What is it?

• It is the interpretation of texts in films, TV programmes, magazines, advertisements, clothes, graffiti, online discussion threads, and so forth.
• Usually this approach puts more focus on the content rather than the structure of the text, as meaning of a text cannot be captured by counting the number of words. 
• Researchers try to understand how people with different cultural background make sense of the social world as shown in texts.
• There are different ways of conducting textual analysis: some are “mutually contradictory and incompatible” (McKee, 2003).
• You are not going to generate a “correct” analysis of a text, instead, you aim to provide a meaningful reading of how readers and writers interact through the text in certain context.