/lit/ - Literature

based Ton Steine Scherben

>>6435183
>How much of literary analysis is bullshit?
literary analysis that is bullshit is the amount that literary analysis that is bullshit.

>>6435183
>I'm just burnt out on all this
burnt out as an undergrad? please go

>1
A writer should chose each work he uses. First because writing is a concius act, second because each work has been edited and revised dozens of times and third because you're dealing with poetry, a field entirely composed of choosing a few perfect words.

>2
If you include an analysis on the authors life, the context of the publication, posterior interpretations or any external element: you could perfectly add books and books to the analysis that are related to a certain point. While that information can help, many times a publication has a bit of filler. You aren't forced to read every paragraph of it.

>>6435183
>"We have written more books about books than books in themselves"

The problem is that the literature academia is way oversize, and still without enough room to accommodate all the people who want to enter it or stay in it. I mean take any author, and you'll find just so many work on his own work, largely surpassing what the author could possibly have expressed.

That's because (1) they can't fit in a corporate environnement and deal with the real world, (2) they don't have enough originality or the courage to create new works of literature and (3) they want the sheltered life of someone who's paid to read novels all his life.

Achieving such a thing requires you to produce somewhat meaningful work that could be valued on a CV or have the probability of making you the new poster child of their university - I'm talking about selection for track tenure. So people write and continue to write on and on about books, about literature, about author X or Y, to the point where it completely not only saturates what could have been said, but invents new meaning to what is analyzed.

>>6435194
UND DESWEGEN HAU ICH JETZT DIESEN TISCH KLEIN

>table doesn't even break

That's why I'm a history major and not an English major. Historical sources have determinate significance based in their context and form, and that significance is only meaningful or discoverable when the source is examined in light of its historicity.
Sylvia Plath was just a sad girl that wrote depressing books. If she hadn't written anything no one would have cared about her suicide. She would have just been another crazy girl if not for perceived talent. I haven't read her so I'm not certain that her work is basically meaningless, but I don't see why someone would get a PhD in her when they could study a time period as intensely as they studied The Bell Jar and learn about the human experience factually-vicariously rather than fictionally-vicariously.

Don't take life advice from characters or novelists. They're fake and they make a living by deceiving you.
And don't major in English.

>>6435214
Burnt out as in I look at this stuff and it seems like insubstantial, meaningless garbage. A waste of time that helps no one and does nothing. It contains no objective truth, like a science, and none of the introspective and insightful qualities of something like philosophy.

Opinions with an over inflated sense of importance. They put more emphasis on picking apart and jerking off over a select group of texts, rather then attempting to create anything of their own. I'm just tired of the whole mindset.

>>6435222
>A writer should chose each work he uses

That's a very "theological" way of pointing it. If you've ever written something yourself, you probably have found that a lot of times, you choose a word in particular not because of some preconceived intention that could be deciphered by a brillant MA student, but just because it fucking fits, that you like how it works in context. Same goes for poetry: poetry is much more "artsy" than the rest of literature, in that the author sometimes will choose arbitrarily a work because that's how art works.

Excessive exegesis is pointless.

>>6435183
10/10 with you OP. That's why I switched and went from lit/phil to phil/politics.

>>6435261
This is also something that makes me really tired of the whole thing. Specifically, I took a creative writing class one time an we had to submit poetry for one of the assignments. Now, I suck at poetry (and writing in general in my opinion) so I just cobbled something together using a simple meter and words that didn't sound horrible. And I intended it to be about nothing other then what it was like driving a car down an empty street at night.

And then we workshopped it and suddenly people are putting all sorts of different meanings on things and extrapolating things I never thought of or intended and even the teacher had some pet theory about what a few parts meant.

And it became suddenly obvious that this might be all they've ever done. The stuff they said were complete fabrications with no bearing on the intended meaning of the poem. And now I can't help but have that thought in the back of my head every time I see this sort of thing. And it's hard to stay invested when you have doubts about the entire foundation of what you're doing.

>>6435259
>insubstantial, meaningless garbage
>Opinions with an over inflated sense of importance
irony

undergrad please get the fuck out, if you're incapable of participating in any discussion on /lit/ then at least refrain from shitposting

you should read Against Interpretation

>How much of literary analysis is bullshit?

Almost all of it. Check out Boal's "Theatre of the Oppressed"

>>6435183
Any chance you can post that essay?

>>6435183
The worst I ever saw personally was when I want to a Classics Studies conference, and some professor from America gave a lecture comparing country music lyrics to Roman literature. I wish I was joking.

What the fuck is wrong with the people ITT who chose nojobs degrees? I hope your parents aren't seriously paying for you to study political science or philosophy.

Oh my God so many undergraduates from reddit here in the last few days.

I know it's a hard pill to swallow but have any of you ever considered maybe you're just dumb?

>>6435362
It's Strangeway's "Boot to the Face". I have it in a text book so no help there, I'm afraid. Maybe it's actually really good and I'm just a thick headed idiot whose eyes glazed over halfway through it. Ah, wait, never mind. Found an internet source
http://www.sylviaplath.de/plath/strangeways.html

>>6435348
Maybe. I'm not an expert in anything and I said they were just my own shitty, stupid opinions. Then again, you just saying I'm dumb and should leave because I don't "Get it" isn't a very good argument.

>>6435375
Thats kinda what I mean. I can sit here and write out a 50 page paper on why "Saved by the Bell" is a christian allegory, but that doesn't make it true.

>>6435387
My degree is actually in Radioactive Medicine; but I'm finishing a minor in english because it was what I started off going for and a subject I've always liked and been pretty good at.

>>6435387
I can teach at high school level with my degree which is pretty much good enough for me

>>6435261
How is that theological?
I do write and I check and recheck a thousand times. When writing prose, which isn't the case in the OP, a lot of times a words just fits but there's a reason why it does. A lot of emotional processes can be analyzed and studied. I don't why that would be wrong in principle.
I don't want to defend stupid people, though, I'm sure there are more pointless and even degrading analysis than there are good ones. Just as in science there are thousands of papers crapped by every university just for funding or to get some attention that are refuted months after.

>choose arbitrarily a work because that's how art works
If you're thinking of classical art then no, it's all about technique and subtle references. If you're thinking about modern art even less, the point of people like Pollock or Picasso was finding a method or a system in their instinctive madness. If you think "anything goes" then you are just playing artist.

>>6435305
Most creative writing classes have bad professors. You can't judge everything based on them and students that were just as unaware as you. That's like watching an infantile soccer league and assuming that's the same as watching the Barza against the Real Madrid.

Check some of DFW's stuff. He might be sort of a meme but his analysis of books are pretty interesting and can be enjoyed at any level. For example
http://www.scribd.com/doc/134106158/How-Tracy-Austin-Broke-My-Heart-David-Foster-Wallace

>>6435183
>How much of literary analysis is bullshit?
Much more than 90%. But it's worth putting up with because once in a while some piece of criticism will actually change the way you look at something and help you understand it much better.

>>6435400

>>6435412

>How is that theological?

Because you are starting from the postulate of perfection: since the author is perfect, then each word he wrote is perfect and therefore there's a sense behind every single word he uses.

Now that, and I'll think you agree, is far from the truth. My entire point is that there's a lot of arbitrariness in any artistic creation, and also in literary creations. There isn't a completely rational reason why you chose to say "shoes" instead of "baskets": maybe you felt it worked better, I dunno. Now of couse, you can explain it, but I find it absolutely baseless to claim to be able to discover and reconstruct all the intentions behind it.

And to re-use your comparison with painting, we could say that it's as stupid as trying to explain why Picasso, Pollock or even fucking Botticelli or Michelangelon decided to paint the dude's sock's upper lining in red. Maybe that's how he felt it, without motivating it with a rational reason.

>>6435473
But it ends up being a matter of knowing when your grasping at straws. While asking why did he rise the left foot instead of the right one might be a bit too much, each item in the back of a painting probably had an intention and meaning. Not because he was perfect but because he worked a lot in that piece and there was no reason to not think about that.
That's were the unnecessary pages of context and comparisons and other works and biography come into play, to justify the interpretation. And you end up with too many pages dedicated to analyzing a simple thing, as OP said, but because that's how the author makes his point stand out. That's what differentiates an interesting analysis from some faggot in /lit/ just presenting his crazy theory about how they were dead all along.

>>6435511
I don't have a particular answer for you beyond what I've already said. Although I disagree with the idea that everything is necessary thought out, you have a point, but I can't help but feel that at the end of the day it's nothing but gazing at the stars and taking wild yet defendable guesses, and that seems somewhat pointless after all.

>>6435351
Not OP, but thanks for recommending this.

>>6435250
spookiest post 2015

itt: people who have n e v e r done research

>>6435573
explain

>>6435183
>implying writers or thinkers are the master of their own implications

>>6435573
>>6435400
>>6435214

>>6435183
>How much of literary analysis is bullshit?
Real literary analysis is pretty obvious, the more absurd a thesis is the more bullshit the analysis is.

Like if I said Animal Farm was an allegory for the Russian Revolution, that analysis would be pretty straightforward, and not a load of bullshit. But if I said Animal Farm contained pansexual subtexts which used Zoroastrianist symbolism to get across its themes of transending gender, that would be a load of bullshit.

It would be very easy to write an analytical essay about both topics, but if you use your fucking head it should be clear one is talking out their ass and pushing an agenda the author never cared for or knew about, while the other is actually what the author intended the book to be about.

When people talk about death of the author, and that the author's intentions don't matter, that's because they want to suck themselves off and draw bullshit connections to their work.

>>6435766
Dis Nigga Know he shit.

>>6435766
>When people talk about death of the author, and that the author's intentions don't matter, that's because they want to suck themselves off and draw bullshit connections to their work.
No, dumbass, it's because some authors insist that they weren't affected by their context, education or just subconscious ideas. No one is completely aware of all their feelings and its completely plausible that some of that got into their work. It's not a difficult concept.
That doesn't mean you have to reject all they said about their work, just don't take it as word of god.

>>6435183
Sylvia plath was a twitter goth

Pause

>>6435348
> calls others undergrads as if being older and posting on 4chan is something to brag about

>>6435418
Kinda like 4chan, and this board in particular.

>>6435766
>When people talk about death of the author, and that the author's intentions don't matter, that's because they want to suck themselves off and draw bullshit connections to their work.

or, maybe it's because the theoretical and philosophical study of linguistics, communication and literature has lead to the contemporary belief shared throughout academia that language is a system of signs which is INTERPRETED, rather than directly heard and understood. Instead of actually attempting to do even a modicum of research into the subject, you'd rather just stand there, arbitrarily deciding what is and isn't bullshit because you, as an uninformed invalid, certainly know more than literally the entirety of western literary academia. The fact that you even think critical theory pushes an agenda not present in the work just shows how entirely misguided your notion of reading actually is.

>>6436118
>ipse dixit, god dammit!

>>6436128
Ironically, contemporary literary analysis occupies the complete opposite position: He himself did not say it, but we heard it.
If you'd like, I'm perfectly happy to refer you to an extensive list of essays, peer-reviewed articles and other various philosophical enquiries into the process of reading. Maybe instead of stubbornly dismissing it you could take the time to pick it apart yourself?

>>6436118
what's interesting about this post is that the author is clearly in denial of his homosexuality. Notice the use of caps lock in "INTERPRETED" which infers that he is unable to contain his rage, which in the homosexual community, is known as a "hissy fit" (Grey, p192). The post reeks of confusion regarding the masculine/feminine dichotomy, and the voice clearly imitates the English-speaking phenonoma known as the "gay lisp" (Nietzsche, p78). Try reading it while sub-vocalizing the gay lisp, and you'll notice how befitting his syntax is with gender non-conformity. You may also notice how he wrote one long sentence followed by one short sentence, indicative of his wrists literally becoming more tired as he typed out this post, which means that he is limp-wristed, another common trait found among the bath houses of San Fran (Bernadette, p52), where the author most likely hails from.

>Sources cited:
Pray the Gay Away by Bernadette Barton
The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche
The Juliette Society by Sasha Grey

>>6436329
you mean sasha gay

>>6435907
no one is bragging, its just painfully obvious you are an undergrad since no graduate student would ever shitpost like this

>>6435257
9/10 b8

>>6435183
>How much of literary analysis is bullshit?
You're asking this question as if it's answerable. As if there is a correct analysis of anything.

Which means that you haven't heard yet that the author is dead.

And we have killed him.

>>6435183
It is pretty much sophistry. But that goes for pretty much anything.

I remember a similar disappointment, but in retrospect I'm kind of disappointed in myself for ever thinking it would something other than that. I don't blame people for their word game hustle.

When you think about it, there's really no reason to believe something like literary analysis to be anything more than arbitrary opinion dressed up fancily. The same goes for philosophy.

Academia is so disappointing.

>>6436329
Ah, that wonderful sanctuary of stubborn ignorance, ad hominem. I shall bask in the tears trickling gently towards my feet, as another argument is won.

>>6436653
if the tears are going to your feet aren't they coming from your face?

>>6436676
I would've said 'trickling gently down' if that was the case, but I didn't. To say they are trickling towards my feet without suggesting any movement in the vertical axis implies that the flow is horizontal; thus, the tears cannot come from myself.

>>6436694
>I would've said 'trickling gently down' if that was the case, but I didn't.
Death of the author though

>>6436329
I disagree with you, but that post was hilarious.

>>6435259
>science
>objective

>>6437280
More so then literary analysis, thats for sure. You can test a hypothesis with data. Can't test shit in literature.

>>6435611
This guy is the only one who actually understands literary analysis, and he got no replies. That saddens me.

>clearly authors embed meaning in their works
Of course, but they also embed a huge amount of meaning unintentionally. It is up to literary analysts to uncover this meaning which has seeped in from the work due to the influence of the authors upbringing, cultural influence and deeply-held beliefs.

>>6435400
>Is confronted to a concise opinion that brings to the light the charlatanism at the basis of his graduate studies. On the verge of an existential crisis, said anon resort to the baseless rationalisation he has practiced for years.

>>6435250
A pretty decent overview.

One should also remember that literary criticism works in cycles. That piece your professor wrote 10 years ago on Eliot is now beginning to get its own rebuttals, and so your professor decides to respond and so on. Academia is a huge circle jerk, which is not say it is meritless or an entire waste of time. But this the reality of it.

>>6435257
Any serious literary critic will already be familiar with the historical and cultural context of their work not only within the time period but within the culture of the Western canon.

There are many criticisms you can make of English Majors, but not being erudite is not one of them.

>>6436521
This right here. Any kind of theoretical enquiry involving language is necessarily the subject privileging their own subjectivity; and pulling others into their own (constructed) reality by means of subversive argumentation which plays on the often misguided presuppositions of the other.

>I remember a similar disappointment, but in retrospect I'm kind of disappointed in myself for ever thinking it would something other than that. I don't blame people for their word game hustle.
dude read Deleuze and Guttari's a thousand plateaus, their anti-arborescent arguments avoid all and every linguistic hustle you can imagine.

>>6439081
>>6435611
This actually makes a lot of sense. Currently reading Frankenstein and we did a feminist reading of it. Even though the feminist movement did not exist then, Shelley's mother was a feminist. Her surroundings, therefore, gave meaning.

It's legitimate to interpret meaning beyond author's intent. That's assuming you can even know the author's intent in the first place. Let's have an easy example to demonstrate: I intend this post to be the greatest work in English literature.

How far does my authorial intent go? Absolutely nowhere. No one here would sincerely agree with me.

Just because it's legitimate doesn't make it not, as you say, worthless, meaningless, bullshit, etc. Everything is ultimately meaningless, so let's get over that point. Worthless, probably yes also. In all academia, not just English, the only way a grad student can claim any scholarly authority or independence is to master an obscure niche, or risk being redundant. History was my major, and it's like, you can be one of tens of thousands of people who have tried to interpret the American revolutionary war in a new way, or you can write about some long dead financial instrument British bankers in America used in that time period, and claim a little space among the fifteen or twenty people who specialize in that topic. So whoever posted earlier about history being different: it's not.

It's true about english, but it's true about everything else too. Though they are arguably more rigorous, you get the same shit in the so-called hard sciences. Look at all the different, sometimes preposterous interpretations of quantum mechanics. Nobody (or at least few) are disagreeing about the equations. There's an inestimable volume of debate on the INTERPRETATION of those equations, just as there is interpretation/analysis of the same books in English, or documents in history. Sure, unlike literature or history, with hard sciences you can hope to discover new equations yourself, but the extent to which I've seen that happen is comparably worthless. Friend I had in astro-physics has his and his partner's name on an equation about the properties of certain kinds of gasses in the atmosphere of Saturn, if I recall correctly. I suppose it's better than a lot of other things, but still, big deal. That equation is only known to people who specialize in the atmosphere of Saturn, and cared about by still fewer.

>>6436694
This is incorrect. While the common assumption might be that the tears flow vertically (from head to toe) the author fails to define his orientation in space. This means the tears may be flowing in any direction and are, in fact, stuck in a salty superposition.

>>6439190
>english majors
>euridite
>implying 90% english majors aren't plebs drinking starbucks and having GoT as favourite book

>>6439293
Probably the stupidest thing I've ever read on this board, and yet you probably think this is really clever.

Authorial intent pertains to the actual messages and story the author is trying to weave, not what they intend the greatness of their fame to be.

>>6439404
I don't understand how my intention wasn't a "message and story." I mentioned nothing about fame. Greatness? Not about me personally, it's my intention about the meaning of the text.

Same as any author has meanings they intend in their work. Note we've already gone a step beyond the typical case, where my intent as an author is explicitly known. Most of the time this isn't easily accessible.

>>6435209

what? that doesn't make any sense, you nice boy

>>6436206

Not the person you're replying to--in fact, I agree with your position, but I'd be interested in reading such articles.

>>6439220

Not him, but do I need to read Anti-Oedipus first before Plateaus?

>>6439618
I didn't, although it is very useful to be conscious of the whole 'body without organs' thing. Also it's helpful to note that the entire book is written in little self-contained lines or 'plateaus', which they claim can be read in any order (excluding the conclusion). I have yet to try it myself, but it's certainly very interesting to read as it doesn't really move in a single direction, rather in all and any directions - a bit like the rhizome itself!

>>6436653
It's not ad hominem, it's the baseless "death of author" critical analysis wankery that you defend, where any passage can be twisted to any meaning so long as you cite sources.

>>6435412
>Check some of DFW's stuff. He might be sort of a meme but his analysis of books are pretty interesting and can be enjoyed at any level. For example
>http://www.scribd.com/doc/134106158/How-Tracy-Austin-Broke-My-Heart-David-Foster-Wallace

Is he admitting that he has no talent for writing and only has talent for analysis?

>>6439311
Curses! I've been ousted.

Ironically this just proves my point: I, the author of such a post, managed to convince helpless plebians that I was right, even though I was really just talking out of my arse. Don't trust the author because he's already dead

>>6439605
Roland Barthes' Death of the Author, obviously, but here's a few others. I'd recommend reading the last two in the order I've placed them, as they're more concerned with language as a system of signs and, subsequently, the instability of meaning:

Foucalt - What is an Author?

Wimsatt and Beardsley - The Intentional Fallacy

Wolfgang Iser - Interaction Between Text and Reader

Saussure - Course in General Linguistics

Derrida - Of Grammatology (proceed with caution, this shit is painful to work through)

>>6439860
>I haven't even attempted to read any lit theory essays = death of the author is baseless wah

Nice

>>6439887
I've read a bunch, and I recommend you try reading "Postmodern Pooh," if you're able to understand it, that is.

>>6439916
I haven't read it, but I'd quite like to in all honesty. I can't say that in reading about its subject matter and excerpts it doesn't disprove the absence of authorial intent in a critical reading, but it certainly does target the ridiculous agenda-pushing which goes on in western literary academia. I might be a critical theorist (at least in my approach to reading), but that doesn't mean I agree with the entirety of how literature is taught.

>>6439531
how can a tautology not make sense you dolt

>They have not reas Foucault and Barthes' works on the death of the author.

>>6440229
*read
also
forgot pic

>>6440229
>>6440245
Death of the author is slowly becoming a meme on this board, please stop trying to convince silly people

>>6440254
In 'An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative' Barthes puts it basically as:
either everything has a meaning or nothing has a meaning; since for us, as readers, it is not accessible to know what the author meant, we have to take everything carefully into account because we can't know whether it will be important to the narrative or not.

>literary analysis

>>6440299
Who are you trying to persuade? I agree with you, but all of these attempts to convince stubborn /lit/izens is just turning death of the author into a shitflinging match of memetic proportions

>>6435183
There's scarcely 2% of written work(s) that is valuable to every reader, no matter the subject, and the other 98% is left up to flowery bullshit, politics, formalities, and interpretation per individual.

>>6435611
Checked.

As for
>implying writers or thinkers aren't the master of their own implications
I disagree. They wrote it, or preached it, or what have you; they know exactly what they intended to mean, and, more amusing than any interpretation of any work, is the idea that someone not the author of a selected work knows what the author of that selected work's intended meaning(s).

Sure, as >>6439081 notes, there is a great bit of unintentional meaning within each and every work, and literary analysis is the proper way to uncover the meaning(s). That doesn't excuse the ridiculous amount of flowery bullshit or absurdity of professional critics and scholars, or even grade school teachers, from telling the world they know what the author was thinking -- utter nonsense unless someone has already invented the technology to see into the depths of another's mind, alive or dead. Equally absurd is the propagation of this bullshit through shoving the ideals or meanings forced upon the author and their work(s) down the throats of our children, and telling them any other interpretation is wrong. That's the narrow-minded pseudo-politics of academia giving way to favouritism of selected interpretations, as opposed to coming up with creative theories and trying to defend their potential validity with excerpts of work(s) and quotes from the author, as well as literary analyses.

It just seems a fantastic waste to force-feed the ideals and interpretations of those who didn't create the work(s) in question to our future generations rather than allowing or encouraging creativity and teaching them to properly think out, research, and defend an argument with evidence that may back their claims.
It hardly makes sense to teach only one meal to cook, does it not?

>>6435183

>OP could you post the essay please? I would like to read it.

>>6440429
This is the biggest strawman argument I've seen yet in this thread.

>That doesn't excuse the ridiculous amount of flowery bullshit or absurdity of professional critics and scholars, or even grade school teachers, from telling the world they know what the author was thinking
No self-respecting critic would ever claim they understood what the author was thinking. Teachers of younger people perhaps, but only because the notion of death of the author is far too nuanced to be taught effectively to children without them coming up with the most 'random' and illogical interpretations, rather than learning the actual processes of analysis.

>Equally absurd is the propagation of this bullshit through shoving the ideals or meanings forced upon the author and their work(s) down the throats of our children, and telling them any other interpretation is wrong.
So many things wrong with this. The meaning isn't 'forced' on the author, it essentially takes the hegelian master-slave dialectic and applies it to literature; what modern criticism aims to do is identify the struggle of the bondsman, and not the subjectivity of the author-master. The ideals aren't forced, they are rationalised slowly and carefully through critical readings of theoretical texts, whose ideas are then applied to a fictional text in order to demonstrate the student's capacity to ascertain their own meaning. What students are graded on is exactly the same as what you claim modern academia doesn't do: they 'encourage creativity and teach them to properly think out, research, and defend an argument with evidence'.

>>6439293
Your examples work against you.

As for the author, you precisely showed that the intention of the author is indecipherable, can be completely preposterous and that academics are simply attribution meaning on the basis of there speculations of what the author's intention with regard to his work actually were.

I don't understand how your example about history academia is supposed to say.

And finally the interpretations of quantum physics are not physics. They are more philosophy and/or casual discussions between scientists, but are certainly the center of quantum physics, which is the equations, and the reality of the subatomic level.

As far as the equations with Saturn are concerned, the difference with analysis of lit is that you can verify, to a certain extent, the truthfulness of these equations, but making predictions and analyzing whether those predictions turn out to be true. The truthfulness of lit analysis cannot be verified in this way.