We explain what a comment is and the types of comments that exist. Also, how is a literary comment and an example.
What is a comment?
A comment is an assessment made orally or in writing of some analyzed object, issuing an evaluative judgment, which is not the same as an opinion. For example, a comment from a text, a practice that is often carried out in the school environment, almost always consists of writing a new text in which you realize what elements of the original text were read, in what way and why. It is, therefore, a analysis sympathetic or an informed exposition.
Whoever makes a comment is known ascommentator, and he is expected to know enough about the subject he is discussing to be able to make well-founded judgments, with demonstrations, arguments and verifiable sustenance. There, too, is what distinguishes a comment from a mere opinion or a totally subjective approach.
There are various types of commentary, generally classified based on their specific area of knowledge or the way they approach the matter analyzed. Thus, we can talk about:
- Critical comments. Those who approach an object or situation from a comprehensive, analytical point of view, as part of a much larger general exposition.
- Philological comments. Those who approach the object by putting it in relation to a tradition literate or with certain written or bibliographic knowledge.
- Biblical comments. Those that are carried out outside the reading fromThe Bible, sacred text of the tradition Western Judeo-Christian.
- Historical comments. Those that address a period of human history and provide context for its understanding.
- Literary comments. Those that are made around a literary or artistic work, approaching it from an interpretative, subjective, poetic point of view, but based on the making of the work.
Literary commentary
Literary comments are distinguished from analyzes or philological comments in that they approach the literary work as a closed universe in itself, and work only with the elements found there and with the reverberation that they generate in the reader and commentator. That is to say: it is a personal reading of the work, which is based on what has been read and therefore is demonstrable, it has foundations, it is not an opinion or an entirely free interpretation.
To make a literary comment, the following scheme of steps must be followed:
- Read the literary work fully, writing down the passages that are significant or copying sentences and marking the places to which you would like to return later.
- Go back over what was read, extracting the citations that coincide with the marks made, and read them in the order of any idea or speech that they suggest to us: some content that we suspect is hidden in the work, some key concept that is articulated in it, etc.
- Write your own comment in which we say what that content or concept is and in which parts of the work we can look for it, check it, etc. This text must be accompanied by the transcription of the previously extracted citations and must contain all the information bibliographic so that someone who reads it later, can look up the work and verify that what we write about it is true.
Comment example
Here is an example of a comment:
Commentary on the filmAvengers: Infinity War.
The box office success of this superhero film produced by Marvel Studios and released in theaters in 2018 reveals many interesting aspects of the present moment of Western culture, which perhaps can be summed up in the narrative's antagonist, an extraterrestrial entity named Thanos. .
His name already reveals his affiliations with the Greek word for death:thanatos, which is convenient when explaining his project for the Universe, which is the eradication of half of the living beings it houses. This is motivated by the paradoxical desire to preserve life as a whole: for Thanos, we are too many inhabitants of the Universe and we are depleting resources too quickly, so drastic measures must be taken to ensure that we do not extinguish ourselves. themselves.
What is behind this approach points to certain important political considerations, which seem to be very much in vogue in the security doctrines of countries like the United States, whose government allied with unscrupulous computer companies like Facebook to spy on its own citizens and keep them under surveillance. .
I mean that people must be saved from themselves, they must be protected from their own desires and ways of life, and often this must be done through drastic means. Isn't that what the American Patriot Act entails, which gives the government the power to violate rights and go beyond everything in order to defend the continuity of the AmericanWay ofLife?