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Reading a Text in Contexts

This paper aims to examine a new kind of reading, which is different from the old method of reading, This day there is no single right answer in literary analysis, and it cannot be accepted that any opinion is valid. As Adrian Beard says, the studying a text in contexts has become a major new emphasis in contemporary literary studies. He encourages readers to think about the contexts in which texts mean different things to different people at different times. According to this point of view, we ought to recognize that the word 'contexts' has been used in plural, which emphasizes that readers are not searching for one absolute meaning, but for many meanings in a text. When we read a text, an interpretation of the text is understood to be the art of drawing conclusions from a series of clues offered by the text. The activity of interpreting a literary text is not unlike the activity of interpreting any set of circumstances. Readers gather clues about character, plot, circumstance, and motivation, and from these clues they deduce or make conclusions. However, the old reading method was to read works by great authors, chosen by their teachers who guided them towards an understanding of what these books were 'about'. This meant 1hat the content of the texts was always seen as far more important than the process of reading 1hem, which became a rather passive process. This way of looking at texts is now challenged by critics who argue that the processes of writing and reading require a more coherent analysis. Now we are able to know that one method, Beard's reading a text in contexts is useful to read a text.