Comment by gatherhunterer
6 years ago
Literary analysis is overly criticized due to poor teaching of humanities. I disagree with some of the interpretations that I have heard of major literary works but no one has ever forced those ideas on me, I have never been censured for proposing an interpretation that differs from another. Bad teaching is a shame but dismissing an entire academic field because you had a poor experience as a child is self-aggrandizement. As an adult one should be aware of the general public perception of one’s education. I grew up on standardized tests like the one in the article and even as a teenager I knew they were abysmal.
The people producing art and the people talking about what it means are so very often are mutually exclusive that it is very hard to take the people talking about it seriously.
My experience with literary analysis is being forced to analyze pieces which I often believed didn't have any abstract meaning to speak of and then inventing some nonsense I thought would appeal to the teacher. The criticism is apt because my experience is generally the only experience many people have with the study of languages and literature. If it didn't exist these classes might add value to the lives of the people taking them.
My experience of programming is making a turtle move around on a screen, so programming is dumb. My experience of math is working out how fast trains traveling towards each other are going, so math is dumb. My experience of chemistry is making a bit of paper change color when dipped in vinegar, so chemistry is dumb. And so on ad nauseam.
Those all proved useful though using real empirical based systems. If your programming class was, “what do you think the author meant by this line of code?” with no evidence to support any kind of guess, then yes it would be dumb.
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I just refused. I had good enough grades that I could afford to actively sabotage those lessons with passive aggressive responses that let my teacher know very well by the end of it what I thought of the whole thing.
I found it quite interesting that I was the only person in that class who regularly both read and wrote poems, and at the same time the one who had the sharpest reaction to being forced to analyse them in ways I felt actively destroyed my enjoyment of those poems.
One of the highlights of my school years was during this torture, when I got a chance to read a poem I'd written during one of those lessons aloud, with the intent that we would analyse it.
The teacher walked right into it, not yet aware how much I detested it.
My poem was a scathing criticism of tearing poems apart to invent meanings, unsupported by facts, that the author likely never intended, just barely civil enough to be read out in school.
My teacher got red and mumbled something I think nobody in class heard over the cheering and clapping.
I don't think I ever want to perform any of my poems again - it's a hard reaction to beat.
My teacher and I reached a cautious detente - he didn't punish my grade as much as he could have for that and other demonstrations, and I contained it and mostly played along. But the following year we did have to do a major report that included a literary analysis of a novel, and I told him flat out that I knew I could afford to come out a full grade lower and still not drop a grade for my final grade of the year, and that I just would ignore substantial parts of the requirements.
I did all of the 'mechanical' analysis of vocabulary and identifying allegories and the like, but then flat out refused to speculate on what the text meant. That was purely demonstrative - I certainly could have talked about my subjective interpretation, but the exercise in pretending there was an objective interpretation just made me upset.
It did not just affect my enjoyment of reading, but also my enjoyment of writing - the thought of my writing even potentially being treated like that was profoundly depressing.
To this day I think these kinds of lessons are destructive and do massive damage to students enjoyment of literature.
The people The people producing literary criticism and the people talking about what it means are so very often are mutually exclusive that it is very hard to take the people talking about it seriously.
Let's call spade a spade: if a literary critic is creating an interpretation that goes beyond what the author intended to convey, they're pulling meaning out of their ass. It's completely arbitrary and has no validity; at best it boils down to psychoanalyzing the author (and the critic is not qualified for that), trying to guess what the author "truly wanted" to say without realizing they want it to say. A simple experiment: imagine a blind test in which the critic doesn't know whether the work was produced by a human or a GAN. If they can give similar statements about "what the author meant", then they're talking garbage.
Trying to put the work in context of other works from the same genre or historical period? Sure, that's useful. Telling you what the author "truly meant", even though the author never said that? That's just entertainment. Let's label it as such explicitly, instead of trying to tell people it's a form of "deeper truth".
Not quite. The humanities are fundamentally about persuasion, not about objectivity. There is no objectivity in the arts, creators are not the last word on their work [1], and any good observation is considered a success if it's persuasive to at least some people some of the time.
A lot of academic-level criticism is really an advanced game of "Hunt the hidden metaphor." People can take it or leave it, but as a pastime it's unlikely to go away. No one competent [2] seriously expects any one interpretation to be definitive. It's all just opinion, and sometimes it's interesting and insightful opinion - and sometimes it isn't.
[1] A lot of people find this strange, but why should it be? Creators are no more aware of their own internal motivations than anyone else is.
[2] This may not include high school teachers attempting the same thing, because they're likely to be teaching by rote from standard interpretations and marking them right/wrong rather than trying to elicit interesting personal insights.
Fair. Then I guess my argument boils down to, "I wish high-school teachers and a bunch of other people stopped doing that".
I can appreciate the argument of a work of art being like a mirror, where looking at it reveals as much about it as it does about the person looking. I can appreciate "hunt the hidden metaphor" exercises and even "bend the interpretation so hard to make the book be about something it obviously isn't" games. I've done both, and I enjoyed it - it's a nice workout for imagination and arguing skills. But I wish it was presented as such, clearly labeled as intellectual entertainment. As it is, the way I - and perhaps many other people in this thread - was exposed to literary criticism always made the critics look like historians - dispensing factual, if not always obvious, knowledge about works of literature.
“Goes beyond what the author intended to convey” — there is no such thing. What the author intended to convey was exactly what was written.
Interpretations differ, and hence a literary critic is born.
There are two things. 1) what the author wrote, and 2) what they meant to write. Whey may have wanted to communicate something but failed at it. As long as the author is alive, or as long as they left notes or explanatory works, you can learn it. But going beyond these two things and claiming "this is what's in the text" is where literary criticism becomes bullshit.
I have been censured for proposing the 'wrong' interpretation. And it totally destroyed my respect for that teacher. My interpretation was supported strictly by the actual text. The 'correct' interpretation not just according to our teacher, but our textbooks, required a tortured reading and assuming a comma was misplaced when this author always otherwise had perfect grammar. The only defense was an appeal to authority: surely I did not expect to understand it better than some idiot who'd failed at basic reading comprehension a century ago.
In this situation it isn't the teaching, it's the test.
The test demands an answer, whereas good teaching would be a discussion.
I'd prefer my kids to finish school knowing how to read and enjoy poetry, than knowing how to complete multiple choice tests.
> ...dismissing an entire academic field because you had a poor experience as a child is self-aggrandizement.
Can we please try to be more polite than this? Accusing someone of self-aggrandizement doesn't usually lead to a friendly and interesting conversation.
I was using "you" in the general sense. The site guidelines encourage readers to assume good faith on the part of others and if you have an issue with a comment it can be flagged so that a moderator can deal with it.