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such a process of discovery. It aims toward an understanding of the author's guiding abstractions by identifying literary concretes: the characters, events, descriptions, dialogues, and stated ideas of a narrative, and discerning their relevance to the work as a whole and its central themes. Whereas, in writing a work of literature, the author begins at the abstract level and, from it, crafts the concretes of his narrative, the reader must begin at the concrete level and reach the level of abstraction via literary analysis.

Furthermore, a work of literary merit must offer an insight, principle, or example valuable to the individual reader. Aside from discovering the author's intentions and guiding principles in writing a work, the reader must inquire of himself, "What benefits to my own life and understanding might I extract from this text?" The insights the reader might seek to derive through literary analysis can be positive or negative. A text can offer models to emulate, or examples of what not to apply to one's own life. The reader can even disagree with the author's worldview or ideas of desirable conduct and, through literary analysis, discover the root of his divergence from the author. In this respect, the undertaking of literary analysis is necessarily didactic, even if the author did not create his text with a didactic purpose. Literary analysis is a process of cognitive discrimination, in that the reader must be selective in what he does and does not derive from the author's premises. In analyzing a text, the reader interacts with these premises by filtering them through his own.

Aside from individual relevance, a worthy work of literature has a universal relevance, either to an aspect at the core of the general human condition, or at the root of some widespread field of human endeavor. The author, as a human being, enters the writing process with certain assumptions, implicit or explicit, regarding a set of universal human themes, including the nature of life, consciousness, volition, and human action, the meaning and possibility of success and happiness, and the status of the individual himself. In addition, the author might hold a set of views which are more narrowly targeted, but still potentially relevant to a wide array of human beings. While the conflict between the individual and the omnipotent totalitarian state in George Orwell's 1984, for example, is not a historical universal, Orwell uses it to arrive at an understanding of the meaning

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