In the article Tackling Textuality - Without Theory from The Use of English (Volume 52, Number 1, Autumn 2000), Peter Barry accounts for ten principal methods on how we take on and interpret a literary text. These are ten essential features that will always be required when interpreting a text. With this checklist Barry makes us aware of what we do when we decipher a literary work when 'close reading' without the use of literary theory. However, these methods are never sufficient as they mainly look 'inwards into the text itself' when we have to look out from the text too. The need to look out from the text is the reason we have and need literary theory and to complement his checklist he elucidates four aspects of the connection between literature and the outside world which are history, language, gender and psychoanalysis. Barry uses Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 to illustrate these different approaches.
Barry's principal methods explains for example how we look for a general 'structural pattern' in a literal text to enable an interpretation, how a close reading reveals that things are not always what they appear to be and how we identify the difference between meaning and significance. Furthermore we consider what influence the genre of the work has on its contents and we usually read the literal as metaphorical.
Barry uses the relationship between literature and language to illustrate 'deconstructive reading'. He argues that this particular relationship allows us to think about deconstructive reading which as well as it has been a strong instrument in literary theory it is also closely connected to our usual intensive close reading. One of Terry Eagleton's definitions of deconstructive reading is 'reading the text against itself'. The close reader's ambition is to demonstrate a 'unity of purpose within the text' and with all its intentions directed towards that, the text then appears to be in harmony with itself. The deconstructor on the other hand wants to demonstrate the text's disharmony and looks for elements of for exampel contradictions, absences or omissions. Barry illustrates deconstructive reading with the poem 'Oread'.
In conlclusion of Tackling Textuality - Without Theory, he claims that literary theory can many times be an obstacle which leads to more problems than it is able to solve but the enjoyment and the understanding when unfolding a text is rewarding enough to justify the process.

Keywords:
literary theory, close reading, deconstructive reading, interpretation and meaning