ABSTRACT
What makes Bunin's Gentle breath ‘one of the best short stories ever written … a true model of its genre’? Vygotsky entertains that question in The psychology of art. 1 It is a question about beauty and art in writing. It is a question of little concern to content analysis in its approach to writing. Harold D Lasswell, the ‘father’ founder of content analysis, made that clear: ‘Content analysis will not tell us whether a given work is good literature’, whether it is “beautiful writing”' (Lasswell et al. 1952, pp. 45, 22) Rather, Lasswell looked at writing for what it would tell him about propaganda 2 and communication – propaganda as ‘the control of opinion by significant symbols… [and by] forms of social communication’; and communication as answers to the questions ‘Who, says what, how, to whom, with what effect?’, the ‘what’ question being the primary concern of content analysis (Lasswell 1926, p. 11, see also 1927, p. 627; Lasswell et al. 1952, p. 12).
