I used to be a voracious consumer of fiction, but somehow critical reading of Lord of the Flies knocked that out of me in sophomore high school English. I think it was all the deeper meaning analysis I was forced to do moreso than the book. It just seemed like we were going far beyond the author's intention in a joyless analysis exercise.
> I think it was all the deeper meaning analysis I was forced to do moreso than the book. It just seemed like we were going far beyond the author's intention in a joyless analysis exercise.
That was literally my entire high school honors English program. You must interpret everything, to the satisfaction of the English teacher, or else.
It quite reliably took people who absolutely loved reading and made them hate books. I'm not quite sure the point of it, really. It took me a decade after high school to read a fiction book again, and this is far from uncommon among those who suffered through it alongside me.
I don't remember a thing about Red Badge of Courage except I had to extract meaning from why the grass in this particular scene was green - to symbolize new life, hope, rebirth, etc.
I was also one of those students who loved to read going into high school only to have it beaten out of me by English teachers over-analyzing everything. But... as an adult I can definitely see and appreciate the value of it.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen comments on r/TheHandmaidsTale along the lines of “why do people keep bringing up abortion laws here it has nothing to do with this show!” or have discussed Avenue 5 or South Park or some other satire with someone only to realize they’ve _completely_ missed the underlying message the writer(s) had made exceedingly obvious.
I remember my teacher used to talk about the “what level” and the “so what level” and he definitely went overboard in exploring the so what level but I’m also grateful I’m not blind to it. I think there are a surprising number of people who are unaware of any meaning beyond the literal words they read or hear.
On the other hand, the meaning of art is determined by what you bring to it. If you find a self-consistent interpretation that is not or perhaps even contrary to what the author had in mind or the classical analysis, that interpretation is just as right.
I recently learned that 19th century literature was often released one chapter at a time. This lead to substantial "filler" chapters which were required for the author to keep the story going.
I sometimes wonder if at least some portion of literary analysis is equivalent to teaching contemporary fan theories while waiting for the next episode/sequel/release.
Stephen King released The Green Mile in serial form like this.
He said it was a major challenge because once the chapter is out there it’s committed, so you can’t go back and fix major plot holes that you didn’t foresee at the time.
Yes, a lot of modern television shows have been serial works rather than episodic ones. Babylon 5 comes to mind as one of the earliest serialized television shows, if not the earliest.
Well, I suppose soap operas existed before that, but as far as I can tell they rarely had proper narrative endings; they were designed to last as many years as possible.
I was wondering why you wrote Babylon 5 when I can think of earlier long running shows, I.e. the original Star Trek, but I guess those are more like soap operas? Hm.
It’s not about how long a show was on the air, it has more to do with how interconnected the episodes are and whether the work has a story arc that was planned in advance. In a purely episodic work, you can experience the episodes in any order and have the same enjoyment. In a purely serial work, the order of the episodes (or should we call them installments?) matters a lot.
Star Trek was episodic. No matter what happens in one episode, most things remained status quo for the next. There were some slow changes to the cast, but for the most part you could watch the episodes in any order.
TNG was book–ended by their dealings with Q, but that story had no closure and only took up about four or five episodes out of 7 years. There were some other stories like that as well, stories that were longer than an episode but much shorter than the show as a whole.
On the other hand, Deep Space Nine was closer to a single story with a beginning, middle, and end. There were still plenty of episodes that would still make sense if you moved them to a different season, but it was much less episodic than the previous shows.
Voyager was billed as a serial work, but was so badly written that most episodes could be moved around at will with no harm to the storyline.
Babylon 5, in contrast, gave every episode some link to the overarching plot, even if it was just hints. (Especially in the first season, when the main antagonists were still hidden and all we had were hints.)
It’s easy for episodic shows to be written at the same pace that they are filmed. With serial shows, you have to know in advance where the story is going to go even if you still write most of the dialog at the pace of filming. I didn’t watch much of Lost, but I got the impression that while it was a serial, the writers had no real plan from the start and that everything was made up as they went along. The result is that the story is incoherent. I’ve never watched any soap operas either, but I gather that they try to arrange for frequent cliffhangers and dramatic changes (making the story more serial), but that there is never a planned end to the story; they’re perpetually in the middle. The result is a work with constant churn and no resolution.
Lost definitely felt episodic and incoherent at times. I think they did plan out some arcs loosely that worked over the course of a few seasons. Some character progression and morality flip was clearly unplanned, and those arcs felt like a soap opera.
I’ve seen the other shows you’ve mentioned, but not Babylon 5. I had read of comparisons between it and DS9 before, and now that comparison makes more sense.
High school English class was like this for me too. It was usually obvious what my teacher wanted students to say but it just seemed all so contrived and I couldn’t bring myself to participate in the silliness. On my report card she once wrote, “stubbornly sticks to his opinions even when wrong”.
One day, for fun, I tried out saying what I thought she wanted to hear. I got a lot of praise from her that day.
I kind of enjoyed the absurdity of it, but I openly acknowledged it was a game. Fortunately discussions at my highschool after freshman year were less about the teacher imposing their will, and new ideas were the most rewarded. It was fun racing to support tenuous conclusions before anyone else could.
Spanish Literature was an especially exciting class. I still think one of the greatest accomplishments of my life was writing a two page Spanish paper on a 12 line poem and only receiving marks off for grammatical mistakes. My teacher even wrote "haha" in the margins next to one of my more ridiculous explanations, but didn't say it was necessarily wrong.
I used the improvisational analysis techniques I learned in those classes to entertain art student friends in college sometimes. Especially popular with free drinks in an art gallery.
> It quite reliably took people who absolutely loved reading and made them hate books. I'm not quite sure the point of it, really. It took me a decade after high school to read a fiction book again, and this is far from uncommon among those who suffered through it alongside me.
I pretty much only read science fiction now, and the occasional crime thriller, although I used to be a voracious reader. I din't realize why until I read your post: high school English made me hate fiction. It's like I was playing a game of guess-the-password, and was being graded on how close my arbitrary answer matched the teacher's expectation. I hated it, and it destroyed any interest in reading "high" literature to this day :(
I think I can appreciate sci-fi books in particular because my brain knows there's no way they'd ever be taught in an English classroom, so it doesn't evoke memories of those horrible literature classes.
I remember suffering through that nonsense as well. Then I remember a moment in a class in college where something "clicked" and I suddenly understood the game. After that it became simply tedious, but not raw torture like it had been. To be honest, it has helped me think a couple layers deeper about some of the media I consume.
I still think it's stupid and trite in the way it's handled in the educational setting and completely agree it mostly a garbage way to analyze things. Once you understand the game it becomes quite brainless and formulaic in most cases.
I remember being stunned in high school that people would get degrees and an entire semester would be devoted to finding hidden symbolic meanings that authors in many cases obviously didn't intend.
This was back when you could read Huck Finn. The teacher droned on and for over a week about how it was a symbolic journey of a boys growth towards manhood, how Huck was on the metaphorical river journey of overcoming racism. I said no, I didn't think that was what the story was about. It was just a story, in a certain time, in a certain place, meant to entertain, not to enlighten. She got really mad.
So I opened up the intro to Huck Finn where Twain writes the following:
*
“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR
per
G.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE”`
*
I read it out loud in the class and said I didn't believe he was joking. He had foreseen the possibility of people like her arising and attempted to preempt it! I'll never forget her standing there with her mouth open and no answer.
There is deeply symbolic literature, no argument. But all of it clearly is not. And interpretation of symbolism in many cases is summoned directly from thin air. Turns out it's an entire profession!
> * “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR per G.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE”` *
Have you considered that Mark Twain, a master of satire, may have intended that passage to be just that?
I think the 'will be shot' gives it away.
I don't know much about metaphoric journeys on rivers from boyhood to manhood, but there was more of a point to that story than you seem to think.
While some may analyze beautiful literature into oblivion and I feel your pain, I can’t agree with you on Huck Finn. My interpretation of the intro you quoted is very different from yours.
Mark Twain went out of his way to highlight barbaric racism on rubber plantations in the Congo by writing a satirical pamphlet to try to get the word out:
Even though he masterfully wove his beliefs into the underlying fabric of Huck Finn, I am sure he wished to subtly communicate important truths while spinning a really delightful tale.
While satire clearly can go above a young boy's head, it is important to keep an open mind about literature. Symbolism doesn't necessarily need to have a purpose.
We can also learn a lot about the environment in which a writer operated, just by learning from which symbols was used to convey a message. This is one of the central points, but also perhaps the most misunderstood, of modern (and post modern) literary criticism.
Your teacher may not have been the best, but that does not mean all literary criticism is bad.
My complaint was (and still is 30 years later) is that an entire cottage industry seems to have arisen around finding hidden meanings.
Would we do that to television today? Does the cartoon "King of the Hill" contain hidden significance and deep moral lessons? Maybe. Or maybe it's just wit mostly designed to entertain.
This reads like something you would find on the ThatHappened subreddit. I bet your classmates also clapped after you so brutally took down that dumbass teacher with facts and logic, right?
You had to take that class to learn not to take everything you read at face value. As sometimes happen people decide to go the other way around and declare that texts never have any deeper meaning and that it is all just nonsense and gosh darn how can those liberal arts even exist??????
It’s a shame because it prevents you from enjoying literature at a deeper level, instead of saying that Anna Karenina is the exact same as some silly airport novel.
We now have proof that it really is "going far beyond the author's intention". Texas licensed a poem for a standardized test. The poem's author was still alive, and was unable to "correctly" answer test questions about the meaning of the poem.
So yes, the English teachers really are spouting nonsense, and we have proof.
There also is a similar story of such in my country. There was this guy who wrote a short and it was included in the national textbook. The guy's son (or grandson, I can't recount exactly) was assigned to analyse that short and the author, out of curiosity, made the kid submitted his analysis instead. The teacher even went as far as commenting "You don't understand the author's intention at all". Which really make us think how absurd literary education can really go.
Depends on whether you subscribe to the "death of the author" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGn9x4-Y_7A) or not. Does the author's intent in writing something trump everyone else's interpretation? What if we don't have the original author around to ask? A good example of this is all the interpretations of various passages in the Bible different groups have had throughout history.
Instead of privileging the author's intent, one can treat literature, or even religious text as akin to art. The reader participates in the meaning of the piece. Or you can think about how people argue over and critique movies and television shows.
You can find your own meaning, but you should be honest about the fact that it is your own meaning.
English teachers are demanding "correct" interpretation that has nothing to do with what the author intended. It's bullshit, and they need to admit that. It's also squeezing very important topics out of the schedule, such as the teaching of proper grammar and other things needed for non-literary writing in a professional career.
This is the fate of much good literature - forcing recalcitrant high schoolers to dissect something that doesn’t talk to them which can result in a life-long hatred.
I wonder if it would make it better if teachers would explain to you that this bit is not very useful in and of itself, but we do it to practice writing and because other people think we should. It might dissuade some people from pursuing English literature degrees in college, but that's probably not a bad thing. Would the honesty help at all?
I didn't hate literature class in highschool but I think I might have liked it better if I wasn't so confused about why the various arguments and analysis seemed so tenuous to me. Fundamentally, the analysis of literature is the least productive skill we teach kids in high school, although writing is still very important.
I was turned off from fiction in high school because I thought "we are being told to read the best of what the world had to offer, and most of this is shit".
Turns out there are great fiction books out there - took me a while to unlearn the bias.
Assignment: Write about what the main character (Homer) does after leaving the nuns he'd helped.
What I did: Wrote a hysterical (to me, at the time) story about how he went to South America in search of a mystical coffee with some made up Latin name which, when translated, meant "Grave-digging coffee that really stinks". I'm still proud of that line. His team of scientists (who all looked like "Billy" from The Far Side) were all killed in various ways while traversing the Amazon, all of them funny (to me, at the time). I was very, very happy with myself. Creative writing was fun.
Teacher: Rewrite it, be serious.
Me: Wrote some drivel that I hated, turned it in, got a lousy grade.
That stifled me for a long time, because it's been hard ever since to just let loose on a story. I criticize it every step of the way now. I find short form poetry (often as music lyrics) to be far simpler and just as expressive if not more so.
well this is the key thing really. why are we so hung up on authorial intent? For example, Bradbury claimed that fahrenheit 451 is not about censorship - should we let that influence how we interpret and utilize his work? I think it is valuable to use fahrenheit 451 as a precautionary tale about censorship, regardless of what Bradbury originally intended.
