abstract ideas.