/lit/ - Literature

why put it in the book then

This holds true with basically anyone OP. Besides if you were an English teacher he/she would probably start reading too deeply into something after reading it for the 20th time.

>>1768238
um because it was description. sometimes i wonder whether the author really put it there or not. i think us students/scholars/teachers just over do it and analyze ever single detail

the author would probably go umm ok i didn't mean that but yeah whatever ill go with it

>>1768240

then why didn't he pick the color red?

>>1768240
It depends on the author and the work really. If you're reading Dear John and the curtains are blue it most likely means nothing considering the reputation of the author.

On the other hand, you have works like The Great Gatsby and The Scarlet Letter where there is definitely a trend in color, and this trend will almost always be symbolic.

>>1768251
true i get what you mean. but sometimes i just get the feeling that the stuff we analyze is not what the author really intended.

>>1768245
His curtains were blue?
He likes blue?
He looked up and the first thing he saw was blue?
He flipped a coin and it landed on blue?

He just fucking prefered his curtains were blue instead of any other colour for no reason at all?

I'm with you OP, teachers read way too much into the stuff. Most of the stuff in there can be read and interpreted in many ways, one of them being just random coincidence.

Don't trust too much on opinions from studies or professors. Read the book and see what it means to you, what you get out of it.

>read Hemingway story
>two characters notice a cat in the rain
>teacher: "the cat is in the rain, thus representing a wet vagina. This alludes to the fact that one of the characters is struggling with her lesbian identity."

>>1768262
so descriptions are arbitrary? why do you read them?

>>1768262
Being able to interpret in many ways is pretty much THE ENTIRE POINT of studying literature.

>>1768267
Freudian interpretations...?

well gee, it's almost as if in contemporary lit crit you can analyze shit independent of the author's intentions!

>>1768270
Because they may or may not be arbitrary, that's the whole point of what I was saying. Sometimes they mean something, sometimes they don't.
Don't be looking for meaning behind everything because you will end up making up one if you can find it, and you'll never know the difference.

Just read the book and let it flow.

>>1768262
our teacher constantly makes us do some analysis bullshit for a random four sentence passage that practically has nothing to analyze.

often I just bullshit my way through it and after the test everyone has different BS interpretation on the dumbass passage. what did the author intend... we don't fucking know. sometimes the teacher just makes up some random stuff.

the thing is what is the point of analyzing and coming up with different interpretations if the author never even intended any of these viewpoints.

>>1768267
I laughed at this.

>>1768273
Yes, exactly. And one possible interpretation is no meaning behind it at all.

>>1768240
http://www.gummyprint.com/blog/archives/hills-like-white-elephants-complete-story/

YES OP SOMETIMES THE DESCRIPTIONS ARE ACTUALLY A BIG FUCKING DEAL

>>1768276
>>1768276
>>1768276

bingo babycakes

>>1768267
this is what happens in my class. utter bullshit.

>>1768275
I guess. We were reading through Hemingway and looking for sexual themes.

I just thought it was insulting, as if she assumed Hemingway's work had to be linked to sex for youth to find it interesting.

>>1768284
OH GOD OH GOD is it my imagination, or does /lit/ expose the fact that 4chan is full of kids even more than the other boards?

>read Catcher in the Rye in highschool
>really, honestly enjoy it
>spend TWO FUCKING WEEKS listening to our teacher explain the significance of the ducks in the pond

The significance is that Holden is a cunt who pins all his problems on things outside himself. He uses the ducks as a device to distract himself from his problems, and is pissed when the cab driver won't indulge him because that means he has to man up and deal with shit.

SHOULD NOT TAKE TWO GODDAMN WEEKS.

Sometimes the curtains are just fucking blue, but being a creative writer myself, I can say that when it's up to you to decide what of all colors the curtain could be, sometimes you settle on a color because it actually means something.

For example, if the rest of the story was to dreary and sad, why not choose blue curtains instead of hot pink (unless I was going to be ironic or something)?

i got into lit crit because i wanted to understand better how and why art is made.

then i realized that lit crit has nothing to do with those things.

i was rather disappointed.

>>1768306
>>1768306
>>1768306

but: that doesn't mean it has no value. the multivariate paths of possible interpretation open the mind to the fact that the way you process reality is flexible, and that each sensory impression can lead to an infinite symbolic web, a la william blake ("the infinite in every thing"). this is important creative realization.

Dude "The Sun Also Rises" almost centers around a man's inability to achieve an erection. It's pretty sexual (also Brett is a fucking whore)

>>1768306
What happens in lit crit then if it's not what you expected?

>>1768294
My previous comment about "The Sun Also Rises" was a response to your comment

>>1768294
you realize that one of the characters of Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls" has a hoby of deflowering virgins?

Hemingway was a badass drunk fucker. In every possible meaning. Of course there's a lot of sex in his books.

>>1768251
It depends. It could be say the author likes the color red, or the color red sets as scene.

Maybe not symbolic, but setting the characters up to do something. Creating the mood for the scene persay.

>>1768323
Jesus dies.

>>1768323
>>1768323
>>1768323

symbolic possibilities and social, cultural, political, and psychological implications of a text are exploded and explored apart from the author's intentions. the process or impetus of the work's creation is consciously avoided or it's, at most, an afterthought.

this is, of course, smoke and mirrors, in my opinion. author and work and audience are components in a unified system (see my name). but don't tell them that.

ITT: big lesson in why teenagers make shitty critical thinkers.

>>1768348
If the mods were cool dudes, anyone who put an opinion like OP's in this thread would be underage b&

>>1768348

speak for yourself

>>1768348
Many are just plain damn lazy, and would rather devote all the time to hate rather than do.

But to a certain extent, you do have to wonder. Like the green light in Gatsby. I feel that was something deep for the character to look to do. Green was just part of the description. Maybe this is to an extent from all the films i've watched.

What else would he be doing? Looking at his toes and smoking?

>>1768354

yeah god forbid anybody learn anything here

whoop de doo.
>you spent days looking/rereading a passage of 10 lines.
>you interpreted what the author wrote be it what he actually intended or your own bullshit ideas

and how did you contribute to society?
literature is complete nonsense.

>>1768359
exactly

>>1768364
>>1768364
>>1768364

you come up with new ways to think about the world that may influence your actions and shape reality.

oops, was that rhetorical?

>>1768356
I just did. You know, in the response you replied to.

Maybe you could critically think about that.

>>1768380

sorry, i'll clarify.

"describe yourself"

What I really, really hate is when a teacher takes a passage from a book, interprets it, then refuses to accept any other interpretations, saying, "This is what the author meant."
I feel like sometimes the curtains are just blue, sometimes they represent the main character's depression, and sometimes they are blue because whatever; it's all about the reader and how they interpret the text.

>>1768380
Hey man that's just your interpretation.

>>1768408
I'd like a writer to actually say for once what they were meant with each part while writing a famous, analyzed piece of literature (on their deathbed or otherwise).

I'd like to see how the 'expert' interpretation and the author's intent line up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_the_Author

>>1768394
you aren't clarifying, you're correcting your mistake. You improperly applied a cliche (lazy writing showing a lack of complex thinking) to a statement, and are now trying to pass it off as a droll remark.

Some people have problems with this sort of thing because their minds can't go further than "right or wrong". In their minds everything is literal, and anything beyond that is "stupid because the author didn't mean that".

You know what?

Fuck you. School shouldn't cater to the lowest common denominator. I absolutely loved my English teacher and she opened up my mind to books I never would have even given a second glance. If you had to write a few essays you hated so someone like me could discover literature and literary analysis then so be it. Go back to watching Jersey Shore

There are some things that the authors write with a purpose. But a lot of stuff we just over analyze. Take symbols, hardly any author actually tries to make a symbol stand for something. So instead we have something that is interpreted completely differently by a dozen people.

Funny story, I read an essay about how the cigars in Dracula were actually symbols for a penis. And how Dracula was actually one-big rape-fantasy by the author. Gave me something funny to tell my friends about, however.

Intentional fallacy, OP . . Most no-nonsense professors will tell you that it really doesn't matter what the author intended, and that the act of criticism, as a necessarily subjective act anyway, doesn't rely on whether the author 'meant' to have a particular text read in this way or that . . Even if the author is still alive and maintained that 'Fuck, the curtains are blue because they're blue,' a critic could easily dismiss this assertion and say that the author clearly had a subconscious motive in coloring the curtains in that particular way.

>>1768408

if they're doing that you need a new fucking teacher.

>>1768418

i know right. except that the author is inextricable from the text. i'm a little disappointed in modern theory's reluctance to go there-- just because the information is temporally or intersubjectively inaccessible doesn't mean there is no information. forces are at work that they don't understand.

this is especially problematic with modern celebrities and musicians, like Gaga, where the "personality" or "person" is a component in the work. what about performance art? etc.

>>1768423
Well, the problem that many have (or at least so i've seen) is that people are posed with 'What did the author mean?' Rather than musings that are actually created by you, and just spurred by something.

We can all accept the musing, because it's an interpretation is right nor wrong. But for what the author meant, it's either right or wrong.

>>1768276
>>1768418

THIS!

/thread

>>1768422
>>1768422

no, i'm not.

intentional fallacy.

>>1768418
I would like to personally thank you for posting that.

>>1768417
Long story short, I wrote a short story that a bunch of people critiqued for this class, but they didn't know I was the writer or that I was even in the room. They made up a lot of interpretations that I hadn't originally intended. Some of them sounded cool so from then on I pretended that's what I meant. The writer is entitled to any interpretations the reader puts into it.

>>1768417
Joyce did this with bits of all his books. Nabokov did the opposite; he insisted Lolita did not have allegorical meaning. Individual pieces of prose from it might have been meaningful in relation to the characters, but there was no sweeping allegory.
Most of the modernists spent all their time that wasn't writing fiction on talking cryptically about their meaning. Joyce, Eliot, Pound, W.C. Williams, etc. Hemingway never went into detail but always loved to say "90% of it isn't there" in relation to all of his writing.
I'd like to paraphrase a famous literary scholar about literature in general, Hugh Kenner: The scholar (meaning the analyst), the Explicator (meaning the grammarian, the dictionary writer, the annotator), and the Poet (meaning, well, the poet, or more generally, the writer) are a trio. In order for literature (or art in general, really) to flourish, grow, change, and influence the world, all three must be working equally hard. It's not like poets fall over and suddenly have their masterpiece in their head. They READ, they ANALYSE, they SPEAK, they THINK. The poet does not come first, and pull his craft out of thin air; just like the analyst and the explicator, the poet's craft is one of reference, re-use, and creation from others' work.

>>1768426
>hardly any author actually tries to make a symbol stand for something

[citation needed]

>>1768448
Care to post the story and elaborate on their interpretations if you will?

>>1768408
This. Reading is a highly subjective / personal experience, and even if the author were to write a step-by-step guide to understanding and analyzing his or her works, this guide itself couldn't be completely trusted, as the author himself comes to his OWN text with a subjective and personal interpretative faculty that may be miles away from where he was when he actually wrote it.
I had a professor who secured a phone interview with Anthony Burgess, and was asking him a ton of questions about the different situations in his novels, and offering possible analyses. The whole time, Anthony was pretty much agreeing with everything the prof said. At the end of the interview, Anthony asked the prof if he could use his analyses for an upcoming lecture, as he had forgotten exactly what he'd intended when writing the original works.

>>1768448
Yup. I remember writing some creative writing pieces in an LA class that I gave to the teacher for reviewing.
The teacher immediately began drawing parallels that I really never put in there. I didn't say anything, because she obviously loved it, but still.

>>1768439

no, because

>>1768434

(second section)

>>1768460

Oh I know that, I read Foucalt's response on author discourse (rather begrudgingly I might add)

Nevertheless OP sounds like whiny teen, inexperienced, but that is no fault of his/her own. Better to tell 'em now why seemingly pointless things are done...

>>1768452
nice

>>1768454
I'd rather not, it's not a very good story. I'm not afraid to say it was written rather well, which is part of why it was in the top 10 stories to be published, but upon a second reading, we all kind of realized that the ending was weak and left the story kind of empty. At the time of writing, I really had no idea how to make a good story. I'm rather ashamed of it and use it as a lesson, now.

>>1768482
Ah well, it was worth a shot. Does prove a point however, i would have just liked to understand the magnitude of the observations versus intentions.

>>1768452
>>1768452
>>1768452

bravo sir

>>1768475
>>1768475

haven't read it. sounds like i should. and yeah, i think people learn a lot from these boards, despite their reputation.

good writers write with purpose

I'm sure it's common for a writer's shit to get over analyzed.

>>1768492
I've learned more from 4chan than i could really care to say.

It's the fun teacher at school, while not always on topic, you do end up picking up some useful knowledge, and a hell of a lot of random trivia

>>1768499

the purpose, though, may not be denotative, logical, or subject to rational analysis.

>>1768492

Yeah, I think its called "What is an Author?" specifically the section called Author Function. Read it when you're feeling like you can take some lit theory without nodding off (I just can't help it sometimes...)

>>1768513

sweet thnx. sounds really good.

>>1768506

Everything is subject to rational analysis

>>1768519
Rationality within literature is entirely subjective

>>1768521

Subjectivity is subject to rational analysis

>>1768503
>learning things from 4chan
People think this is a joke, but I started my literature endeavor with the /lit/ classic lists and other recommendations. I asked my English professor if he had ever read Gravity's Rainbow (I bought it without knowing what I was getting myself into) and he replied that he wrote his dissertation on the book. Since then, I was able to bro it up with him about literature and books and all and he helped me out a lot and said I was "reading the right stuff."

Thanks, /lit/! Maybe he'll disregard my two C's and give me an A in the class anyways!

>>1768519

let me rephrase: it may not yield particularly rich fruit to rational analysis because rationality may not have been a component in the "purpose" spoken of in the quote i was responding to. often, creative processes happen in the absence of rational thought, and rational criticism of these processes is mere autopsy.

>>1768522
Ration analysis of subjectivity will become inherently subjective

>>1768531

Nope

Best example of an author forestalling that shit right in the beginning is Tolkein's preface to his re-release of the lord of the rings in the 70s, where he denies that LOTR is an allegory:

"As for any inner meaning or 'message', it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical... It was written long before the foreshadow of 1939 had yet become a threat of inevitable disaster, and from that point the story would have developed along essentially the same lines, if that disaster had been averted."

Also:

in 1961, Tolkien sharply criticized a Swedish commentator who suggested that The Lord of the Rings was an anti-communist parable and identified the Dark Lord with Stalin. Tolkien retorted,

"I utterly repudiate any such 'reading', which angers me. The situation was conceived long before the Russian revolution. Such allegory is entirely foreign to my thought."

Also in that preface, he wrote what would happen if it was an allegory (Saruman makes his own ring, Mordor occupied, the ring stolen and used by aragorn)

>>1768535
No, you're wrong

>>1768535
>>1768531

how about the process of accessing dasein is a continual attempt at reinterpretation along the trajectory of the attempted real

>>1768540
Link for this? I would like to read his alternate, allegorical storyline.

>Or do scholars over analyze shit and the author just goes with it...

Criticism is a self-congratulatory circlejerk, and the opposite of creation.

>>1768545
I baw'd when I read that.
Anyone want to go for a sled ride or something?

>>1768527

I started my literary endeavors (or pretensions as it may be) when I had a course on Alexander in college years ago, and we had to buy Plutarchs lives as a text book. Pretty much had it sitting on my shelf, and started reading the other stories when I had to take a shit one day. Read them all, and then pretty much read every classic in the western corpus one after another from there. Weird how we experience a sudden change of temperament and course with little reason.

>>1768549

or it's just another kind of creation

>>1768546

Give me a minute.

>>1768543

Stop being so wrong

>>1768556
>>1768555

if you're samefagging, i'm in love with you.

As for any inner meaning or 'message', it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical. As the story grew it put down roots (into the past) and threw out unexpected branches: but its main theme was settled from the outset by the inevitable choice of the Ring as the link between it and The Hobbit. The crucial chapter, "The Shadow of the Past', is one of the oldest parts of the tale. It was written long before the foreshadow of 1939 had yet become a threat of inevitable disaster, and from that point the story would have developed along essentially the same lines, if that disaster had been averted. Its sources are things long before in mind, or in some cases already written, and little or nothing in the war that began in 1939 or its sequels modified it.

The real war does not resemble the legendary war in its process or its conclusion. If it had inspired or directed the development of the legend, then certainly the Ring would have been seized and used against Sauron; he would not have been annihilated but enslaved, and Barad-dûr would not have been destroyed but occupied. Saruman, failing to get possession of the Ring, would in the confusion and treacheries of the time have found in Mordor the missing links in his own researches into Ring-lore, and before long he would have made a Great Ring of his own with which to challenge the self-styled Ruler of Middle-earth. In that conflict both sides would have held hobbits in hatred and contempt: they would not long have survived even as slaves.

(i meant:)
>>1768543
>>1768556

>>1768560

The truth is that everyone in this thread is samefag

even you

>>1768556
When you attempt to rationalize someone else subjectivity, that is, making their opinions objective, you will (sub)consciously inject your own opinions about the opinion into the now not-so-rational argument

>>1768564
[spoiler[ /lit/ is actually 3 people in the same room samefagging [/spoiler]

>>1768564
>>1768564
>>1768564

deeeeep maaaaan

then i really AM in love with you

>>1768565

I don't think you understand what rational inquiry is

>When you attempt to rationalize someone else subjectivity, that is, making their opinions objective,

Especially because you think description is rationalization which also somehow makes something objective

man d&e's going to have so many boring words to post about this

>>1768235
I'd believe you, but in case you hadn't noticed, not only were the curtains blue, the crying woman's necklace, the dead cat's ribbon, and the paint the starving child was lying in.

PATTERNS HOW DO THEY WORK?

There is a difference between allegory and symbol. Allegory is something that the author is trying really hard to make the reader understand. "Animal Farm" = morality tale about communism. That is what it was meant, there is a 1-to-1 correspondence, and it is very clear because the author wanted to make it clear.

Symbol is something more. Symbol can be difficult to determine, symbol can be emotion instead of exposition, symbol can even be something the author did not rationally mean to write. I mean, you can take from your meth using cousin the lesson "don't use meth" even though he never meant that lesson when he took up his actions. And another person can look at the same thing and take a different lesson. Symbol invariably means bringing a part of yourself to the conversation with the work.

"The curtains were blue" does mean something. The author went out of his way to mention them, and to create blue drapes instead of beige screens. It doesn't have to be a big symbol, it could just be the emotion of the setting.

>>1768359
I interpreted the green light a bit differently. Gatsby's obsession with Daisy was heavily symbolic of America's obsession with wealth. Making the light the same color of money helps solidify this symbolization. But then again, that's just the explanation I conjured up in five minutes time in response to a test question.

OP is 100% correct and this thread proves his point.

>discussing Of Mice & Men
>teacher claims the name "Lenny" symbolizes Lenny's primitive, animal-like nature because it comes from the Latin word for "lion".
>teacher claims all the names that begin with the letter C represent Cain.

MFW

>>1768783
steinbeck used that cain/abel thing over & over

>>1768783
well, there's a point when the teacher takes it too far. my professor seems to then that because the name "dewey" in "As I Lay Dying" seems to signify that dewey's vagina is as wet as morning dew when dewey is fucking.

I will put this in all caps, in hopes that the implied magnification will help it travel through your thick fucking skulls:

IT DOES NOT MATTER WHAT THE AUTHOR MEANT. NEITHER DOES IT MATTER WHAT THE TEACHERS THINK.

>>1768792
I forgot the rest of it.
WHAT MATTERS IS WHAT I SAY BECAUSE I EXPRESS MY IDEALS ON THE INTERNET AND I POSSESS MANY PENISES.

>>1768792
>IT DOES NOT MATTER WHAT THE AUTHOR MEANT

sure man.

but really, i like to think that i'm communicating with the author when i write notes in the margins.

not that i don't have the tendency to project my own systematic understanding of lit. on the narrative/symbols, though i lean toward not focusing on colors/animals in an archaic symbolism sort of way

>>1768796
Ideals? Penis?

>>1768792

That's only true if you're criticizing a piece from a certain point of view, or more precisely, from within a certain school of criticism. I forget which though, I usually just fall asleep.

>>1768671

Did you think Nick was gay or what?

"Take your hand off the lever!" seemed so symbolic to me in highschool for queerotry.

You really shouldn't focus on authorial intent. What's important is what the TEXT shows the reader, intentional or not. Yes there are some people who have very abstract readings of text, but just because their readings may seem a bit odd that doesn't mean they are wrong. If you disagree with something your professor says, then write your essay, whenever he or she assigns it, in response to whatever you disagreed with. Show problems with your professor's theory, and then give your reading with adequate proof. Can't do that? Then don't complain.

Kill yourself, OP and everyone who agrees with him.

If that's how you look at literature, than you should get off /lit/. Read some fucking manifestos by the actual authors first.

Dumb fucking pieces of wasted youth. Fuck you.

>>1768821 You really shouldn't focus on authorial intent.

Bullshit. Text means what the author meant it to mean and nothing more.

>> What's important is what the TEXT shows the reader, intentional or not.

Again, bullshit and incredibly narcissistic. You are not the universe and the author did not have you in solely mind when they wrote the text.

You read in order to be exposed to the thoughts of others and not to merely reinforce what you already think.

>>1768843
Gosh, what a cogent argument. I'm certainly convinced.

>>1768843

If Joyce had said his intention in Ulysses was solely to express passion toward the arrival of summer, that's it? That's all it means? All of the language in the text transcends its linguistic functions to serve only the purpose of that meaning?

>>1768235
The larger question is... what else do the curtains represent? Curtains are part of the house, traditionally the female sphere of influence. Likewisee, curtains have folds, and were also usually made of a soft material, like velvet. The curtains are definitely vaginal in nature... therefore it is possible the representation of unrequited love.

Seriously though, people have built entire careers in structualism and the like. If you really wanted to get into it, check roland barthes' S/Z. It's dripping with textuality.

>>1768851

That is clearly not what that guy was saying. At all.

It's about the overall experience.

And sometimes an author says things without meaning other things, sometimes he does.

To dismiss the curtains being blue as just the curtains were blue is complete ignorance, not to mention laziness in thought.

The English language almost always carried ambiguities.

>>1768851 If Joyce had said his intention in Ulysses was solely to express passion toward the arrival of summer, that's it? That's all it means? All of the language in the text transcends its linguistic functions to serve only the purpose of that meaning?

Yup. You must take the author at his word. What he intended is what he intended. Nothing more. His context matters and your context does not.

In fact, your insistence that an author's text most mean more than the author intended arises from the same infantile desires that produces fan-fic. You want it to mean more so it must mean more, just as teenage girls need more "Twilight" so much that they write their own "Twilight" stories.

Now, if you want to discuss what "Ulysses" makes you feel that wholly appropriate because what the author intended in the text and what you feel from the text are two separate things. The problem arises, however, when some lit crit assclown or other type of douche nozzle intentionally confuses what the text makes them feel with what the author intended.

You see this all the time in the various fill-in-the-blank-studies when a left-handed, autistic, red-headed, lesbian, Inuit, anarchist proclaims that Joyce was commenting on the historical oppression of left-handed, autistic, red-headed, lesbian, Inuit, anarchists in "Ulysses" while all you self-deluded lit crit grads chant "Ditto, ditto, ditto."

Haven't you ever noticed that the only thing you gain from studying lit crit is the ability to teach lit crit? Doesn't that ring any alarm bells for you? Or have you drank enough of the kool aid?

>>1768878
You honestly believe a book has no meaning beyond the author's intent? Plenty of authors will testify to a book of theirs coming out totally differently to how they originally intended.

>>1768878
1. Guy says you shouldn't focus on authorial intent.
2. You say a text only means what the author meant it to mean, i.e. only authorial intent matters.
3. You say, no, wait, how you respond to the text is relevant too, but don't go calling that authorial intent.
4. Hey, turns out if we look at 1 again, the first dude very specifically DIDN'T call it authorial intent.

Hmmm...

>>1768878
>I have no idea how argumentation and textual evidence works
>Furthermore, I have no grasp of how language functions

Cool. I like how you let your rage at terrible criticism undermine your entire mental capacity to understand interpretation.


>Haven't you ever noticed that the only thing you gain from studying lit crit is the ability to teach lit crit? Doesn't that ring any alarm bells for you? Or have you drank enough of the kool aid?

There's also, you know, BEING a literary critic and engaging in the critical discussion of literature. However, you don't seem to understand literature outside of mere entertainment purposes.

Literary criticism: making shit up about what other people wrote instead of actually writing something original and interesting yourself.

Enjoy your sophistic circlejerk you permanent burger flippers.

>>1768972
>making shit up

See: >>1768911

>>1768972

tl;dr you're in your sophomore year of college and failing all your english classes

now you want to change majors

boo fucking hoo

>I can't use my own brain to interpret the ambiguous information around me!!!

Fucking failure.

>>1768984
>However, you don't seem to understand literature outside of mere entertainment purposes.
That's a sad attempt at a fancy bullshit way of saying "I'm gonna just make some shit up and if you don't think I'm oh so clever for doing so well then you're clearly just too stupid to understand my intellectual prowess. No matter that you've called me on my bullshit. It's not bullshit because I say so!"

C'mon, you can do better than that.

There is nothing worse than people who try and turn the obfuscation of bullshit into intellectualism. Actually, people trying to do just that and failing miserably (see: this entire thread) is even more embarrassing.

>>1769025

I'd like you to show me why literary studies are bullshit. On my side of this, I cite the accumulation of academic books and articles. If you can take a recent argument by a respectable (see: not just some grad student bawwing about sexism in Chaucer, but an actual expert in a field) literary critic and show how the argument doesn't work, then fine.

Who says that writing about writing is in any way inferior to any other kind of writing? An essay about Eliot stands as literature beside Eliot himself, and there are some writers that we would never have heard of if a critic hadn't written something amazing about them. Sometimes criticism is more important the the thing criticised.

Making shit up about a book they read is how English majors attempt to justify that 4 years of tuition that resulted in them packing your groceries.

Most of the books they give you at school are pretty bad, anyway.

>>1769118
So are most of your posts.

>>1769119

And?

>>1769119
This is what I have been trying to tell him for months. But he doesn't listen.
>>1768235
Anything can be analysed to mean practically anything, just make some shit up and make it sound like you know what you're talking about and you'll get an A.

In one of my tutorials, we were discussing Gulliver's Travels. The tutor got talking about this 'leaky holes' theory (can't remember the critic who came up with it) about how Gulliver keeps falling through holes and how this is related to shit and society...I kinda thought bullshit at that point, I mean it's true that in the course of the book he falls through some holes, but who gives a fuck? Critics really spin out bullshit sometimes.

>>1768843

Think about the word 'text'. It derives from the latin for 'weave'. A text is a weaving of parts which create a whole. There is no one, definitive meaning or purpose, just what meanings the ink symbols on the pages transpose into your mind.

>>1769119

>most
>not all

Humans search for symbols and meaning in what is meaningless, this is how the human brain works.

But the author's brain is to put meaning into symbols as well, even if it's subconscious. Sometimes it's conscious, sometimes someone interprets something right that the other didn't consciously propose, sometimes they embellish a falsity.

>Year 11 (britfag here) English
>Teacher insists the the snapping of the fog's neck by Lennie represents the powerful preying on the weak
>Mfw it's just a fucking catalyst for plot progression

>>1769416
>just plot progression
Deep.

>>1768821 Here
Culture is embedded in literature, and elements from culture may or may not be intentionally included. This is why it is important not to focus on the authors intent.

For example, John Doe is writes a story which he intended to show the hardships of a working class man. However, despite the story revolving around that theme, details of the story could illustrate other things. If there are characters of a different race within the story and they are treated a certain way, then with sufficient evidence (for example similar occurrences in other books, or similar documented incidents) you could say that the text illustrates the treatment of that race during that time period.

Like I said before: sure there are some teachers/critics out there who have some wacky theories, but just because it comes out of their mouth that does not mean it is right. The curtains were blue, and it meant nothing else? Okay. Prove it. You are free to respond to his or her theory and give reasons why it is wrong (in a collegial manner), then present your own theories. Participate in the critical discussion.