You’ve probably noticed the word “text” being used in a number of places in this course. Before you assume that literary scholars go around staring at their phones to analyze sentences like “LOL IFYP!,” we should clarify what “text” means in the academic context. In humanities scholarship, a “text” is any object that can be read: usually novels, poems, essays, or movies, but theoretically including anything that conveys meaning, such as architecture, fashion, or advertisements.

Humanities fields, like literary studies and media studies, rely heavily on texts as evidence. Researchers in these fields analyze primary source texts, like novels and films, with support from secondary sources, like theoretical texts. Secondary source texts provide frameworks for interpretation and argument-building.

Direct Quotations

Oftentimes, texts are used as evidence in the form of direct quotations from the work in question. In an article on the Filipino superhero Darna, Cherish Aileen Aguilar Brillon uses a direct quote from the comic book as evidence to support a claim about the superhero’s “mission” (which in turn supports a claim about the ways in which Darna comics both reflect and modify the American superhero genre).

Mission serves as the superhero’s moral anchor. Darna’s mission was clearly articulated in the first comics issue:

Darna: Magmula ngayon, ako, si Darna, sa ngalan ng Planetang Marte na aking pinagmulan, ang siyang magiging pinakamahigpitna katungali ng kasamaang naglipana dito sa inyong daigdig. (Darna: From now on, I, Darna of Planet Marte, will be the greatest enemy of evil that roams your planet.) (Ravelo and Redondo, #1 17)

The initial mission is straightforward: Darna’s duty was just to protect the people from all the bad elements in this world. Its simplest interpretation means that Darna’s job is similar to a law enforcer who catches bad guys. As with genre elements, this mission evolved into something else. It went from “protecting the people against the bad elements” to making sure that idealistic and abstract notions of peace and justice are achieved. This was first verbalized in Darna vs. The Planet Women, where the opening scene saw Narda praying to God, asking that she be made an instrument for attaining “katarungan atkatiwasayan” (justice and peace).

Here, Darna is not only tasked with fighting evil but with making sure that justice is achieved and served on behalf of the oppressed. But what does achieving justice mean in Filipino society? …

Note that the meaning of the direct quote is not treated as self-evident. Immediately after quoting the comic book, Brillon explains the quotation and ties it into the overall claim of the paragraph.

Summaries

When the specific language of a text is less important that a broader plot point or theme, scholars often use a summary of the relevant parts of the text as evidence to support their claim. In an essay about cats in literature, for instance, Maria Nikolajeva argues that cats often represent anti-authoritarian forces and ideas. She describes one story in which “chaos invades the everyday order, all rules are abolished, and the whole house is literally turned upside down” (Nikolajeva 254). See if you recognize which story is being summarized here:

The Cat can be interpreted as the child’s playful imagination set free as soon as the adults leave the house. The Cat interrogates all the norms of the adult order. He can do the impossible balancing acts. His use of language is intricate, yet he does not play with sheer logic. Instead, he demonstrates the arbitrary nature of language, which is one of the main instruments of power that adults employ to oppress children. For instance, the Cat promises to show the children two things. The word “thing” is a so-called linguistic shifter – that is, an expression the content of which can only be determined by the situation (“a thing” can denote almost anything, although most often an inanimate object). However, on turning the page, the word acquires a concrete and tangible signified, as it refers to two living creatures. The word “thing” ceases to be a shifter and becomes a regular signifier, while the signified, Thing One and Thing Two, are portrayed in the picture, thus visualizing the concretized abstraction. Not least, the Cat and the two Things intrude into the Holiest, the mother’s bedroom, where the children most likely are not allowed to be, and turn it upside down, too – a perfect symbol for the attack on parental authority. (Nikolajeva 254)

This paragraph summarizes several scenes in the text and suggests how we should interpret the meaning of these scenes. Through a purposeful retelling, the plot of the story becomes evidence in support of the argument (that cats in literature can represent anti-authoritarian ideas).

Secondary Works

Scholarly essays also use quotations from or summaries of secondary works as evidence to help make their overall case. In an analysis of the character of Rue in The Hunger Games, for instance, S.R. Tolliver uses a method of Critical Discourse Analysis outlined by Norman Fairclough. For this reason, Fairclough’s text becomes part of the evidence mustered by Tolliver to make her points about Rue:

Essentially, the microanalysis of The Hunger Games connected to the macroanalysis of stereotypes about Black girls creates a foundation to explore why some readers believed Rue to be White. Particularly, Fairclough (2003) contended that texts assume and create implicit interpretative positions for subjects who are supposed to be capable of using presuppositions created from their prior knowledge to make connections across diverse elements of texts and to generate logical interpretations. These interpretations are not only influenced by the intertextual nature of discourse, but interpreters also have “particular accumulated social experiences…with resources variously oriented to the multiple dimensions of social life” that affect how they interpret a text (p. 136). These claims suggest that consumers of discourse will naturally make intertextual connections to other modes of discourse and to society as a whole, whether they know it or not.

Readers’ social experiences, often imbued with visual and textual references of Black girls who do not possess innocent and childlike qualities, could create an implicit foundation for reading biases that affects how they interpret the text. (Tolliver 11-12)

In this passage, Tolliver uses both a summary of Fairclough’s theory and a direct quote from Fairclough’s book to make the point that readers always read in light of other things they’ve read and heard (i.e. readers “make intertextual connections to other modes of discourse and to society as a whole”).