Aphorisms on Texts

Text as the Thing Being Interpreted: If the concept of a text can be understood as anything made by a human or group of humans, and interpretation as an explanation of how and why something was made in the way it was made, then you must know what your text is before you start to interpret it. In any interpretation, the text is the thing being interpreted, whether that “thing” is a book, idea, action, situation, event, trend, topic, or some other social phenomenon.

Text Statements: In an interpretation, your text statement is a promise to your reader, a promise to interpret something, a promise that must then be fulfilled by a paper that actually interprets that thing. You fulfill the promise you make in your text statement when you offer a thesis statement. Your text must be what your thesis is about, and your thesis must be a claim about your text. Your argument must be responsive to your text; you must actually be interpreting what you said you were going to interpret. Thus, a text is what’s being interpreted, and an argument is the interpretation of that thing.

Defining Your Text: Use the versatility of textuality to your advantage. That is, use your opportunity to define and interpret anything humans make to identify and focus in on exactly what you want to interpret. This is called “defining your text.”

Defining a Text (1): For example, “the television show Mad Men is a text, as is “the character Peggy Olson in Mad Men,” and “Peggy’s haircut in the episode ‘The Jet Set’ during season two of Mad Men,” and “the gender politics symbolized in Peggy’s haircut in the episode ‘The Jet Set’ during season two of Mad Men.”

Defining a Text (2): Or “stigma” is a text, as is “the causes and effects of stigma,” and “the social and psychological causes and effects of the ‘ex-con’ stigma,” and “the social and psychological causes and effects of the ‘ex-con’ stigma during the hiring process in the southern United States.”

Precision When Defining a Text: In the above examples, each articulation identifies something different to address, something more specific, and thus something more likely to be interpreted fully. The more precisely you can identify the text you’re interpreting, the more fully you’ll be able to fulfill the promise of all interpretation: to explain how and why a text was made in the way that it was.

Undefined Texts: Many unsuccessful interpretations are doomed from conception because they fail to define a text or because they fail to define a text specifically enough. Often, it is not someone’s inability to interpret a text that comes up short but that person’s failure or refusal to identify and define a specific enough text, one that might actually be interpreted in the space available.

Narrowing Your Text: Thus, when defining your text, be aware of your limitations. If you’re writing a five-page paper, your text can’t be something like “Milton’s Paradise Lost.” Why not? Your text can’t be “Milton’s Paradise Lost” because scholars have been writing about “Milton’s Paradise Lost” for almost four centuries, and we haven’t figured it out yet. Sorry to break the news to you, but you’re not going to interpret the entirety of Milton’s Paradise Lost in a five-page paper. It would take an entire scholarly book, or more likely an entire scholarly career, or in fact several careers, to interpret the totality of “Milton’s Paradise Lost.” If you promise to do it in five pages, you’re going to fail. What you can do in five pages, however, is produce an interpretation of a specific aspect of Milton’s Paradise Lost. A five-page paper might actually be able to offer an interpretation of something like “the context and rhetorical features of Satan’s first use of the word ‘evil’ in Book V of Paradise Lost.” When you scale back the size of your promise to your reader (by narrowing your definition of your text), you ramp up the likelihood of fulfilling that promise (by allowing yourself to explore your text in depth).

How to Define Your Text: Try to define your text as clearly as possible by identifying the general and the specific things you’ll be interpreting. By the general sense of your text, I mean the topic(s) or document(s) under consideration; by the specific sense, I mean the particular examples of the topic(s) or the particular places in the document(s).

Defining Texts with Specificity: For example, instead of saying, “This paper addresses stigma in Shakespeare’s plays,” you might write, “Focusing on four characters – Richard III, Shylock, Falstaff, and Caliban – this paper explores the concept of stigma in Shakespeare’s plays.” Or, instead of saying, “In this paper I address gun violence,” try saying, “Focusing on the gunmen behind the recent tragedies in Aurora and Newtown, this paper explores the mind of the mass murderer in twenty-first century America.”

Flagging Text Statements: Sometimes it can be helpful to “flag” your text statement as such by saying something like, “This paper concerns …” or “In this paper, I explore…”

Text Statements as Questions: It is possible to state your text in the form of a question – e.g., “Why are there only two women in Hamlet?” – but it is important to understand the difference between a text statement and a problem statement. A text statement identifies the problem to be addressed (what it is), while a problem statement explains why a problem is a problem (why it needs interpretation).

Not Every Paper Needs a Text Statement: Shorter papers (especially close readings) often don’t need an explicit text statement: it suffices to identify a question or problem (as long as the specific text – i.e., the thing being interpreted – is clear in your statement of that question or problem).

But You Should Still Write a Text Statement: Even if the paper doesn’t require a text statement, however, the interpretive process that leads up to that paper depends upon a clear understanding of what is being interpreted. Thus, you should always write a text statement, even if you eventually determine that it’s unnecessary or inelegant in your actual paper.

Longer Papers Need Text Statements: Longer papers (especially those involving multiple kinds of evidence) always need an explicit text statement.