I've always thought english class is actually cover for a bit of psychology class. In english class you may discuss, for example, "the sky was rainy and sad st

I've always thought english class is actually cover for a bit of psychology class. In english class you may discuss, for example, "the sky was rainy and sad stuff was happening, this is the author applying pathetic fallacy". Or, "the lady wore red, and she is the object of desire, so there is a color-idea running through the novel". The immediate response was "no way the author put that in on purpose!". And a little debate ensues about how authors do often meticulously insert details to keep a thematic thread like that going. Famously, there's a character grid from Catch-22 floating around, that basically lays out the traits and how they were injected throughout the plot-line. More commonly, though, what we write is imbued with the same biases that psychological studies try to extract. So an author may write a story where every male character speaks in a way that gets interpreted as "in this novel the men represent War". And the author may pipe in to say "I did NOT intend it like that!", and this is fine. However, it wouldn't really be the end of it. Maybe the author revealed some subconscious opinions. So this is why I've always thought that "reading too much" in english literature was just doing a little bit of armchair psychoanalysis, where you are the doctor and the patient is the author, and their book their story. (I'm a bachelor in mech eng and a masters in chem eng and haven't taken english since highschool though. take with handfuls of salt) edit: A student a while back sent a letter to various authors and asked them if they deliberately inserted symbolism in their work. It's a cool read. http://mentalfloss.com/article/30937/famous-novelists-symbolism-their-work-and-whether-it-was-intentional http://mentalfloss.com/article/30937/famous-novelists-symbol...