"Analyzing fiction is a guessing game at best" You might be confusing the process of analyzing fiction and producing an analysis that demonstrates whatever a g

"Analyzing fiction is a guessing game at best" You might be confusing the process of analyzing fiction and producing an analysis that demonstrates whatever a given English lit professor is looking for. Though you might be also happy to know that such luminaries as C.S. Lewis think that analysis itself may be the wrong way to talk about stories -- that if you're doing it right, you you experience them more than you "analyze" them: http://weston.canncentral.org/writing/index.php?2001/09/27/15:36/It-doesn%27t-MEAN-anything http://weston.canncentral.org/writing/index.php?2001/09/27/1... It's certainly true that some professors (not just literature, but of any discipline in which there are subjective or aesthetic issues, which is arguably all of them) really don't have a sufficiently flexible view to accommodate thinking outside of the paths they've personally trodden. But my experience is that a lot of literature people really just want to see that you've had some kind of experience with the work and are capable of articulating insights that you've connected from it. "the problem with fiction is that the stories exist in a realm without rules (or incomplete rules, in the best case scenario)" It's not clear to me that anybody lives in a realm with complete rules (unless some of them are inconsistent). And even if we are in fact located in such a place, I'd be willing to bet that nobody has anything resembling a complete model of the world in their heads. "Analyzing fiction is a guessing game at best, and a completely naive, amateur attempt to perform psychoanalysis on dead authors at worst. Anyone who points this out will not fare well in such a class... take it from someone who learned firsthand." I wasn't there, I have no way of telling whether or not you were as confrontational about the fundamental worthiness of an endeavor many people find deeply enriching and to which your prof had probably chosen to dedicate their life to as you seem to be here, or if you were simply unfortunate to take a course from someone who couldn't handle some any challenge let alone thoughtful deviation from accepted analysis is unfortunate, but I'd submit that in either case there was probably some opportunity for real education. As for whether it's just a game: the universe may well be ultimately orderly, and the limited rationalism we're possessed of might even yield the tools to eventually encompass most of its secrets. But the universe most of us really inhabit -- the one made of the stories in our heads -- is a lot messier, and fiction and the tools of analyzing fiction can be as important in navigating it as logic is.