Comment by TheOtherHobbes
6 years ago
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.