Interpretation of literary

Interpretation 
Interpretation of a belles-lettres work comprises the following 
three stages: 1. Preparatory stage. 2. Main stage. 3. Conclusive stage. 
The preparatory stage requires the readers' acquaintance with the 
author's literary career and the cultural context. The knowledge of the 
historical situation and the concrete circumstance of the creation of the 
literary text will help the reader to see the author's pragmatic task, i.e. 
the purpose of his book. The author's biography, an outline of his 
previous works, the information about his world outlook, his social 
sympathies, his aesthetic credo etc. will prepare the reader for 
understanding ambiguous and obscure places in the text and for 
comprehending the book's message. 
The main stage deals with the belles-lettres text itself and com-
prises two steps; Step A and Step B. 
Step A presupposes reading the imaginative production for the 
•sake of its content-factual information, i.e. the plot of the novel or story 
and the roles of its main personages. Simultaneously the reader 
acquaints himself with the vertical context, i.e. the commentary to the 
text, explaining quotations from world classics, allusions and elucidating 
different proper and geographic names and historic facts. If the book is 
not supplied with a commentary, the reader can consult an 
encyclopaedia or other reference-books. Since this step deals with the 
text taken in its wholeness it is also convenient now to analyse its 
structure (with two kinds of segmentation: context — variativc and 
volume-pragmatic traditional arrangement of text components), its 

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composition (with all elements of the plot), its completeness and to a 
certain extent its integration. 
Step B deals with the linguoustylistic analysis of the text, com-
prising the following aspects: a) systematization of key-words and 
thematic words with subsequent inferences from their usage; b) 
decoding all lexical, syntactic and phonetic stylistic devices and other 
cases of foregrounding; c) selection of poetic details and commenting on 
their language capacity. 
The conclusive stage is supposed to provide a final formulation of 
the Content-Conceptual Information based on the analyses of the 
modality of the text, its impliciteness, the role of the title and its 
pragmatics. It will be revealed in the process of discussion among the 
recipients of the book (the students guided by their teacher). 
The scheme of interpretation given below can help to organize the 
process of interpretation at the seminars with students. It is 
recommended that all students should be thoroughly acquiaintcd with 
the scheme. For this purpose it is advisable to read and trans-Hate all 
items of the scheme in the auditorium at the introductory lesson under 
the teacher's guidance. 
For discussion at the lesson the teacher can use those items from 
the scheme which arc more significant for the chosen literary text.