Time in Relation to Text Analysis

Since there is no “objective truth” because every person is entitled to their own interpretation of a text, identifying the “most likely interpretation” can be challenging. This makes me wonder about the director’s role: how can he be certain that audience will grasp his interpretation of the story?

In “A Beginner’s Guide to Textual Analysis”, Alan Mckee explains that understanding the context is essential to make sense of the main text in question. He highlights three levels of contexts: the “rest of text, “genre of text” and “the wider public context in which the text is circulated.” Generally speaking, it is necessary to identify the social circumstances surrounding the media article and how its creation is influenced by other related articles.

This leads me to realise how the concept of time plays a key role as well, specifically the way past and present affect each other. We can only understand the past from our present context. From where we stand, we evaluate how past events culminated in the present. Therefore, when we are recounting, we can only affect the audience based on present-time interpretations of history.

Going back to the idea of directing, the artiste can only predict his/her audience’s most likely interpretation based on the present context. It is not possible to create something for a target audience in the 60s. People from that period have already evolved with time. This idea reminds me of how in photojournalism elective, we learnt that the value of a story is based on its “newsworthiness”; i.e. how relevant and important it is in the present context.

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