Comment by TeMPOraL
6 years ago
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.