Comparing Texts

Nicola Onyett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134333721
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Routledge A Level English Guides equip AS and A2 Level students with the skills they need to explore, evaluate, and enjoy English. Books in the series are built around the various skills specified in the assessment objectives (AOs) for all AS and A2 Level English courses.
Focusing on the AOs most relevant to their topic, the books help students to develop their knowledge and abilities through analysis of lively texts and contemporary data. Each book in the series covers a different area of language and literary study, and offers accessible explanations, examples, exercises, summaries, suggested answers and a glossary of key terms.

Comparing Texts:

• provides students with the skills they need to compare and contrast texts
• explores and compares texts from a wide range of genres and periods
• draws on a large number of literary and non-literary texts, from Chaucer's Wife of Bath to The Good Wife's Guide, from Frankenstein to poetry by Carol Ann Duffy, and from Nigella Lawson to Fast Food Nation
• introduces the main themes and issues students need to consider when comparing texts: themes, genre, time and place, form and structure, and intertextuality.

CHAPTER 1
GENRE

This chapter focuses on the impact and importance of genre upon the way we read and receive texts. A genre is the framework within which a particular type of text operates – the rules of the game, if you like. The oldest established use of the term ‘genre’ refers to the classical literary text types of poetry, prose and drama, and these neat categories are often used to organise and shape the way we respond to certain texts and create our own meanings. Our expectations of each new text we come across are based upon either our previous experience of similar texts, or the way in which a new text is presented. This network of links between texts is called intertextuality . If you read a sequel to a novel you have enjoyed, you would expect it to relate to the first text in some way, perhaps by picking up where the previous narrative had left off, or by following the same characters through another series of adventures. If you read a detective novel, you take it for granted that narrative closure will involve the solution to the central crime of the story – which is why thrillers are often known as ‘whodunits’. Moreover, if your English teacher tells you that you that you will be studying a particular novel as an examination text, you might reasonably expect it to be a famous work by a great writer. Most A Level students would be surprised to be presented with a copy of The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies.

TEXT CONVENTIONS

If you think about the advertising and marketing of books, television programmes and films, you will see how the producers of these media texts rely on the audience’s knowledge of generic conventions. Next time you are in a bookshop, notice how, for instance, romantic novels aimed at young women (often referred to as ‘chick-lit’) are grouped together and identified by their bright pastel front covers and modern cartoon illustrations. J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books are sold in bright jackets with vivid illustrations and similar typeface for children, but with redesigned, black-and-white, graphic front covers for adults. Television soap operas, with their regular characters and continuous action, are designed to catch the early evening audiences that the programme schedulers hope will stay tuned to a particular channel for the rest of the evening. The soaps are closely identified with their channels and function as brand identifiers: EastEnders denotes BBC1, Coronation Street ITV1 and Hollyoaks Channel 4.

Next time you go to the cinema, see how film trailers try to hook you by linking a new release to a previous success. This is one of the key reasons for the success of franchise films such as the Scream series; the audience that pays to see Scream III has a good working knowledge of the generic conventions of not only horror movies in general, but the horror-spoof subgenre in particular. The way in which we receive and understand media texts shapes and controls our expectations of them. Generic practices and conventions provide us with a yardstick against which to measure our responses; they tell us how to think about texts.

In order to understand how texts work, we need to familiarise ourselves with their machinery. Both writers and readers are aware of generic conventions, and much of the interest which emerges as we extract our own meanings from a particular text is located in the extent to which we are aware of the writer’s ideas and intentions.

Exercise 1 – Omelette à l’Oseille

Read the following complete text and place it within the genre that seems most appropriate to you. Suggestions for answer follow.

Elizabeth David
Omelette à l’Oseille (1955)

One of the nicest of summer omelettes. Wash a handful of sorrel; chop it. Melt it in butter; add salt. In five minutes it is ready to add to the eggs.

Suggestions for Answer

This text follows the classical recipe format, describing how to prepare a simple meal. The reader deduces that the French title (French being the traditional language of fine cooking) means ‘sorrel omelette’ because of the ingredients listed. Elizabeth David begins with an authoritative pronouncement on the dish, but does not describe its flavour in any detail. Her voice is cool, concise and economical; her sophisticated punctuation, particularly the use of semi-colons, enables her to compress a lot of information into brief but weighty sentences.

CASE STUDY: THE RECIPE GENRE

This text contains ideas and information about food preparation. Like all the other extracts in this chapter it can be categorised as a recipe, and this generic similarity is a useful perspective from which to compare the form, structure and language of the following texts.

Exercise 2 – Key Lime Pie

Read the following text from How to Be a Domestic Goddess and list the linguistic elements that support a recipe classification. Suggestions for answer are at the back of the book.

Nigella Lawson (2000)

What follows are two versions of key lime pie, although there is little chance of using fresh key limes. You can use bottled key lime juice (or so it’s claimed), but I tend to use ordinary limes.

A note on crusts: it’s traditional to use digestive biscuits, but I wanted to make a chocolate-based one as well, I suppose in memory of the chocolate lime sweets I ate as a child. If you use chocolate digestives, it’s hard to cut the tart once it’s been fridged so I suggest you use ordinary digestives with a teaspoonful of cocoa added when you mix them with the butter. Ginger nuts work very well, too: and I love using coconut biscuits.

And as far as the filling goes, don’t expect a lime pie to be green. It’s yellow – though the first pie is slightly greener because of the zest. A really green pie is a dyed pie.

The following seems to be the basic model for a key lime pie: and it’s the one in Jane Grigson’s monumentally absorbing Fruit Book. Don’t be put off by the idea of condensed milk. It’s essential and the sourness of the limes totally sees off its temple-aching sugariness.

For the base:	For the filling:
200g digestive biscuits	5 large egg yolks
50g softened, unsalted butter	397g can sweetened condensed milk
Springform tin	zest of 3 limes
	150ml lime juice ⌠of 4—5 limes⌡
	3 large egg whites

Put the biscuits and butter into the processor and blitz till all’s reduced to oily crumbs. Press these into the tin, lining the bottom and going a little way up the sides, and chill in the fridge while you get on with the rest.

You will need an electric mixer to do this. I always use my KitchenAid, but a hand-held one is fine. Beat the egg yolks until thick, add the can of condensed milk, grated zest and the lime juice. Whisk the egg whites separately until soft peaks form, then fold gently into the yolk mixture. Pour into the lined tin and cook for 25 minutes, when the filling should be firm. It may puff up and then, on cooling, fall, but that’s the deal.

Leave to cool on a rack before unmoulding, and chill well.

Serves 6–8.

Suggestions for Answer

Your response to this exercise represents your working knowledge of how the recipe genre operates. You have identified a series of patterns and structures within this text, which you associate with the recipe genre; however, you may also have processed additional information. Because Nigella Lawson is a well-known food writer, you would not expect her to be writing a novel, poem or comedy sketch: your pre-existing knowledge and understanding has therefore shaped your expectations of this new text.

The primary function of a recipe is to instruct the reader and many of the discourse features of this extract underpin that purpose. Yet aspects of the text do not square with a recipe categorisation. These awkwardnesses should make you think about our tendency as readers to pigeonhole texts, and the constraints of too narrow a classification. Most writing is multi-functional, working on several levels at once rather than sticking slavishly to a single theme or purpose.

The register of this text indicates that it is aimed at a well-educated audience with a wide vocabulary and an interest in the work of other experts. An academic style is created as Lawson cites a related reference text for potential further reading, Jane Grigson’s Fruit Book. A noticeable feature of her prose is the lavish use of personalised description, such as the unusual choice of the verb ‘ fridged’, rather than ‘chilled’, and the vivid physical accuracy of the noun phrase ‘temple-aching sugariness’ for an oversweet taste. The punctuation is often complex and unusual: the effect of three carefully placed commas followed by a colloquial punch line adds interest to the sentence, ‘It may puff up and then, on cooling, fall, but that’s the deal.’ This decorative and embellished style is more complex and idiosyncratic than we might expect of a straightforward set of instructions.

How to Be a Domestic Goddess was accompanied by a Channel 4 television series. It is, in a sense, a written version of a performance text received visually by the viewers. The written form must, therefore, convey something of the author’s personality to recreate the relationship between Lawson as seen on television and her viewers at home, and this overrides the impersonal instructional conventions of the recipe genre. Moreover, not everyone who reads this text intends to make the pie; many readers will have bought How to Be a Domestic Goddess to make a statement about their own actual or fantasy lifestyle, rather than as an instruction manual. Marketing and publicity present Lawson’s books as a way to recreate the glamorous and aspirational existence her audience has seen on television.

Exercise 3 – The Domestic Goddess

Analyse the following extract, also from Nigella Lawson’s How to Be a Domestic Goddess, noting

• (a)any discourse features that confirm that it is still within the recipe genre and
• (b)those that challenge this categorisation.

Suggestions for answer follow on page 6.

This is a book about baking, but not a baking book – not in the sense of being a manual or a comprehensive guide or a map of a land you do not inhabit. I neither want to confine you to kitchen quarters nor even suggest that it might be desirable. But I do think that many of us have become alienated from the domestic sphere, and that it can actually make us feel better to claim back some of that space, make it comforting rather than frightening. In a way, baking stands both as a useful metaphor for the familial warmth of the kitchen we fondly imagine used to exist, and as a way of reclaiming our lost Eden. This is hardly a culinary matter, of course: but cooking, we know, has a way of cutting through things, and to things, which have nothing to do with the kitchen. This is why it matters.

The trouble with much modern cooking is not that the food it produces isn’t good, but that the mood it induces in the cook is one of the skin-of-the-teeth efficiency, all briskness and little pleasure. Sometimes that’s the best we can manage, but at other times we don’t want to feel like a post-modern, post-feminist, overstretched woman but, rather a domestic goddess, trailing nutmeggy fumes of baking pie in our languorous wake.

So what I’m talking about is not being a domestic goddess exactly, but feeling like one. One of the reasons making cakes is satisfying is that the effort required is so much less than the gratitude conferred. Everyone seems to think it’s hard to make a cake (and no need to disillusion them), but it doesn’t take more than 25 minutes to make and bake a tray of muffins or a sponge layer cake, and the returns are high: you feel disproportionately good about yourself afterwards. That is what baking, what all of this book, is about: feeling good, wafting along in the warm, sweet-smelling air, unwinding, no longer being entirely being an office creature; and that’s exactly what I mean by ‘comfort cooking’.

Part of it too is about a fond, if ironic, dream: the unexpressed ‘I’ that is a cross between Sophia Loren and Debbie Reynolds in pink cashmere cardigan and fetching gingham pinny, a weekend alter-ego winning adoring glances and endless approbation from anyone who has the good fortune to eat in her kitchen. The good thing is, we don’t have to get ourselves up in Little Lady drag and we don’t have to renounce the world and enter into a life of domestic drudgery. But we can bake a little – and a cake is just a cake, far easier than getting the timing right for even the most artlessly casual of midweek dinner parties.

This isn’t a dream; what’s more, it isn’t even a nightmare.

Suggestions for Answer

This text (the preface to How to Be a Domestic Goddess) differs from Nigella Lawson’s key lime pie recipe in being theoretical rather than practical. The narrative structure of polemic is used and the text is an essay set out in paragraphs. Baking is presented as an act of profound cultural significance. The first sentence presents the reader with a paradox that undermines the main purpose of a cookery book at a stroke, by denying that this text will tell you how to bake. Lawson states that she is using cookery as a metaphor for the role of modern women; it is not the practicality of baking that matters, but the psychology and sociology of it. She polarises the modern career woman who is too busy to cook for pleasure and the 1950s ‘domestic goddess, trailing nutmeggy fumes of baking pie in her wake’, using hyperbole to add an ironic, humorous feel; baking is presented as ‘a way of reclaiming our lost Eden’.

Her deviation from the traditional recipe form is clear from the verbs she uses. Rather than the imperative form associated with the genre – mix, stir, grate, beat – Lawson uses evocative phrases such as ‘feeling good’, ‘wafting along’, ‘unwinding’ and ‘winning adoring glances’. Again, unlike the conventional impersonal and context-free language of instructional writing, Lawson sets up a personal relationship with her readers, visually encoding a shared secret within the text by using parentheses...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• CHAPTER 1: GENRE
• CHAPTER 2: THEME
• CHAPTER 3: LINKED AND LABELLED TEXTS
• CHAPTER 4: SOURCES AND ADAPTATIONS
• CHAPTER 5: COMPARING TEXTS IN EXAMINATIONS
• SUGGESTIONS FOR ANSWER
• GLOSSARY