But as Spinoza once said about scripture, sometimes it's better to study a text for its meaning, not its truth.
We seldom study a text in depth without finding that it miraculously reflects our preoccupations; inside every book, we are seeking and finding ourselves.
Academic critics tend to shy away from the shifting nature of such judgments, for one thing, and are more interested in other reasons to study a text.
The simple view is less applicable when we put reading to other purposes, e.g., when students study a text for a quiz, or when we scan texts looking for a fact as part of a research project.
When the Israeli stylometricans, as they call themselves, study a text, they scrub it clean of everything that's "topic specific" -- in other words, no "gown," no "princess," no "keg," no "bullet-resistant".
Using a 2 × 2 design, university students (N = 143) studied a text with the intention of either generating test items or performing well on a test, and then either generated multiple-choice items or restudied the text.
For example, if you are studying a Shakespearean text and you set yourself the goal of knowing "The Tempest" inside out by the end of the day, the task may seem insurmountable.
Even those who have no ambitions to enter the profession often discover through the drama GCSE that there is a real difference between performing and seeing a performance and simply studying a play as a text in the classroom.
My daughter will not study a narrative text written in English that does not come from the "British Isles".
A shake-up of English literature at A-level will result in teenagers studying a minimum of eight texts in depth, says a consultation paper.
In the literature, authorship attribution is studied as a text categorization problem where the writing styles of individuals are modeled based on their previously written sample documents.
