October 7: Textual Analysis (Yannick Kluch)

Because textual analysis is one of the methods I have used the most frequently in my scholarly career so far, I really enjoyed reading Alan McKee’s “A Beginner’s Guide to Textual Analysis” this week. I have to admit that so far I have, like many Cultural Studies scholars, used a rather “intuitive form of textual analysis” (McKee, 2001, p. 144). I have done many textual analyses – from my master’s thesis on the construction of masculinity in Old Spice commercials to an analysis of the sexuality and promiscuity of the character Barney Stinson in the television sitcom How I Met Your Mother. The textual analysis that fits McKee’s guide on how to do a textual analysis the best, however, was a textual analysis I did of the marketing activities (and the actual stores) of the brand Abercrombie & Fitch in Germany. I would like to base my blog post this week on this analysis and put it into the context of McKee’s guide, in hope that it will help everyone to get a better understanding of the method of textual analysis.

McKee (2001) points out that textual analysis is an important method because “if we want to understand the world we live in, then we have to understand how people are making sense of that world” (p. 144). Further, McKee (2001) points out the immense importance of the context a text is put in for the textual analysis of that text; he states that “this context (that is, a series of intertexts, related texts) is what ties down the interpretations of a text” (p. 145). As such, the meaning of texts vary depending on the context they are being placed in (McKee, 2001, p. 145). My paper on Abercombie & Fitch (A&F), titled “‘Welcome to the Peer’: Americanization, the Abercrombie & Fitch Brand as Imagined Community, and National Identity in Re-Unified Germany,” is a good example of this. The brand – in this case the text to be examined – has a completely different meaning and offers completely different interpretations in Germany’s cultural climate (context 1) than it does in American culture (context 2), or even other European societies (context 3, and so on).

In my analysis, I found that A&F had more stores in Germany than in any other country in Europe, and I wanted to find out why that was the case. By analyzing some of the most popular German media platforms, I found that narratives are dominant in German media that focus on the lack of a inner unity of the German people. I concluded that A&F in Germany – which was framed as a brand that represents a cohesive community of individuals in the context of American culture – is so appealing to the German people because it creates a sense of community that the Germans, more than 20 years after the Berlin Wall came down, still desperately long for and cannot find on a national (identity) level.

Many of the articles we have read in the past two weeks have shown how sport stars can be read as a text within a specific context. For instance, the construction of Micheal Jordan’s masculinity was grounded in the context of discourses about Black sexuality and the nuclear family at that time. I therefore agree with McKee (2001) that “you can do nothing with a text until you establish its context” (p. 146).