Transcript Slide 1

Analysing Texts
Part Two
Looking within the text is only part of how you
might build up an understanding and start to
analyse a text.
Other things that might affect the meaning that
is created by a writer are...
...when it was written – the text may deal
with cultural and historical details that
belong to a specific time in history.
...when and by whom it is being read – a
modern day audience may react very
differently to the details in a text, to say a
contemporary reader (someone reading it at
the time it was written).
...the writer’s background – what were/are
the events in their lives that may affect what
they write about and how they write about
it.
Information about cultural and historical
detail is not always evident in the text and so
you must find about this to build up your
understanding and the your ability to really
understand what is being communicated.
You should also know about the writer.
Let’s have a look at some more
extracts.
Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In
rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks, the
courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog
suffered on a summer’s day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in
the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men’s stiff collars wilted
by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o’clock
naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet
talcum. People moved slowly then. They ambled across the square, shuffled in
and out of the stores around it, took their time about everything. A day was
twenty-four hours long but seemed longer. There was no hurry, for there was
nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see
outside the boundaries of Maycomb County.
Every town the size of Maycomb had families like the Ewells. No economic fluctuations changed their
status – people like the Ewells lived as guests of the county in prosperity as well as in the depths of a
depression. No truant officers could keep their numerous offspring in school; no public health officer
could free them from congenital defects, various worms, and the diseases indigenous to filthy
surroundings.
Maycomb Ewells lived behind the town garbage dump in what was once a Negro cabin. The cabin’s
plank walls were supplemented with sheets of corrugated iron, its roof shingled with tin cans
hammered flat, so only its general shape suggested its original design: square, with four tiny rooms
opening on to a shotgun hall, the cabin rested uneasily upon four irregular lumps of limestone. Its
windows were merely open spaces in the walls, which in the summertime were covered with greasy
strips of cheesecloth to keep out the varmints that feasted on Maycomb’s refuse. The varmints had a
lean time of it, for the Ewells gave the dump a thorough gleaning every day, and the fruits of their
industry (those that were not eaten) made the plot of ground around the cabin look like the
playhouse of an insane child: what passed for a fence was bits of tree-limbs, broomsticks and tool
shafts, all tipped with rusty hammer-heads, snaggle-toothed rake heads, shovels, axes and grubbing
hoes, held on with pieces of barbed wire. Enclosed by this barricade was a dirty yard containing the
remains of a Model-T Ford (on blocks), a discarded dentist’s chair, an ancient ice-box, plus lesser
items: old shoes, worn-out table radios, picture-frames, and fruit jars, under which scrawny orange
chickens pecked hopefully.
One corner of the yard, though, bewildered Maycomb. Against the fence, in a line, were six chippedenamel slop jars holding brilliant red geraniums, cared for as tenderly as if they belonged to Miss
Maudie Atkinson, had Miss Maudie deigned to permit a geranium on her premises. People said they
were Mayella Ewell’s.
How does Lee use details in this passage to present the position of the Ewells in Maycomb society?