Comment by colechristensen
6 years ago
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.
As I said in another comment, at this level "literary criticism" is intended to develop rudimentary skills of textual interpretation. You learn what symbolism is and are asked to produce some examples. It doesn't matter what the poem "actually" means any more than it matters that you're ignoring friction and variable speeds and the changing mass of trains as they burn fuel when you work out how fast they're going in school math tests. When you get to more advanced textual analysis, you have to justify readings based on the work as a whole, the writer's oeuvre, historical context, linguistic concerns, philosophical frameworks, and so on.
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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.