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"Analyzing fiction is a guessing game at best, and a completely naive, amateur attempt to perform psychoanalysis on dead authors at worst." Actually, one of th
by jonnathanson 15y ago
"Analyzing fiction is a guessing game at best, and a completely naive, amateur attempt to perform psychoanalysis on dead authors at worst."
Actually, one of the cardinal rules of literary criticism is that you should not attempt to psychoanalyze the author of a work; rather, you should treat the work as a self-contained unit. If you're going to analyze the author, then it's an entirely different task. Blending the two bastardizes both efforts. So yes, I would agree that bad criticism tends to employ such efforts. But I would also argue that no literature professor worth his tenure should even be proposing such methods in a classroom.
I do agree that trying to discern intent is a "guessing game." But some ways of guessing are much more effective than others. And some guesses are more sound than others.
While I sympathize with much of what you're saying, I think you give short shrift to the field of literary criticism and analysis. There's some genuinely insightful, analytical, occasionally profound stuff out there.
"My method of analysis was to approach stories from a rational standpoint..."
What do you mean by this? "Rational" in what sense? Are you studying the rationality of the text? Are you proposing a set of logical guidelines to be used in evaluating a text? Are you focusing on the internal coherence and consistencies of the world within the story? Are you focused on the story's structural soundness? "Rational" is a pretty big and broad word that begs clarification. As you can see, I just generated a handful of different ways of interpreting your statement. This would seem to indicate that the statement needs further clarification.
Now, the real problem with this is that you're suggesting that your approach was "rational," and implying that other approaches are irrational. Such a claim demands explication.
"...the problem with fiction is that the stories exist in a realm without rules (or incomplete rules, in the best case scenario)."
Again, this is pretty vague. What do you mean by "rules?" And are the "rules" you're proposing in any way tainted by your own subjectivity? It's very, very, very tricky to define sets of rules for fiction. By and large, we're still pretty much working with the set that the Greeks came up with a couple thousand years ago.
I don't mean to knock you or your post, because I think I understand what you're saying. But if you're going to attack a system, you need to be very clear about a) what's wrong with the system, and b) what your alternatives entail.
- nradov 15y agoExcept that those cardinal rules of literary criticism are more or less pointless and arbitrary. It's like how the cardinal rules of certain types of astrology form a (mostly) internally consistent system, but so what? Neither astrology or literary criticism produce useful results, except by happenstance. No one system of either discipline is provably better than another, so it's ridiculous to draw a line at psychoanalyzing dead authors when everything else is built on a foundation of sand. Teaching classical literary criticism techniques is probably as good a way as any to improve students' reading comprehension, critical thinking, and writing skills. But let's not pretend it has some deeper significance beyond being a pedagogical tool.
- rkon 15y agoMy problem with literary criticism is that it's essentially a disingenuous pseudoscience. Critics make authoritative pronouncements on human nature, culture, society, etc., when they're not actually qualified social scientists. They constantly misappropriate theories from other disciplines, yet they make no effort to support their claims with research or empirical evidence. Literary criticism as a whole seems to suffer from a fundamental misunderstanding of epistemology (for which I'm sure we can thank postmodernism). It's the perfect platform for anti-intellectuals to espouse their unsubstantiated social and political theories while enjoying immunity from any rigorous scrutiny.
- jonnathanson 15y agoWith all due respect, I think you're reading the wrong literary criticism. That's quite a broad brush with which to paint the entire field, and I can assure you that most of it does not "deal in authoritative pronouncements on human nature, culture, society, etc." or "misappropriate theories from other disciplines." The best literary criticism analyzes and evaluates what's in the text, and does not attempt to conflate literature with philosophy or sociology (unless in an anthropological sense of those fields). Perhaps some of you have had some bad English teachers or professors? I think we all have. There are vanishingly few good ones out there these days. But we should not confuse bad literary criticism with all literary criticism. Just as I wouldn't look at a horribly coded mess and conclude that the field of programming is bunk, I wouldn't look at a terrible example of criticism and condemn the entire field.