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That is exactly the sort of thing some pseudo-highbrow twit would have given me a 'D' for in high school after assuring me that "there are no wrong answers". I

That is exactly the sort of thing some pseudo-highbrow twit would have given me a 'D' for in high school after assuring me that "there are no wrong answers". I love it.

davidw 11y ago
I once got a D for an essay on "how does the symbolism help us understand the author's message" when I said that, frankly, it didn't, and that if the author wanted to send a message, he should have come straight out and said it. Sorry, but that's the way my brain is wired, and I was exasperated by the teacher going on about a bunch of stuff that to me seemed like you could just make it up as you go along. "Well, the boat symbolized her relationship with her father, and when the anchor broke, it meant that her affair with her uncle was doomed from the outset because the barnacles on the boat were symbolic of the calluses on his hands, because he was a factory worker, rather than one of the landed gentry..." or some horse shit like that. You can downvote me, but I won't apologize for loathing that kind of thing.
- jqm 11y ago
  You are getting down-voted but I always had the same feelings. Lit teachers often read far far too much symbolism into the text. It is usually simply guesses or completely unfounded and stretched opinion far removed from what the author intended, and most usually a huge waste of everyone's time.
  - travjones 11y ago
    I agree. Sometimes one can establish a degree to which his/her interpretation is correct by considering evidence (from the author's text) for and against his/her interpretation, but rarely are lit teachers (at least in my experience) this objective.
  - jilopy 11y ago
    Pick up a copy of "How to Read Literature Like A Professor" by Thomas C. Foster at your library. My AP Lit instructor had me read it almost a decade ago (after similar complaints) and it helped me enjoy required undergrad literature classes much more - gives a practical, fair insight into literary analysis.
  - protomyth 11y ago
    The best sendup of Lit teachers reading too much symbolism was in the movie "Back to School" and the Kurt Vonnegut scenes. Diane: Whoever did write this doesn't know the first thing about Kurt Vonnegut! [cut to Thornton's dorm suite] Thornton Melon: [on the phone] ... and another thing, Vonnegut! I'm gonna stop payment on the cheque!
- VikingCoder 11y ago
  In what WAY does the author's use of the PRISON SYMBOLIZE the protagonist's struggle - AND how does this relate to our discussion of the uses of irony? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3YdjD0OyJc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3YdjD0OyJc
- jtr1 11y ago
  Interesting. I've come across similar stories and sentiments among scientist and engineer friends. A frustrating experience to be sure, but it strikes me that these are people whose jobs require them to sort out systems which, without proper foundational knowledge, would seem pretty confusing and arbitrary. What surprises me most is to hear a person whose identity is grounded in curiosity and exploration write off that experience as horse shit, without questioning first whether they lacked the tools to understand it. Perhaps you just had a bad teacher?
  - davidw 11y ago
    > jobs require them to sort out systems which, without proper foundational knowledge, would seem pretty confusing and arbitrary. But they do respond to some kind of underlying rule or rules, which can be teased out, most of the time. That can be fun in many cases. To me, all the lit stuff seemed completely arbitrary and made up. There were no testable hypothesis, no experiments to run. "The author was trying to tell us that ..." - well unless the author actually documented that later, how do you know that with any degree of certainty? The only English class I liked was journalism, where we were taught how to clearly and effectively communicate the facts known about something, and were rewarded by keeping things brief and to the point, rather than filling up pages with BS.
    - slewis 11y ago
      Yeah, I think a lot of English teachers push on over-interpreting, which drives some set of students away. It's unfortunate because there is actually a lot of beauty to be found in literature, and each reader is free to find his or her own. Beyond beauty literature helps establish empathy by exposing you to the inner-thoughts of different types of people, and it inspires creativity, both of which are useful in any field.
    - jtr1 11y ago
      Journalism is actually a great example of the utility of literature classes - because even if you don't enjoy literature, the act of reading critically is an important skill to making sense of the world. I'll take a leap and suggest that you and I can agree that much of what is called "news" these days does not merely transfer facts from the news organization to your brain. When you read a news article, you interpret it with context. You ask, what is the reputation of the agency reporting this news? Do they have a history of factual reporting? Do they bring a particular political bent or agenda to bear on their reporting? What words are they using to tell the story? What does it mean when someone refers to the "War on Terror" - how do you understand that metaphor? What memories, emotions, experiences does it evoke? How is that phrase intended to be interpreted? There is so much more to write about this, but bottom line for me is: language drives human interaction. Understanding how others interpret language (through metaphor, shared understanding, history, etc.) is important for navigating that interaction. It helps us call bullshit on politicians who use words to conceal ignorance, or maybe on teachers who don't actually understand the literature they are presenting ;) I imagine you were never rewarded for "filling up pages" with actual bull shit, so you picked up metaphors at some point along the way.
- noonespecial 11y ago
  It was all so much "cut up the flower to find what makes it beautiful". The latent hypocrisy of the whole thing depressed me to no end, but it was a vivid introduction to that distasteful pseudo-highbrow thing people do with everything from beer to wine to poetry to cheese. The answer all along was simply "I like it". I like the way it sounds in my mind, the way it tastes with spaghetti. The way it rolls off the to tongue when read aloud. That's it. And that's enough.
  - toothbrush 11y ago
    Well, there is something pragmatic to be said about at least knowing why you liked something — personally, i like being able to semi-reliably pick a cheese or wine based on descriptions or memories, at least in the vain hope that it'll be above-average according to my tastes :)
  - Lawtonfogle 11y ago
    Even Love itself can be dissected and torn apart, the inner workings exposed for the grime ridden machine that it is. But that is done in neurology, not literature.
- matwood 11y ago
  Haha. I got in an argument with a lit teacher in HS when I asked how she knew what the author meant? Did the author tell her that? Was it in some notes that were left? In this case it was simply what people years later had agreed the author meant. Humans so desperately want to apply meaning to everything even when there is none. I've seen this in interviews where an excited fan asks a musician the deep meaning of some song and the response is along the lines of 'it sounded cool'.
  - vidarh 11y ago
    I had similar arguments. In one case I got in a heated argument with him, because the "official" interpretation of a well know poem we had to analyse clearly hinged on interpreting a certain phrase in a way that was grammatically totally wrong and incongruous with the authors grasp of the language and past usage. But no arguments would sway him, because past authorities had said otherwise, with no evidence whatsoever to support their interpretation (I could not know that my interpretation was valid either, but that was part of my point - mine at least had the advantage of not assuming the author had made a massive grammatical error right there in that one poem that he'd never made anywhere else, that just happened to totally change the literal reading of his poem). It pretty much shattered my respect for that teacher, and strongly contributed to by burning hatred for literature analysis.
- WalterBright 11y ago
  That's why I avoided taking such classes.
- bcgraham 11y ago
  Your example is just the type of literary reading that turns off students. When they encounter it without a more gradual learning curve, what they actually learn is both: 1. The king has no clothes. 2. Semantics isn't important in the humanities; it's just playing with syntax and vocabulary. I wished they taught it more like another sense of humor. Like funny things, authorial intent can make it better or worse, but the thing itself has most of the inertia. Also like funny things, requiring explanation deflates it. When you're just watching a movie or a television show, or reading a book, and it hits you, it makes the narrative so much more rewarding. As for why authors don't just come out and say their points: nobody likes being told what to believe. It makes audiences irritated, suspicious, bored, etc. (which is how people react to ham-fisted symbolism). But when the pieces are left out for you to discover "for yourself," you'll be a lot more receptive.
  - pluma 11y ago
    My experience with literary studies can be summarized with a single anecdote: My highest scoring exam in literary studies was about a book of which I had only read the plot summary on Wikipedia. I scored higher by literally making things up than by trying to apply logic.
- JeremyNT 11y ago
  There's a scene in Annie Hall[0] that you might find quite satisfying. I was a literature major in college. I enjoyed writing (thinking, erroneously, that I could make a career out of it) and reading, so it seemed like a logical choice at the time. By the time I graduated, I came to loathe the subject. I still believe that there is immense value in the exploration of literature, but for me that value results from a personal and intimate relationship with the subject matter, not from engaging in a dissection of it with some literary "expert." I think the way we teach literature (and the arts in general) is misguided. [0] http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/07/misunderstanding-mcluhan-flashback-to-annie-hall/?_r=0 http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/07/misunderstandin...
  - heyzeusalmighty 11y ago
    I took a similar path in education as you. It was my junior year, I was halfway through what should have been a 20ish page essay analyzing a 3 stanza poem when I began second guessing my decision. I switched majors to Political Science the following semester and found it was much easier to make arguments based on hard data rather than guessing at the artist's intentions. Most of my colleagues in my English program went on to law school, which dovetails nicely with that analytical type of mind but as you say, endless dissection robs the work of what attracted me to it in the first place. After graduating, it took me a few years to get back into fiction (longer still to poetry).
    - tsotha 11y ago
      >Most of my colleagues in my English program went on to law school, which dovetails nicely with that analytical type of mind but as you say, endless dissection robs the work of what attracted me to it in the first place. My favorite introduction to a book is the one Tolkien wrote for The Fellowship of the Ring. I can't find the exact quote, but basically he says the book is meant purely for the enjoyment of the reader and shouldn't be interpreted. A million literature teachers cried out and were suddenly silenced.
      - magicalist 11y ago
- anigbrowl 11y ago
  Well, one can make it up as one goes along, and indeed there's a whole strand of criticism built around the idea of revisionism, where we reconsider literary works in the light of chances that have occurred since they were written to gain new perspectives on meaning and interpretation - a trivial example would be reading older poems that include the word 'gay' (as in carefree) reinterpreted in the modern context where it implies homosexuality. Everyone knows that that secondary meaning was not and could not have been in the author's mind when the poem was composed, but the facts that we can't 'un-know' the modern meaning of 'gay,' and that it is possible for such revisionist reinterpretations to be meaningful or even moving despite the demonstrable absence of authorial intent to create such meaning tells us something important about the nature of the reading process, and thus of the thinking process that underlies it. That said, symbolism generally is constructed deliberately. When I write fiction it's almost impossible for me to start at the beginning and proceed to the end - I start out with fragmentary ideas of momentary images, snatches of conversation and so on, and traverse them in sort of random fashion until the outline of a sequence emerges which suggests a plot. Various symbols will suggest themselves along the way, and one or two may 'click' by encapsulating or paralleling the story structure particularly well. Once I've identified one of those then it acts like structural reinforcement, so I'll go back and add it or emphasize it in various parts of the story where it seemed to fit well. The symbol(s) you pick in turn become a source of new ideas for solving other plot/structure problems. So suppose I have a story about some lonely woman and I realize this person likes flowers (I didn't decide this, I just kept picturing her eating dinner alone but always with a vase of flowers on the table so I'll roll with it), and then it hits me that flowers have a short life and wilt and die so that's a good metaphor for my character's situation if she doesn't find love. This isn't a full story yet, though - why is this person lonely? Dunno, don't have any ideas...well I'll think about flowers a bit....vases...you need to water the...do you pick them or buy them...will they attract insects....oh wait, flowers use insects to pollinate, what if my character was stung by a bee and unconsciously displaced a fear of sex onto the incident? Now I have a story because I have a person in conflict with herself, impelled to seek love by the fact of time's passage but afraid of the emotional or physical risks that entails. Hmm, not only does my lead like flowers, but has become obsessed with them - she owns a chain of florists or she's a master flower arranger that supplies flowers for all the best weddings, and has put all the energy that normally goes into a romantic relationship into floral activities instead. Then she meets someone who's perfect, but maybe hates cut flowers, which is a problem because my florist is obsessed with having everything just so and needs to learn to accept other people as they are naturally...well now I have a whole little world here with numerous interconnected symbols and some obvious characters and situations that I can develop, and the name of the flower store and the story is 'Perfect Bouquet,' and it seems like it's going to be a romantic comedy. Exploring and exaggerating the semantic associations of the initial floral symbol has provided me with a basic plot and a handful of obvious scenes that I can begin writing immediately. Most books on writing say things like imagine your characters, find out everything about them and flesh them out in detail, then put them together and see what they do...' I guess that works for some people but I think it's total crap. I don't know any florists or much about flowers, apart from a summer working for a commercial flower supplier when I was young (which was basically a warehouse job). But taking a generic person, an emotion, and finding some symbol that can embody that were enough to get the ball rolling. You can do this in reverse too. Sticking with the romantic comedy genre, take You've Got Mail. Meg Ryan is a proto-hipster who owns a tiny local bookstore, Tom Hanks is the ruthless CEO of a bookstore chain that wants to put her out of business, and of course they have to fall in love (via the internet, which ironically has since put a large bookstore chain out of business - see my point above about revisionist readings, because it's interesting to ask whether Nora Ephron even contemplated that possibility when she wrote the film). Now the story structure is pretty generic - it's sort of Beauty and the Beast set in a bookstore, and BatB is in turn a metaphor for mating strategies. But why bookstores? Couldn't Meg Ryan have been a plucky neighborhood grocer being squeezed by the opening of a new Walmart store, or a feisty buggy whip maker fending off an encroaching automobile salesman. But that she sells books rather than vegetables or equine accessories suggests she's primarily contemplative and maybe sensual, as opposed to nurturing or dynamic, that she's a collector/curator rather than a consumer or maker, and so on and so on. The process of exploring these semantic associations isn't a scientific one, and you're absolutely right that it can degenerate into horse shit that ends up telling us more about the critic's inner life than the work that is supposedly under scrutiny, but the inquiry is itself informative. Why is Jaws about a giant shark rather than a giant alligator or bear? It wouldn't be hard to imagine a story about a village near a swamp or a forest that was menaced by the appropriate animal and have the plot unfold quite similarly - creature features are among the oldest kinds of stories and thus among the most formulaic, but we don't mind because they're so relatable, as long as the personality of the Creature is developed sufficiently well. Symbols work like icebergs; the large part that is submerged (below the level of consciousness)serves as a foundation for the relatively small visible part: the authorial design is to present the reader with something whose significance is easy to underestimate but which will become clear during the development of the story.
- semi-extrinsic 11y ago
  Mandatory https://xkcd.com/451/ https://xkcd.com/451/
  - pluma 11y ago
    As the comic is clearly about literary studies in particular, I wonder whether the number is intentional.
    - stan_rogers 11y ago
      Could be, and for more than one reason. Ray Bradbury himself had trouble convincing literary studies types (among others) that his book was about what he wrote it about. (He wrote a more subtle Idiocracy, but people read a more subtle 1984.)
- thwest 11y ago
  You might enjoy Barthes' "Death of the Author". (not trolling)
- hugh4 11y ago
  The thing about that kind of symbolism is that it works best when you don't even consciously notice it. The talk of the boat anchor just primes you into thinking in a certain manner, then the author hits you with the girl-father story and you see it through that lens. Or the symbolism puts you in a particular emotional state which enhances your experience of the book, much like background music in a film. Unfortunately it's often taught at school as if it's some kind of exercise in decryption.
- bboreham 11y ago
  Judith Kerr, author of The Tiger Who Came To Tea, endlessly has to defend critics who assert that the tiger is an allegory for the Gestapo. "It's just a tiger", she says. BTW, her life story is pretty amazing - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25027090 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25027090
- vidarh 11y ago
  There's an anecdote, that I've been unable to verify, about an interview with a famous Norwegian writer (well, famouns in Norway) where the interviewer - a literature critic - went on and on about the symbolism of a scene in one of the authors books where some women are washing some clothes. Really ripping the scene to shreds word for words and assigning all kinds of meanings to every little choice. And then he asked the author for confirmation, basically. Whereupon said author thought about it for a bit and told the interviewer something to the effect that he thought that was fantastic, and wish he'd thought of all of those things, but he'd just thought the image was nice. When at school I got exasperated by the same thing, as I wrote a lot of poetry at that age, and for me it was all about the imagery and emotions it evoked. Anyone who'd tried to analyse symbolism in any of what I wrote would have already missed the point. You might find something in there, but it would not have been "mine". And generally I feel that while you may pick up on some interesting things now and again, you also lose a lot when you start picking everything apart. Analysis got close to killing my interest in literature. The one time I wrote something intentionally full of symbols, it was a sarcastic response to analysis, with a very clear message to my Norwegian teacher about what I thought about analysing poems. He didn't appreciate it (the rest of my class did, though - it's the only time anyone applauded a poem in any of my classes..) Doesn't mean that there aren't authors that delight in putting symbolism into their works, or who does it subconsciously, of course, but to me it greatly reduces my pleasure in reading to look for it.
- coldtea 11y ago
  >I once got a D for an essay on "how does the symbolism help us understand the author's message" when I said that, frankly, it didn't, and that if the author wanted to send a message, he should have come straight out and said it. Only 2 problems with that: 1) the message in the symbolism is not the same message in the "straight up message" -- it has more nuances for one. It's not because you can't just "say it" that you go to symbolism, it's because the thing, said straight, doesn't really capture what you want to say. E.g. "life is beautiful in a sad way" -- that's the clear message. OK, but nothing much. A short story/poem with the right words/symbolism/etc can not only tell you that, but make you feel it in your stomach, and in several different ways. 2) most people bypass said message when you "come straight out and said it" as it often sounds simplistic and naive deprived of its artifice. E.g. say straight up "Don't do drugs" and most teeanegers will laugh at you. Tell it with a story/song/poem and they might get the message that there's something dark there. Or tell a different story/song/poem and they'd might like to go try some.
  - vidarh 11y ago
    The problem is that you have absolutely no basis for assuming what you pick up that you think is intended symbolism has anything to do with what the author is trying to convey unless they tell you. And very often it turns out that people who try to analyse works get it totally and utterly wrong (at least from the perspective of trying to tease out the authors intent). > 2) most people bypass said message when you "come straight out and said it" as it often sounds simplistic and naive deprived of its artifice. People ignore "don't do drugs" not because it's straightforward, but because it is trying to command you to do something without making a persuasive argument why. It is simplistic and naive for that reason, but that has nothing to do with the lack of symbolism, but with the lack of reasoning.
    - coldtea 11y ago
      >The problem is that you have absolutely no basis for assuming what you pick up that you think is intended symbolism has anything to do with what the author is trying to convey unless they tell you. Language is ambiguous, but not THAT ambiguous. People generally understand symbolic cues, unless we're talking about some extreme "avant guard" kind of art. Most of these clues after all have been honed for millenia, and are part of the cultural landscape. And if people are at least partially involved in art/literature etc, they learn even more of classic tropes and symbolic use of words (or images, in cinema). And if the miss a few symbolisms, they can still get others in the same work, and have a general grap of the message. One of the joys with songs/poems/fiction etc is discovering new levels and depth you didn't see at first (e.g. as you gain more experience with life to relate to them, or as you learn some cultural information that helps you decipher a clue). In the end, it's also up to how good the poet/writer/storyteller is, and how opaque or transparent he wants to make his story. >People ignore "don't do drugs" not because it's straightforward, but because it is trying to command you to do something without making a persuasive argument why Not really (from the point I come from). Even combined with a 8 page detailed pamphlet, with what can happen to you, side-effects et al, most young people still sneer at it and ignore it. For one, they think those things don't apply to them (they are industructible, they can control it, etc) and second they aren't cool. Reasons are the uncoolest things to try to convince teenagers with. It's when you spice up the story, make it cool, or make it impactful, that they might pay attention and think "hmm, maybe drugs aren't so good after all". That's what drug songs like "Needle and the damage done" can do, or books like "Less Than Zero". But at this point you're into symbolism and artifice too.
- DanBC 11y ago
  "Why did this character behave in this way?" "Because that's what the author wrote." We need a way of helping people jump through those hoops because rejecting the premise of litrature analysis is unlikely to go well for powerless children. Changing it from analysing[1] the literature into hacking te teacher may work. "Your teacher has these cognitive oddities. How many can you discover?" [1] I suspect a bit of programming with plenty of graphs of sentiment analysis or character interactions would not be well received in those classes.
protomyth 11y ago
I think my Dad had that "pseudo-highbrow twit" for a professor in college. Asking my Dad why the whale was white in Moby Dick gets a reaction like someone remembering being in a car accident. It also probably explains why he didn't seem surprised to be informed by my high school teacher that my 5-minute book report that stretched to 35-minutes on The Pearl had "too much energy" and "focused on the negative themes" a bit much. For my part, given the conditions of the school, I found the choice of books to be unfortunate.
kenjackson 11y ago
Always reminds me of this Rodney Dangerfield movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jow5aO8mp3E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jow5aO8mp3E

That is exactly the sort of thing some pseudo-highbrow twit would have given me a 'D' for in high school after assuring me that "there are no wrong answers". I love it.

davidw 11y ago

I once got a D for an essay on "how does the symbolism help us understand the author's message" when I said that, frankly, it didn't, and that if the author wanted to send a message, he should have come straight out and said it. Sorry, but that's the way my brain is wired, and I was exasperated by the teacher going on about a bunch of stuff that to me seemed like you could just make it up as you go along. "Well, the boat symbolized her relationship with her father, and when the anchor broke, it meant that her affair with her uncle was doomed from the outset because the barnacles on the boat were symbolic of the calluses on his hands, because he was a factory worker, rather than one of the landed gentry..." or some horse shit like that. You can downvote me, but I won't apologize for loathing that kind of thing.

jqm 11y ago
You are getting down-voted but I always had the same feelings. Lit teachers often read far far too much symbolism into the text. It is usually simply guesses or completely unfounded and stretched opinion far removed from what the author intended, and most usually a huge waste of everyone's time.
- travjones 11y ago
  I agree. Sometimes one can establish a degree to which his/her interpretation is correct by considering evidence (from the author's text) for and against his/her interpretation, but rarely are lit teachers (at least in my experience) this objective.
- jilopy 11y ago
  Pick up a copy of "How to Read Literature Like A Professor" by Thomas C. Foster at your library. My AP Lit instructor had me read it almost a decade ago (after similar complaints) and it helped me enjoy required undergrad literature classes much more - gives a practical, fair insight into literary analysis.
- protomyth 11y ago
  The best sendup of Lit teachers reading too much symbolism was in the movie "Back to School" and the Kurt Vonnegut scenes. Diane: Whoever did write this doesn't know the first thing about Kurt Vonnegut! [cut to Thornton's dorm suite] Thornton Melon: [on the phone] ... and another thing, Vonnegut! I'm gonna stop payment on the cheque!
VikingCoder 11y ago
In what WAY does the author's use of the PRISON SYMBOLIZE the protagonist's struggle - AND how does this relate to our discussion of the uses of irony? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3YdjD0OyJc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3YdjD0OyJc
jtr1 11y ago
Interesting. I've come across similar stories and sentiments among scientist and engineer friends. A frustrating experience to be sure, but it strikes me that these are people whose jobs require them to sort out systems which, without proper foundational knowledge, would seem pretty confusing and arbitrary. What surprises me most is to hear a person whose identity is grounded in curiosity and exploration write off that experience as horse shit, without questioning first whether they lacked the tools to understand it. Perhaps you just had a bad teacher?
- davidw 11y ago
  > jobs require them to sort out systems which, without proper foundational knowledge, would seem pretty confusing and arbitrary. But they do respond to some kind of underlying rule or rules, which can be teased out, most of the time. That can be fun in many cases. To me, all the lit stuff seemed completely arbitrary and made up. There were no testable hypothesis, no experiments to run. "The author was trying to tell us that ..." - well unless the author actually documented that later, how do you know that with any degree of certainty? The only English class I liked was journalism, where we were taught how to clearly and effectively communicate the facts known about something, and were rewarded by keeping things brief and to the point, rather than filling up pages with BS.
  - slewis 11y ago
    Yeah, I think a lot of English teachers push on over-interpreting, which drives some set of students away. It's unfortunate because there is actually a lot of beauty to be found in literature, and each reader is free to find his or her own. Beyond beauty literature helps establish empathy by exposing you to the inner-thoughts of different types of people, and it inspires creativity, both of which are useful in any field.
  - jtr1 11y ago
    Journalism is actually a great example of the utility of literature classes - because even if you don't enjoy literature, the act of reading critically is an important skill to making sense of the world. I'll take a leap and suggest that you and I can agree that much of what is called "news" these days does not merely transfer facts from the news organization to your brain. When you read a news article, you interpret it with context. You ask, what is the reputation of the agency reporting this news? Do they have a history of factual reporting? Do they bring a particular political bent or agenda to bear on their reporting? What words are they using to tell the story? What does it mean when someone refers to the "War on Terror" - how do you understand that metaphor? What memories, emotions, experiences does it evoke? How is that phrase intended to be interpreted? There is so much more to write about this, but bottom line for me is: language drives human interaction. Understanding how others interpret language (through metaphor, shared understanding, history, etc.) is important for navigating that interaction. It helps us call bullshit on politicians who use words to conceal ignorance, or maybe on teachers who don't actually understand the literature they are presenting ;) I imagine you were never rewarded for "filling up pages" with actual bull shit, so you picked up metaphors at some point along the way.
noonespecial 11y ago
It was all so much "cut up the flower to find what makes it beautiful". The latent hypocrisy of the whole thing depressed me to no end, but it was a vivid introduction to that distasteful pseudo-highbrow thing people do with everything from beer to wine to poetry to cheese. The answer all along was simply "I like it". I like the way it sounds in my mind, the way it tastes with spaghetti. The way it rolls off the to tongue when read aloud. That's it. And that's enough.
- toothbrush 11y ago
  Well, there is something pragmatic to be said about at least knowing why you liked something — personally, i like being able to semi-reliably pick a cheese or wine based on descriptions or memories, at least in the vain hope that it'll be above-average according to my tastes :)
- Lawtonfogle 11y ago
  Even Love itself can be dissected and torn apart, the inner workings exposed for the grime ridden machine that it is. But that is done in neurology, not literature.
matwood 11y ago
Haha. I got in an argument with a lit teacher in HS when I asked how she knew what the author meant? Did the author tell her that? Was it in some notes that were left? In this case it was simply what people years later had agreed the author meant. Humans so desperately want to apply meaning to everything even when there is none. I've seen this in interviews where an excited fan asks a musician the deep meaning of some song and the response is along the lines of 'it sounded cool'.
- vidarh 11y ago
  I had similar arguments. In one case I got in a heated argument with him, because the "official" interpretation of a well know poem we had to analyse clearly hinged on interpreting a certain phrase in a way that was grammatically totally wrong and incongruous with the authors grasp of the language and past usage. But no arguments would sway him, because past authorities had said otherwise, with no evidence whatsoever to support their interpretation (I could not know that my interpretation was valid either, but that was part of my point - mine at least had the advantage of not assuming the author had made a massive grammatical error right there in that one poem that he'd never made anywhere else, that just happened to totally change the literal reading of his poem). It pretty much shattered my respect for that teacher, and strongly contributed to by burning hatred for literature analysis.
WalterBright 11y ago
That's why I avoided taking such classes.
bcgraham 11y ago
Your example is just the type of literary reading that turns off students. When they encounter it without a more gradual learning curve, what they actually learn is both: 1. The king has no clothes. 2. Semantics isn't important in the humanities; it's just playing with syntax and vocabulary. I wished they taught it more like another sense of humor. Like funny things, authorial intent can make it better or worse, but the thing itself has most of the inertia. Also like funny things, requiring explanation deflates it. When you're just watching a movie or a television show, or reading a book, and it hits you, it makes the narrative so much more rewarding. As for why authors don't just come out and say their points: nobody likes being told what to believe. It makes audiences irritated, suspicious, bored, etc. (which is how people react to ham-fisted symbolism). But when the pieces are left out for you to discover "for yourself," you'll be a lot more receptive.
- pluma 11y ago
  My experience with literary studies can be summarized with a single anecdote: My highest scoring exam in literary studies was about a book of which I had only read the plot summary on Wikipedia. I scored higher by literally making things up than by trying to apply logic.
JeremyNT 11y ago
There's a scene in Annie Hall[0] that you might find quite satisfying. I was a literature major in college. I enjoyed writing (thinking, erroneously, that I could make a career out of it) and reading, so it seemed like a logical choice at the time. By the time I graduated, I came to loathe the subject. I still believe that there is immense value in the exploration of literature, but for me that value results from a personal and intimate relationship with the subject matter, not from engaging in a dissection of it with some literary "expert." I think the way we teach literature (and the arts in general) is misguided. [0] http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/07/misunderstanding-mcluhan-flashback-to-annie-hall/?_r=0 http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/07/misunderstandin...
- heyzeusalmighty 11y ago
  I took a similar path in education as you. It was my junior year, I was halfway through what should have been a 20ish page essay analyzing a 3 stanza poem when I began second guessing my decision. I switched majors to Political Science the following semester and found it was much easier to make arguments based on hard data rather than guessing at the artist's intentions. Most of my colleagues in my English program went on to law school, which dovetails nicely with that analytical type of mind but as you say, endless dissection robs the work of what attracted me to it in the first place. After graduating, it took me a few years to get back into fiction (longer still to poetry).
  - tsotha 11y ago
    >Most of my colleagues in my English program went on to law school, which dovetails nicely with that analytical type of mind but as you say, endless dissection robs the work of what attracted me to it in the first place. My favorite introduction to a book is the one Tolkien wrote for The Fellowship of the Ring. I can't find the exact quote, but basically he says the book is meant purely for the enjoyment of the reader and shouldn't be interpreted. A million literature teachers cried out and were suddenly silenced.
    - magicalist 11y ago
anigbrowl 11y ago
Well, one can make it up as one goes along, and indeed there's a whole strand of criticism built around the idea of revisionism, where we reconsider literary works in the light of chances that have occurred since they were written to gain new perspectives on meaning and interpretation - a trivial example would be reading older poems that include the word 'gay' (as in carefree) reinterpreted in the modern context where it implies homosexuality. Everyone knows that that secondary meaning was not and could not have been in the author's mind when the poem was composed, but the facts that we can't 'un-know' the modern meaning of 'gay,' and that it is possible for such revisionist reinterpretations to be meaningful or even moving despite the demonstrable absence of authorial intent to create such meaning tells us something important about the nature of the reading process, and thus of the thinking process that underlies it. That said, symbolism generally is constructed deliberately. When I write fiction it's almost impossible for me to start at the beginning and proceed to the end - I start out with fragmentary ideas of momentary images, snatches of conversation and so on, and traverse them in sort of random fashion until the outline of a sequence emerges which suggests a plot. Various symbols will suggest themselves along the way, and one or two may 'click' by encapsulating or paralleling the story structure particularly well. Once I've identified one of those then it acts like structural reinforcement, so I'll go back and add it or emphasize it in various parts of the story where it seemed to fit well. The symbol(s) you pick in turn become a source of new ideas for solving other plot/structure problems. So suppose I have a story about some lonely woman and I realize this person likes flowers (I didn't decide this, I just kept picturing her eating dinner alone but always with a vase of flowers on the table so I'll roll with it), and then it hits me that flowers have a short life and wilt and die so that's a good metaphor for my character's situation if she doesn't find love. This isn't a full story yet, though - why is this person lonely? Dunno, don't have any ideas...well I'll think about flowers a bit....vases...you need to water the...do you pick them or buy them...will they attract insects....oh wait, flowers use insects to pollinate, what if my character was stung by a bee and unconsciously displaced a fear of sex onto the incident? Now I have a story because I have a person in conflict with herself, impelled to seek love by the fact of time's passage but afraid of the emotional or physical risks that entails. Hmm, not only does my lead like flowers, but has become obsessed with them - she owns a chain of florists or she's a master flower arranger that supplies flowers for all the best weddings, and has put all the energy that normally goes into a romantic relationship into floral activities instead. Then she meets someone who's perfect, but maybe hates cut flowers, which is a problem because my florist is obsessed with having everything just so and needs to learn to accept other people as they are naturally...well now I have a whole little world here with numerous interconnected symbols and some obvious characters and situations that I can develop, and the name of the flower store and the story is 'Perfect Bouquet,' and it seems like it's going to be a romantic comedy. Exploring and exaggerating the semantic associations of the initial floral symbol has provided me with a basic plot and a handful of obvious scenes that I can begin writing immediately. Most books on writing say things like imagine your characters, find out everything about them and flesh them out in detail, then put them together and see what they do...' I guess that works for some people but I think it's total crap. I don't know any florists or much about flowers, apart from a summer working for a commercial flower supplier when I was young (which was basically a warehouse job). But taking a generic person, an emotion, and finding some symbol that can embody that were enough to get the ball rolling. You can do this in reverse too. Sticking with the romantic comedy genre, take You've Got Mail. Meg Ryan is a proto-hipster who owns a tiny local bookstore, Tom Hanks is the ruthless CEO of a bookstore chain that wants to put her out of business, and of course they have to fall in love (via the internet, which ironically has since put a large bookstore chain out of business - see my point above about revisionist readings, because it's interesting to ask whether Nora Ephron even contemplated that possibility when she wrote the film). Now the story structure is pretty generic - it's sort of Beauty and the Beast set in a bookstore, and BatB is in turn a metaphor for mating strategies. But why bookstores? Couldn't Meg Ryan have been a plucky neighborhood grocer being squeezed by the opening of a new Walmart store, or a feisty buggy whip maker fending off an encroaching automobile salesman. But that she sells books rather than vegetables or equine accessories suggests she's primarily contemplative and maybe sensual, as opposed to nurturing or dynamic, that she's a collector/curator rather than a consumer or maker, and so on and so on. The process of exploring these semantic associations isn't a scientific one, and you're absolutely right that it can degenerate into horse shit that ends up telling us more about the critic's inner life than the work that is supposedly under scrutiny, but the inquiry is itself informative. Why is Jaws about a giant shark rather than a giant alligator or bear? It wouldn't be hard to imagine a story about a village near a swamp or a forest that was menaced by the appropriate animal and have the plot unfold quite similarly - creature features are among the oldest kinds of stories and thus among the most formulaic, but we don't mind because they're so relatable, as long as the personality of the Creature is developed sufficiently well. Symbols work like icebergs; the large part that is submerged (below the level of consciousness)serves as a foundation for the relatively small visible part: the authorial design is to present the reader with something whose significance is easy to underestimate but which will become clear during the development of the story.
semi-extrinsic 11y ago
Mandatory https://xkcd.com/451/ https://xkcd.com/451/
- pluma 11y ago
  As the comic is clearly about literary studies in particular, I wonder whether the number is intentional.
  - stan_rogers 11y ago
    Could be, and for more than one reason. Ray Bradbury himself had trouble convincing literary studies types (among others) that his book was about what he wrote it about. (He wrote a more subtle Idiocracy, but people read a more subtle 1984.)
thwest 11y ago
You might enjoy Barthes' "Death of the Author". (not trolling)
hugh4 11y ago
The thing about that kind of symbolism is that it works best when you don't even consciously notice it. The talk of the boat anchor just primes you into thinking in a certain manner, then the author hits you with the girl-father story and you see it through that lens. Or the symbolism puts you in a particular emotional state which enhances your experience of the book, much like background music in a film. Unfortunately it's often taught at school as if it's some kind of exercise in decryption.
bboreham 11y ago
Judith Kerr, author of The Tiger Who Came To Tea, endlessly has to defend critics who assert that the tiger is an allegory for the Gestapo. "It's just a tiger", she says. BTW, her life story is pretty amazing - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25027090 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25027090
vidarh 11y ago
There's an anecdote, that I've been unable to verify, about an interview with a famous Norwegian writer (well, famouns in Norway) where the interviewer - a literature critic - went on and on about the symbolism of a scene in one of the authors books where some women are washing some clothes. Really ripping the scene to shreds word for words and assigning all kinds of meanings to every little choice. And then he asked the author for confirmation, basically. Whereupon said author thought about it for a bit and told the interviewer something to the effect that he thought that was fantastic, and wish he'd thought of all of those things, but he'd just thought the image was nice. When at school I got exasperated by the same thing, as I wrote a lot of poetry at that age, and for me it was all about the imagery and emotions it evoked. Anyone who'd tried to analyse symbolism in any of what I wrote would have already missed the point. You might find something in there, but it would not have been "mine". And generally I feel that while you may pick up on some interesting things now and again, you also lose a lot when you start picking everything apart. Analysis got close to killing my interest in literature. The one time I wrote something intentionally full of symbols, it was a sarcastic response to analysis, with a very clear message to my Norwegian teacher about what I thought about analysing poems. He didn't appreciate it (the rest of my class did, though - it's the only time anyone applauded a poem in any of my classes..) Doesn't mean that there aren't authors that delight in putting symbolism into their works, or who does it subconsciously, of course, but to me it greatly reduces my pleasure in reading to look for it.
coldtea 11y ago
>I once got a D for an essay on "how does the symbolism help us understand the author's message" when I said that, frankly, it didn't, and that if the author wanted to send a message, he should have come straight out and said it. Only 2 problems with that: 1) the message in the symbolism is not the same message in the "straight up message" -- it has more nuances for one. It's not because you can't just "say it" that you go to symbolism, it's because the thing, said straight, doesn't really capture what you want to say. E.g. "life is beautiful in a sad way" -- that's the clear message. OK, but nothing much. A short story/poem with the right words/symbolism/etc can not only tell you that, but make you feel it in your stomach, and in several different ways. 2) most people bypass said message when you "come straight out and said it" as it often sounds simplistic and naive deprived of its artifice. E.g. say straight up "Don't do drugs" and most teeanegers will laugh at you. Tell it with a story/song/poem and they might get the message that there's something dark there. Or tell a different story/song/poem and they'd might like to go try some.
- vidarh 11y ago
  The problem is that you have absolutely no basis for assuming what you pick up that you think is intended symbolism has anything to do with what the author is trying to convey unless they tell you. And very often it turns out that people who try to analyse works get it totally and utterly wrong (at least from the perspective of trying to tease out the authors intent). > 2) most people bypass said message when you "come straight out and said it" as it often sounds simplistic and naive deprived of its artifice. People ignore "don't do drugs" not because it's straightforward, but because it is trying to command you to do something without making a persuasive argument why. It is simplistic and naive for that reason, but that has nothing to do with the lack of symbolism, but with the lack of reasoning.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    >The problem is that you have absolutely no basis for assuming what you pick up that you think is intended symbolism has anything to do with what the author is trying to convey unless they tell you. Language is ambiguous, but not THAT ambiguous. People generally understand symbolic cues, unless we're talking about some extreme "avant guard" kind of art. Most of these clues after all have been honed for millenia, and are part of the cultural landscape. And if people are at least partially involved in art/literature etc, they learn even more of classic tropes and symbolic use of words (or images, in cinema). And if the miss a few symbolisms, they can still get others in the same work, and have a general grap of the message. One of the joys with songs/poems/fiction etc is discovering new levels and depth you didn't see at first (e.g. as you gain more experience with life to relate to them, or as you learn some cultural information that helps you decipher a clue). In the end, it's also up to how good the poet/writer/storyteller is, and how opaque or transparent he wants to make his story. >People ignore "don't do drugs" not because it's straightforward, but because it is trying to command you to do something without making a persuasive argument why Not really (from the point I come from). Even combined with a 8 page detailed pamphlet, with what can happen to you, side-effects et al, most young people still sneer at it and ignore it. For one, they think those things don't apply to them (they are industructible, they can control it, etc) and second they aren't cool. Reasons are the uncoolest things to try to convince teenagers with. It's when you spice up the story, make it cool, or make it impactful, that they might pay attention and think "hmm, maybe drugs aren't so good after all". That's what drug songs like "Needle and the damage done" can do, or books like "Less Than Zero". But at this point you're into symbolism and artifice too.
DanBC 11y ago
"Why did this character behave in this way?" "Because that's what the author wrote." We need a way of helping people jump through those hoops because rejecting the premise of litrature analysis is unlikely to go well for powerless children. Changing it from analysing[1] the literature into hacking te teacher may work. "Your teacher has these cognitive oddities. How many can you discover?" [1] I suspect a bit of programming with plenty of graphs of sentiment analysis or character interactions would not be well received in those classes.

protomyth 11y ago

I think my Dad had that "pseudo-highbrow twit" for a professor in college. Asking my Dad why the whale was white in Moby Dick gets a reaction like someone remembering being in a car accident. It also probably explains why he didn't seem surprised to be informed by my high school teacher that my 5-minute book report that stretched to 35-minutes on The Pearl had "too much energy" and "focused on the negative themes" a bit much. For my part, given the conditions of the school, I found the choice of books to be unfortunate.

kenjackson 11y ago

Always reminds me of this Rodney Dangerfield movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jow5aO8mp3E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jow5aO8mp3E