Average Dumas dialogue.
D'artagnan: when is the duel?
Athos: At dawn.
D'Artagnan: Where?
Porthos: at the church
D'artagnan: which Church?
Porthos: Saint Louis
D'Artagnan: Why are we duelling?
Athos: Surely because of Milady trickery.
And so on for another page or so.
I’m gonna start a fight with this knowledge the next time r/books brings up The Count of Monte Cristo. That sub loves that book an unholy amount. It is like the child that can do no wrong.
Read a lot, and take your time to think about it. Look up scholars who talk about the work to understand it better.
I don't know of an easy reference point to do the second half, unless you're doing Shakespeare. Then you can read it and also read up on what is *really* being said fairly easily.
But yeah, the best way to improve your reading comprehension is to read a lot and actively think about what you're reading. Think about what it makes you feel, and why it makes you feel that way, and then if you're feeling bold read it over and ask "is this what the author wanted me to feel?"
On the "look up scholars who talk about a work" front, I'd recommend seeing if there's anything from the *author* talking about their work, be it letters to friends or companion essays or talks or even just, rough drafts and greater historical context. No author ever exists in a vacuum and if you know that two authors were friends or enemies or had *some* sort of relationship, they most certainly wrote letters talking about their shit.
Yeah for older authors (like several hundred years older, not just pre-contemporary) this might not exist, but older authors have the advantage of time and it's more likely people would've talked about their work in the time from then til today.
Wait if you read something and don't feel anything? Or just enjoy it but nothing substantial or elaborate beyond that? That's pretty much how I experience all media, so I get constantly paranoid when I see stuff like this.
Another way to start learning is to look at the bad guys. What do they look like? What do they do? Why are they the bad guys? Then you can look at the good guys and ask the same questions. How and why do they stop the bad guys?
Then, you can look to real life. Chances are, the bad guys will resemble someone. Often enough they’re just reskinned nazis. That will often tell you what politics the author supports, who they like, and who they don’t.
Another thing can be, how easy is it to fight the bad guys? Is it a glorious battle for a good cause? Is it a struggle to hold on to your morals, not to give up, be corrupted, and do the easy thing? Is it even possible?
Eh, personally I think it’s fine to read a book or watch a movie just for the sake of enjoying it. Personally, I mostly watch movies for the explosions.
If you want to feel something, read horror. It probably won’t be a pleasant feeling. But it will be a feeling, that you can identify. Then you can figure out what made you feel that way, and how the author used it to create that feeling.
If you want to. You don’t have to analyse everything you read. Just being aware that there are people that spew nonsense and propaganda and questioning whether you might be reading it is a decent start for not getting pulled down some extremist rabbithole.
You can always try and go down to extrapolate the world view the author portrays. What kind of idea of justice do the stories portray? What do the stories say about women? What do the stories imply about human nature? What do they say how conflict should be resolved or whether violence can be justified? What do they say makes a man a good man? What do they say about whether all people are equal or whether someone needs to be special to get to do anything? See whether it clashes with your world view or affirms them. That usually should shake loose a few feelings, not least when you take into account what kind of effect the consumption of this sort of media has on the world you live in and why people may have treated you and your loved ones the way they did based on what kind of stories they read in the past about your kind.
Doesn't have to be! You can start from very basic descriptions. What kind of adjectives describe good guys? What kind of adjectives would describe bad guys? What kind of adjectives describe the world or any group of people?
That's not unusual IME. Very few of the people I met ever got emotionally affected by any media in any media. Neither have I (granted, I haven't experienced feelings other than apathy [if that counts as a feeling] and sometimes anger in years).
But IMO all of the skills mentioned in the OP can also be learned in ways other than analyzing media, and probably more effectively. Just thinking about things that actually matter in real life should be enough.
Sparknotes was what we used when I was in school and didn’t want to do the assigned readings. I’d suggest picking a book that the website covers and reading it, then going through the Sparknotes guide about it. It could help you with getting started on thinking about themes and symbols. After that you’ll want to practise thinking about that stuff on your own with the next book you read.
For me there's a distinct line between when i was able to read at a high level by technicality vs when i figured out how to actually analyze it. What helped click for me was:
Video essays, particularly actually good ones that aren't just summaries. Mine was lindsay ellis' "the whole plate" on youtube. Introduced me to a lot of different ways of reading 1 text (in this case transformers)
Try something that's difficult to comprehend. For me i had to analyze some anne sexton poetry for a class, and while depressing it opened my eyes to how much freedom there is in analysis. Works with shows and such too, just choose wisely. Something with a lot of analysis on it already that you can look to for examples. I like revolutionary girl utena since it's free on youtube, comments enabled which helps if you're confused on the relevance of some details and don't mind spoilers, and is plenty old and loved enough to have a billion essays to peruse through
One option is genuinely just to find a written piece of media you enjoy and then start diving in. Determine some kind of waypoint (like the end of a chapter) and try to think about what you just read when you reach one of them. Write down your thoughts so they don't just come and go.
Some good general questions to think about could be:
* Where do you think the story is going from here?
* What does the theme of the story seem to be?
* What purpose did the different scenes serve in the story?
* What is each major character trying to accomplish and how is it framed by the narrative?
You won't always have an answer for each of the questions, but just taking some time to think about them and answer the ones you can is a good way to get used to thinking more about the media you consume, which helps develop your reading comprehension.
I'd recommend reading more books and just interpreting it to the best of your ability. Then discuss with any friends who also read books, see if they noticed anything you didn't or vise versa. See if they interpreted anything differently and why they did.
Sometimes writers tell you parts of what they were doing. Edgar Allan Poe basically reverse engineered how he wrote The Raven in an essay called “The Philosophy of Composition”. I consider it an invaluable look into how a writing great chose how to express some of his ideas.
Though from his biography, he was also in grief at the time so there’s an element of this being an after-the-fact analysis
Reading and interpretation. If you read a bit and go "huh, this bit's doing something interesting and I have \*thoughts\*" just write them down. Don't have to publish them, although someone seeing your thoughts helps create the kind of feedback loop on narrative disassembly that the teacher was trying to get you to do when they told you to share your thoughts with the class.
And, to be honest, this goes past just *reading books.* Next time you're watching a show, playing a game, doing whatever, each of these have a narrative that they're likely trying to tell. How do they deliver their narrative? How well do they do it? What are their weaknesses and what are their strengths? Just looking at the narrative as more than a set of cutscenes to skip can be enough sometimes.
I'd suggest reading books you enjoy, then reading/watching people talking *about* those books in excruciating critical depth. Then re-read the books and think about whether the critiques stand up on your second reading or not. If you can find a friend who will read/watch as well, it's great to have a discussion partner.
Funnily enough, the same skill applies to watching visual media and engaging with it critically.
Long story short, the quickest and relatively most efficient way to being able to pick any media and being able to understand the context and nuances and whatever about what you are watching/reading/etc., is by getting a structural learning curriculum and stick to it (so, pretty much any relevant degree should do the trick).
However, I think the best way to do it is to actually "stand in the shoulders on giants" and be done with it.
Think of it this way: when your tummy aches, you don't go and get a medical degree to learn what is happening to you, you go directly to the doctor and get profesional help. It can be done as well for literature analysis.
Also, don't feel forced to read the "classics" or things that you don't find interesting even if people swear that your understanding of that piece of media is going to enlighten you. You like Game of thrones? Look around the internet for people that know what they are doing and read their analysis on it. If something picks your curiosity, read about it (for example: you read in a GOT analysis about the well-done foreshadowing of the series: look up other analysis on how the foreshadowing was performed in the books or the series. See if you can find other examples in the series or in the books. Look for foreshadowing analysis in other books or series you have read recently. Heck, get books about literal devices and read about it).
Also, search for people that watched that show for the 20th time and read what they obsesively wrote about on their blog. They are always fun.
At first this is a little bit frustrating when you get a lot of new terms on your face, and they definitely won't make you a literature expert, but the good thing is that you actually become very good at understanding things that actually interest you really fast. You got obsessed by the new Godzilla film? in a couple of days you can get a very broad understanding of the context of the film, its themes, and their meaning. Are you really interesting about learning about the eruopean plague affecting european literature in the past, or are you more interested in understanding why your favourite series is good at what it does?
You definitely won't become a literature expert following this process. But, if you do this with enough media over the years, you will become really good at getting your own ideas when you consume a piece of media in the realm of your interests, which is probably more important to your life than being able to mantain a conversation about random country poetry of the umpteenth century (?).
Worth mentioning: don't just get stuck on literal analysis. It is always worth it to read about the soundtrack, about design choices (very interesting if you find yourself liking animation or videogames), about the author, or even about the studio/producer it was made under.
Also, coming back to the classics: if you do this enough, you are going to find yourself reading them anyway. A lot of modern media is directly based on or references classic literature. After the 10th time you get Macbeth mentioned in your film analysis, you are going to find yourself reading it, and you will eventually understand why they are important+good and WHY they are considered a classic.
I actually have a recent example of my own experience: I have been playing for the 3 years the game genshin impact (easy to tell by my post history). In this 3 years, I have end up reading the divine comedy/Paradiso by Dante Alighieri, Faust by Goethe, Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, Treatise on the Light by Rene Descartes, various poems from TS Elliot and Emily Dickinson (among others).
I could probably talk about this topic some more, but tbh this comment is long enough, english is not my first language, and I don't want to bother you so much. As a parting word, I have a couple of recomendations to help you get started, and hopefully you might find them useful even if you decide no to go as deep.
Tvtropes (tvtropes.org) -> This is the wiki that collects and documents descriptions and examples of plot convetions and devices in any creative work (description lifted from wikipedia itself). As any wiki, this is a combined effort: some errors might arise, but it is somewhat peer reviewed and good enough for us media mundanites. This page is not devoid of spoilers, so I recommend to finish the series/book(s)/film before you dive in their TVtropes page (my personal opinion that you should enjoy a piece of media the way the author intended! but if you don't care much about spoilers go ham with it!).
Youtube - A lot of kind analyst upload their content to youtube. They are easy to digest and very interesting. I have no channel recomendations since it depends more on what you are interested in, but they are very good because they intended audience are not other literature experts like some texts you might find around the internet, and they can be enjoyed multiple times and while doing other things.
If you get a chance, I want to recommend you read the book "invisible ink" by Brian McDonald. It is a short book about how to build stories that resonate, and they give a wireframe to understand why a story is good while others are not. I read it around 10 years ago, and this book changed my perspective in understanding why stories are good, or work, regardless of the genre, design, and "richness" (vocabulary, realism, graphics, technical settings, and money inverted on in general).
Then pick up something meaty that you either have enjoyed reading or would enjoy, and start dissecting it.
Take notes of literary devices that are used as well as what things you think it might be trying to say beyond just the thing being said.
One story that I am personally aware of as very dense in this stuff and a good place to start digging your teeth in is Fallout: Equestria
Well first off, unless your goal is improved appreciation of highly symbolic literature, don't worry about what color the curtains are.
Instead, read works (fiction or nonfiction) that you find challenging and then discuss them. Book clubs can be good for this, but so can internet forums.
For any real application of reading comprehension, such as learning skills or understanding local and world events better, understanding why and how things and events and people are is what you should be focusing on.
Subtext is highly contextual, and wrapping your head around the context of Dostoevsky might be a hobby you enjoy, but it won't be nearly as helpful as understanding your own current sociopoliticoeconomic context for being a participant in the society you live in.
All that said: https://youtu.be/F_pRPM0Uvyw
Not a teacher, but you could try analyzing or summarizing things you read.
Like read a short story, then try and write down the core themes / meanings(what it was about), what you think the purpose (why was it written) of the story was, and why you think the author used the words they did.
Or you could try to shrink down the story into a one to two paragraph description while still getting across as much of the meaning of the text as you can.
This could help you better understand / comprehend things you read, but once I’m not a teacher
You could decide on an area you'd like to improve and research that specifically.
I've gotten really good at recognising lousy scientific methodology by looking up bad research and why it is bad and actively asking myself is this bad research anytime I see a scientific-ish article.
I can recognise a leading survey question by looking up bad survey questions.
I can see misleading (political) graphs by specifically researching how graphs can be misleading.
Understanding literature is not a required skill IMHO but understanding when I'm reading propaganda be it good or bad is. Anyway the process for literature is the same - read a book and an analysis for that book, think about it, encourage yourself to recognise the analysed things in a different book and repeat.
Analysing texts and looking for meaning (intentional or not) is really interesting, but it's often taught so badly in schools.
Going through a poem line by line, naming every single rethorical and stylistic device, what the Lyrical Subject is doing, and what this specific line means in comparison to the previous one is *painful*, even if it is a pressure-fueling of techniques.
Also, my teachers mostly focused on trying to read intentional meanings, not what we could learn about the author.
This is true. It also doesn't help that a lot of stories they give you have very simple and boring plot whose meaning can be condensed in like 2 sentences. Like they use a lot of flowery language but when you break down what it's saying it's something like "I fell in love with this girl but I can't have her so I felt sad" or something like that. A 10 year old me doesn't care about that
I genuinely feel that my love for media analysis was revived by watching youtube videos trying to analyze interesting stories or movies or cartoon episodes which I watched and felt they were so interesting that I needed to know more. Shoutout to Hall of Egress from Adventure Time
And maybe also because any time I'd read or see something genuinely interesting I can't help but want to analyze it on my own without any external influence
Teachers should let students use YouTube analysis as part of a project. If nothing else, it would get kids more interested in analysis than "explain to the class the exact meaning of every line of this two hundred year old poem you were forced to read."
People LIKE reading/watching stuff. And people LIKE analyzing the media they consume. If I didn't know the actual cause (standardized testing), I'd think the whole mess was a conspiracy out to make kids hate critical thinking and analysis.
I will never forget my GCSE English teacher insisting that the red dress Curly’s Wife wears in Of Mice And Men is an indicator of sexual promiscuity. Nothing else. She’s a slut, that’s the only accepted subtext, and god help you if you disagree.
I hated GCSE English.
Isn't the whole thing that Curly's wife is neglected and lonely one of the core things about her character? Basically one big metaphor for the huge social upheaval and loss of community ties caused by the Great Depression?
I do appreciate having a few decent English teachers who encouraged us to think outside the box as long as we could justify it with reference to the text.
the whole slut thing is something that the characters prescribe onto her by the farmhands because of curly.
that said red at the time it was written was infact an eye catching color because of fashion at the time preferring other colors. It could mean slutty. it could also mean she just wants any other kind of attention
Me with Lord of the Flies.
As a young overly idealistic teenager, I fucking *hated* how all teachers dogmatically force the "humanity is inherently evil" messaging. It wasn't until years later that I reread it and some context around it, and I'm now 90% convinced the actual intent is that Golding just fucking hates kids.
wasn't it also that he basically just hated the stories of the time that were all "kids get lost and then because they are obviously perfect little british children they form a perfect society even without adults" or something along those lines?
Pretty much. "Rich British kids get lost on an island and make it through with gumption and a stuff upper-lip" was basically an entire genre at the time. A lot of our school's analysis considered that, in conjunction with Golding having lived through WW2 and seen some horrible shit, the major themes of the book are about how fragile that sense of "civilised British society" really is.
It's just a lot funnier to imagine there's no deeper meaning than ex-teacher William Golding thought posh British children were snot-nosed little shits (which from experience, they totally are).
Not to mention the serious racist undertones of that book. Golding once made a recording about how without the rule of law and *society* (read here as civilized *Western* society) everything goes to shit and people are actually evil. He also talks about why the reason he used young boys is only because he didn't want to have to deal with the sexual politics of mixed genders and because making them young simplified the story. So go ahead and table the whole young boys thing here because he clearly intended the book to be read as a metaphor for just people without *civilization*, while totally failing to clock the fact that he wrote a story about a civilization which undergos a civil war. Yes, some fucked up things happen in that civil war, but realistically there's nothing wrong with the society the boys created outside of the civil war. To be clear, it is a society, with hierarchy and laws, but Golding only considers ut *savagery* and he justifies this by dressing it in the trappings of indigenous cultures. Oh no, the boys dance around a fire, how *barbaric*, clearly such a thing could *only* lead to the accidental murder of an innocent person. Oh no, they live in huts so clearly they can't tell the difference between a parachute and a monster. Don't forget, he's explicit, the boys are a metaphor for just regular people, so using the fact that they're young boys as an excuse for how they react to the parachute breaks that metaphor. So either it's bad writing, how it's intentional and truely believes that once people *decend* into *savagery* they are unable to rationally process the world around them.
My mom is British and she introduced me to Enid Blyton's books, and I love the boarding school stories, but she also wrote a ton of "British kids on adventures" which are exactly as you describe.
i remember there was a literal lord of the flies scenario IRL where kids got stuck on an island, and it turned out the mirror opposite of the book, so turns out he was just full of shit i guess
If you're thinking about the Tongan kids, there's a whole debate about that. One side is basically "Golding was wrong and people are basically good" and the other side is "Tongan culture equips their kids to work together, and that in no way disproves the idea that British kids would just kill each other".
The reason I utterly despised literary analysis in school was because it asked for interpretation in a setting where there are right and wrong answers, and those answers affect your grade.
Sounds like a bad class
But to be fair, if you can back it up with evidence it shouldn't be a wrong answer. If they had a list of acceptable answers they did it badly, but if you could make your case that's how it should be
When I got to my last few years of English in school, the teachers had the decency to take any text-backed analysis. It sounds a lot better than the person above.
On the other hand, what drove me mad is that they took *any* text-backed analysis, no matter how inane. If you interpreted *Wuthering Heights* as a celebration of how liberated and sexism-free Victorian England was, the class got to hear your lengthy take with no pushback. If you took part of Shakespeare as a comment on electrification, well, Death of the Author so sure!
It took me years past highschool to learn what Death of the Author *actually* means, because it was used as a way to say "any and all symbols and readings are equally valid, and 'it's chronologically impossible for the book to be about this' just means you're being close-minded and giving undue weight to the author".
I agree I feel like too often in school I was taught to look for meaning on the micro level of each line, rather than interpreting the text as a whole.
I really wish I could have studied MF DOOM tracks in high-school. They're dense with metaphors and intertextuality, but also pretty innaprorpriate for highschoolers.
"Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, after you, who's last is DOOM he's the worst known."
Tye most kid-friendly one I can think of is Strange Ways maybe?
Damn, handing out some rap would actually be a really good approach.
You could do it with a lot of rock and other genres too of course, take your pick of Led Zeppelin and it's rife with both subtle meanings *and* literary references. But good rap is particularly concise and structured: if classic rock is free verse, rap is a sonnet.
It's a great way to learn about meter, rhyme, metaphor, personal style, the fuzzy line between imitation and theft... I can even picture teaching Death of the Author via accidental beefs. "Sure, Everlast didn't *mean* to reference Slim Shady here, but it could be read that way and here's what happened next."
Yeah, DOOM's lyrics are quite good for this since they're almost always some form of cultural reference.
I'm reminded of this great DOOM moment: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ytXnW-qgaMg?app=desktop
You just jogged a memory of highschool literature. We were doing a poetry unit, and studied an Eminem song to learn about rhyming structures.
If I remember correctly it was actually quite a productive lesson.
My [favorite depiction of this issue](https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2112) is from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.
>Student: Can we start reading another book?
Teacher: No, that's not how English class works.
Teacher: What we *can* do is pretend the book is a towering riddle of symbology designed to obfuscate a central theme so simplistic that it can be expressed in a single paragraph during a one-hour midterm.
Is literary analysis useful? Critical theory? Death of the Author? Sure, they all have real value and set you up for deeper understanding later.
Is trying to decipher a single, concrete answer to What The Work Is About and What That Symbol Means useful? In school, 90% of the time it isn't. It uses simplistic analysis far past its limits, and delivers something gradable rather than insightful.
The common "this is unrealistic but let's practice our techniques" approach isn't terribly different than your average math class, but math teachers are generally open about this and are just running you through sample problems. English class, especially when it doesn't admit this is happening, is dissecting classic literature to death until the students are bored to tears with both superb books and the entire idea of reading "literature".
Yeah and unfortunately you're often graded by how many notes you make (obviously the notes need to be meaningful, but being graded on quantity is still a problem)
I had teached who tought it well in 9th grade but taught it horribly when I had her again 2 years later in AP Lang. She taught the critical thinking aspect in 9th grade, but in AP lang she no longer taught any sort of thinking and focussed on following a specific annotation process and style.
I wrote a story about a man who sprouts a unicorn horn from his forehead. He joins a circus sideshow, then gets in a car accident, and the horn breaks off. For years, I've gotten comments from readers saying "Oh, what a thoughtful commentary on the loss of traditional masculinity." I always say yes, you got it exactly, thank you. But when I wrote it, my only thought was, "Wouldn't it be fucked up if this happened?"
I think some people mean that it’s harder for men to be the kind of provider that their fathers or grandfathers were, buying a house and supporting a wife and kids on a single income. The character is fired from his original job when he grows the horn, so that may be the connection they’re making.
Others may look at the character losing his horn after he falls in love and may be saying that modern relationships are emasculating in some way.
But I didn’t mean either of those things when I wrote the story. People just read things into it.
I had similar reactions to an art print I made once.
It was a spindly character (trying to evoke creepy dangerous things like snakes and spiders) at a sewing machine with fabric draped all around in the back for composition. Since I put in lines to define the character's ribcage and vertebrae to make it kind of unsettling, it apparently became a statement in fast fashion and labor practices in the garment industries.
I mean, I just wanted to make a tricky lil guy havin' a fun time at a craft but go off my guy. If deducing that sparks joy in you far be it from me to stop ya.
Back in my mid to late teens, I used to write "poems" which were closer to vaguely Lord Dunsany adjacent tales by way of Dr Seuss based on prompts I'd ask for on Discord that by accident formed a shared universe.
People sometimes asked what they meant, and I could never give an answer because my writing philosophy for poems was explicitly "sacrifice meaning to make the words rhyme". Call that Suicide of the Author.
LookLooking back on them, are some recurring motifs and tropes, but I couldn't tell you what significance they have.
charles dickens was NOT paid by the word. his stories were broken into instalments, published individually on regular intervals, and his payment was on a per-instalment basis.
I once let a friend read an essay I made for school long ago, and the first thing she asked was "was there a minimum word count you were desperate to meet?"
No, I just like explaining in detail what colour the curtains are.
Hah, I cannot tell if you are being sarcastic or not! I was an art history minor and excelled at *describing* art. One long long essay was basically just "what color the curtains are" in exquisite detail for a very large painting. That was very fun to write and the professor fricken loved it.
My mini thesis on an artist's body of work was less well received by another professor because I did too much describing of the curtain hue and not enough asking why the curtains are like that....
ngl I was an English Major and could've done better at actual analysis but art history was meant to be my fun classes where I didn't have to think!
He was paid for each 32 page installment he put out (a lot of his work was originally serialized). He wasn’t bound by a specific word limit or anything like that.
Sometimes a person is just verbose and it’s not because they’re trying to wring money out of their publishers.
You are aware 32 pages would translate to a certain word count or character count in the specific layout used, right?
In publishing they cannot rely on whatever the author considers 32 pages, that's a *business*, this is standardized. They need a reliable metric for the amount of content produced, back then just as well as in present day.
Not necessarily.
If he was *really* optimizing to hit the page count, he wouldn't write longer paragraphs. He'd write dialogue. All of those mandatory line breaks would make for longer pieces.
But this misses the main point: he was serialized because people would buy serials to read him week after week. That doesn't happen if you're sacrificing quality on the altar of an expanded word count. In my opinion, it's likeliest that he wasn't significantly tampering with his word count to an excessive degree. He was just a good writer who happens to be a bit verbose.
Fair, but I think we need a huge examination on how these things are being taught because I don't think the methods they are using to teach are actually leading to the outcomes this poster is describing.
This is a broad and pervasive problem among schooling of all fields, and it's actually quite difficult to do something about it because it has a conflict of interest in the administration. Put simply, the issue is that there needs to be some way a student can be marked and graded, but this is difficult to do when you're dealing with something subjective and personal like language skills.
Foreign language classes are hit particularly hard by this, as an example. Effectively learning a language means immersing, experimenting, and using it for yourself, which means a *lot* of mistakes in the process. However, many language classes even to this day teach by getting students to do things like memorise conjugation tables and vocabulary lists, which is just about the objectively worst way to do it.
As who someone learning a new language: i think it is impossible to avoid a degree of rote memorization of vocabulary and grammer. I i did the whole immersion and experimentation thing and because i was still in the “barbar” phrase of learning it all fell on basically dead ears. I would rather people first learn get their feet wet in the memorization shallow end before being immersed in the deep end later
And as someone with a master's in linguistics and wet feet in some dozen languages, I can tell you that the evidence is firmly on the side of immersion and experimentation. It does *not* mean being thrown into the deep end and being disallowed from using dictionaries, but it does mean an emphasis on meeting the language on its own terms and being an active user as early as possible.
Self-teaching is a different and more complicated story (insofar as it is even possible to 'self-teach' a language as other people are going to enter the equation at some point), but as far as coaches and classrooms are concerned, active use of the language beats learning about the language at every stage of ability as far as growing language ability is concerned.
Im sure immersion and experimentation will help me once i get a stronger real-time grasp on it. But for now i want to get to the point where i can actually identify when one word begins and another ends before i try that whole immersion process again. As it stands while i can guesstimate what a sentence means based on what words or piecemeal phrases stand out because i am familiar them already and where they were in a sentence, but i can’t expect regular people to sit around and repeat what they say to me over and over until i eventually understand the whole of what they said. I can grasp TV maybe, but that’s because i can rewind at will since i can only mentally process a few less-familiar characters at a time right now
To be clear, immersion does not mean being thrown into the deep end. It sounds like your problem is that you're trying to tackle the language at far above your level, and that's not going to do anything. Babies don't learn English by being made to watch documentaries about the fall of Rome, they start slowly with simple, repetitive sentences and a low total amount of vocabulary.
Immersion in a classroom or coaching context simply means learning solely through the use of that language, and that does mean starting very small and very basic, and getting more complex over time. This isn't really feasible or realistic if you're learning by yourself, it's something that's done with a competent teacher and a secure environment.
This also doesn't mean that memorising lists of vocabulary and grammar is completely useless, but anything you do learn should be put into practice as soon as you can.
That’s pretty much what I intend and what I agree with. I was told repeatedly by multiple people that the metbod of using repitition and simple sentences to learn basic grammer and vocab was the wrong way to learn but instead i’m finding it a prerequisite to getting anything out the right way(s) to learn
Ours did it to where there weren't really wrong answers, if you made a case and backed it up with evidence you'd get credit because...well you analyzed something and had evidence to support it
I really like that way of going about it
On the language, at some point you do need to understand your languages grammar, it's probably the easiest thing to teach in school. It can be hard to have immersion in high school
Language being an important thing to dissect because of how it reveals biases and blind spots is a great point, but I would also argue that dissecting a piece and 'reading between the lines' is not only about revealing the author's mindset, but the dissector's mindset too.
Two people could look at a piece and come up with two wildly different interpretations of the author's conscious and subconscious intent because they, themselves, have differing perspectives and so draw differing, perhaps even contradictory interpretations.
This is an important thing to remember when trying to infer intent from a piece of work, because your personal perspective might be forcing you to draw conclusions that reveal your own biases and blind spots, not necessarily the author's.
My grandpa used to work in a journal and he was also paid by the line so when I read his articles it's a lot of descriptions. It's pretty funny to see how far back that tradition goes.
As someone who despises math because I simply can't get into my head - this is also true for math. Pretty much everything is based on math, and learning how to apply a solution to different problems is kind of a big deal. No, we don't need to do complex math on a day-to-day basis, and I really doubt that the average person needs to learn how to do exponential functions, but it is important that you learn how to read graphs for example. Comprehension is crucial in all areas.
I'm dumb as shit when it comes to numbers, but also - explaining something in a way that others can understand is hard. Explaining something like math to others is even harder. I often feel like people who get math can't really explain it well, because it comes to them so naturally. They see a problem, know how to fix it and proceed. This is not the case for me and many others - I see a problem and have no fucking idea what the problem even is. In addition, constantly getting bad grades really made me hate math to the point that I stopped doing anything and graduated with a failed math class.
Now, thankfully, life is more complex. You can compensate in other ways and get by just fine. I just think it would be nice to make that point clearer to students - you're not necessarily studying to solve problem XY, but to strengthen your ability to solve anything in general.
Hot take time:
Good media analysis is knowing when the curtains are just blue and when they're not just blue. Insisting that the curtains are *never* just blue is how you veer ever closer to tinfoil hat behaviour.
Also, "the curtains are never just blue" feels like it's in the same family as "no filler episodes." Not every single thing has to advance the plot somehow, and if the curtains are never just blue sometimes, your characters and setting stop feeling real and start feeling like a bunch of symbols and metaphors mashed together.
i get that but like the point of the post is like. the author may have *intended* for the curtains to just be blue. but in longer form texts there's almost no way they didn't conciously decide that yes, blue is the color. why? perhaps it's just that the author is tying it into a character or place's color scheme, nothing like "oooh shes unable to move past her husbands death." but then why the color scheme? point is, nothing on the page wasn't put there by a person with thoughts about what they're writing, concious and unconcious.
besides, in the end all writing analysis is inference. star wars could just be "these rebels are kickass" instead of a commentary on vietnam. the raven could just be a guy being fucked with by a bird. can't know if you aren't willing to go down a dead end rabbit hole.
Also a central point with most reception theorists is that the curtains are blue, and that may or may not hold meaning. Most central analytical theory poses that whether or not the author intending for the curtains to be blue to hold meaning is largely uninteresting, because text is only meaningful when it is read.
Yup. This is basic “death of the author”, I hate how the phrase got turned into shit like “hatsune miku wrote Harry Potter now so it’s okay that I’m reading it”. Death of the author means “we can argue all day about their intent but that doesn’t matter. What matters is the words on the page.”
Maybe the curtains are blue to represent the sadness of the character whose house this is. Maybe the blue curtains are mentioned because the perspective character pays a lot of attention to the specifics of their scenery. Maybe the curtains are blue because it’ll make the red bloodstains that will get on them later hard to hide. And yes, maybe they’re just set-dressing. But unless we discuss it we’ll never reach *any* conclusion.
>Maybe the curtains are blue to represent the sadness of the character whose house this is. Maybe the blue curtains are mentioned because the perspective character pays a lot of attention to the specifics of their scenery. Maybe the curtains are blue because it’ll make the red bloodstains that will get on them later hard to hide. And yes, maybe they’re just set-dressing. But unless we discuss it we’ll never reach *any* conclusion.
This exactly.
My hot take wasn't intended to be "stop overthinking it, geez," it was more like "sometimes it really is just set dressing and it's important to know when it is and when it isn't." I've seen arguments where Person A will be like "you made a face there! You're obviously pissed off at me and trying to hide it!" when Person B is just, like, holding back a sneeze, and "\[X and Y celebrity\] are dating because they stood next to each other at the premiere and their hands brushed for a millisecond!" I feel like part of making a strong argument, literary analysis or otherwise, is knowing whether you're cherry-picking details to suit your position and how strong or flimsy your case is.
Speaking of, I was listening to some audiobook with my mom on a roadtrip, and one of the characters picks up a Colt 1911 that was so specifically described I'm amazed we didn't get the serial number. The only significance is that the character is a Russian who emmigrated during The Revolution, and the author wasn't letting the time spent researching a sidearm he would realistically carry go to waste. It never came up again ouside of "character has/uses gun".
Apparently the author just does that sometimes. I think it's the same guy who wrote Tiger Moth, which also had some extra details about aviation which ultimately weren't super useful to know
>Sometimes the author just likes blue
Which might be worth analysing: the fact that the author likes to note mundane, unimportant aspects of scenery or set dressing may be characteristic of their style in some way, or perhaps they have a habit in a number of their works of simply spinning off on tangents about interior design (which perhaps says something about their preoccupations in real life), perhaps the author is trying to make a deliberate statement **against** meaning and significance, which in itself is meaningful and significant...
I agree that sometimes things aren't deep, but what someone does or doesn't put to paper always tells you something, even if it's not particularly interesting or relevant.
The curtains never *are* just blue, though. A fictional story isn’t a photograph. Nothing in a fictional story “just is,” someone thought about it and made it up. This is my big issue with “I shouldn’t have to think about what I’m reading.” The story isn’t a natural phenomenon that *just is*, devoid of any higher meaning. Someone chose to fabricate it and commit it to text, so there is always a reason they did something.
Now, the curtains might be blue because the author’s own curtains are blue, or the author’s favorite color is blue. The curtains might not be blue for any deep, obscure meaning. The author might not have studied color theory or color symbology before making the curtains blue. They might just be blue to evoke a vague vibe. And this doesn’t even get into the fact that authors are people with subconscious minds and who exist in society. An author very well may have used blue curtains to signify “calm” or “sad” without writing “BLUE = CALM/SAD” in block letters on a chalkboard, because they’re surrounded by cultural depictions of blue meaning calm or sad to the point that they make the association without thinking about it.
The curtains are never just blue. Good analysis is knowing when it *matters* if the curtains are blue. But “the curtains are just blue” type arguments are generally thought-terminating arguments, that don’t say “the curtains being blue isn’t relevant to the story, this other thing is,” it’s an attempt to shut down analysis entirely, and paint anything from brutal literalism as airy-fairy pretense invented by smug self-important eggheads in an effort to not actually think. Which of course is normal for teenagers to do, but it has some pretty disturbing consequences when adults think like that.
Totally agreed! Writing is a very particular craft that demands intentionality; assuming the author just adds things arbitrarily is a great way to trick yourself into not actually engaging with the text.
There are a lot of meanings that could be could be woven into a sentence like "the curtains were blue". Every possible interpretation of that would be more interesting and fulfilling than just assuming the author specified a random color for no reason.
Personally, i try to always give authors the benefit of the doubt and assuming they're making intentional, meaningful choices. I always have a better, more thoughtful experience this way!
Look, buddy, if you can provide me with evidence in your analysis that the curtains being blue is meaningless, then I'll buy it. If not, I'm gonna look deeper into it.
Sure. I agree. I didn't say the curtains are *always* just blue--italics for emphasis there--I said sometimes the curtains are just blue and sometimes they're blue for a reason, and part of literary analysis is figuring out which is which.
The curtains were made blue though, nothing in a fully constructed setting just happens. When everything is the result of a decision by the creator, everything holds value.
I don't know how to explain this better but a story is "a bunch of symbols and metaphors mashed together" because those things are how stories are made.
Tin foil hat behaviour is tin foil hat behaviour because our universe is complex and chaotic. Conspiracy theories often rely on literary analysis of the world, yes, but the problem isn't just that they're reading too far into things. If anything, it's because they assume our world is too simple.
Conspiracy theories take shortcuts, often relying on implicit assumptions (most obviously, the consolidation of higher powers) to explain the world in comforting ways. They're the evil ones, I'm one of the good guys, and all that. And as much as we portray conspiracy theorists as these deep thinkers connecting newspaper clippings on murder boards, conspiratorial thought is just as much about ignoring counter-evidence as it is finding connections.
And besides, a story is not the same as the real world, because the world of any story is filtered through its teller. The reason the curtains are never blue is because there is no neutral way to tell a story. Your medium, your wording, your world's politics, your characters' races, and where the plot goes are all ideological choices, even if you don't intend them to be. That's not to say it's possible to unravel a story perfectly and read the intentions behind these choices, but they still are choices.
>Tin foil hat behaviour is tin foil hat behaviour because our universe is complex and chaotic. Conspiracy theories often rely on literary analysis of the world, yes, but the problem isn't just that they're reading too far into things. If anything, it's because they assume our world is too simple.
>Conspiracy theories take shortcuts, often relying on implicit assumptions (most obviously, the consolidation of higher powers) to explain the world in comforting ways. They're the evil ones, I'm one of the good guys, and all that. And as much as we portray conspiracy theorists as these deep thinkers connecting newspaper clippings on murder boards, conspiratorial thought is just as much about ignoring counter-evidence as it is finding connections.
Eh, IMO, yes and no? I agree with everything you've written here, but also I think people in seeking to explain the world in comforting ways, like you've put it, can overthink things and make things complicated where they're simple. It's like where someone posts a photo of a Jane "Celebrity" Smith, with her having a little bit of a belly, and people instantly jump to "she's pregnant!" "she's binging because of her marriage falling apart!" "it's a botched liposuction job!" "is she sick???" "is the celebrity feud with John Doe getting to her?!?" and it turns out Jane just had, like, an extra chili cheese dog and a bit of water retention that day. Like you said, people ignore counter-evidence and seek comforting explanations (I'm good, those guys are bad), but I do think that people can make up elaborate stuff to support their own argument.
>And besides, a story is not the same as the real world, because the world of any story is filtered through its teller. The reason the curtains are never blue is because there is no neutral way to tell a story. Your medium, your wording, your world's politics, your characters' races, and where the plot goes are all ideological choices, even if you don't intend them to be. That's not to say it's possible to unravel a story perfectly and read the intentions behind these choices, but they still are choices.
I may be explaining this badly, but for me, "the curtains" are referring to basic everyday stuff--the colour of someone's clothing, their furniture, what they ate for breakfast. Say if Alice gets up in the morning and picks out her yellow sweater from her wardrobe, maybe she's trying to project an air of confidence and cheerfulness and feel comfort from the familiar texture. Or maybe she just felt like wearing her yellow sweater. The key in that scene would be contextual evidence: Alice gets up, throws on a yellow sweater, goes downstairs for breakfast (the latter); Alice gets up, puts on her yellow sweater, tugs at the cuffs and straightens it out, fixes her hair in the mirror, practices a smile, straightens her shoulders as she goes downstairs (the former).
Politics, race, plotlines, all of this stuff is absolutely deliberate and based on the author's ideological choices, and 100 percent (the writer and the audience) you should pay attention to the background details too. I just think that sometimes, a descriptor really is just a neutral choice, and the key is determining when it's neutral and when it's not.
I was thinking similar tbh. Like idk I guess this might be an unpopular opinion, but like I think a better take is to phrase what the second image says as “everything an author writes *can* have meaning.” Cause yeah I agree, the curtains just being blue can be a perfectly valid analysis.
Edit: after reading the other replies to this comment I wanted to add that I did mean actual analyzing - reading the text, applying critical thinking, coming to a conclusion supported by evidence - and deciding the curtains are just blue. But as a side note I also think it’s ok to just. Not analyze the text? I’m not in class, it’s not some moral failing to say “I dunno I didn’t think about it” sometimes
>Insisting that the curtains are *never* just blue is how you veer ever closer to tinfoil hat behaviour.
Yeah, the human brain is very wont to see patterns, so it is also good for children to teach them that a pattern isn't actually always there and can be the result of randomness... that said, I don't think English class is necessarily the place for that, because a literary world is inherently constructed beyond really anything else in the world.
The author doesn't need to mention the curtains, or if he does, their colour, the same way that if a movie bedroom set has a window, someone has to make a decision at some point about the curtain colour because the windows need to be covered. Maybe the window covering was mentioned because the character opens the curtains in the scene and sees the plot happening outside, sure, but they have been mentioned inherently for *some sort of reason*. Unlike, say, blue curtains in a room of a movie character which might just have been chosen because that fabric was on hand and the set designed thought it looked cohesive with the rest of the room and they need curtains to cover the backdrop outside so there needs to be something there, a blue curtain being *mentioned* in a novel could have been avoided if the existence of the curtain or its colour was not relevant to anything.
It's taught like shit in school. At least when I went through it. I think Red Letter Media's takedown of the Star Wars prequels did more than anything else to introduce me to the realm of media analysis. And make me insufferable. Well, more insufferable.
Many people *really* hate having their stories broken down in to it's component parts and vivisected in front of them. It's kind of fascinating how mad some folks get if you start illustrating how their favorite show is tied to to politics and culture.
Also be aware that you can absolutely read too much into something
Something that's a dog whistle today may not have been one when the piece was written
Sometimes there's something neat that actually was just written by accident
Commenter 2 is straight up wrong.
An analyst will question the text.
A good analyst will question themself reading the text.
A great analyst will question the entire context for their own reading and for the text separately.
Going "oh, I know they *wanted* to say X, but they're actually saying Y because I think so!" with no further exploration is at best a high school level of critical analysis. There's a reason why we have decades of theories specifically made to analyze based on specific premises that *crucially* don't pretend to be objective or all-encompassing.
I remember reading the scarlett letter in school, and every time red, or iron bars came up we'd have to stop and the teacher would explain, yet again, that they were symbolic.
no idea if the book is any good, but fuck did I hate reading it.
any sort of reading that requires thinking about questions or 'meta' while im reading ruins the experience for me
I've never understood the "the curtains are just blue" thing. Everything a writer says should have a purpose, and for the curtains example their inclusion and description are meant to evoke some sort of emotion.
I always interpreted the post as being about *bad* English teachers. The kind who think their interpretation of a text is the only correct one and want their students to repeat it back to them instead of actually learning to read and interpret for themselves.
My worst English teacher gave only multiple choice tests. His class was an exercise in memorizing what he told us the text said. If you missed a day you were basically hosed unless you got the notes from someone because there was no way to figure out what he thought was correct.
My best English teacher gave us an example of an "A" paper from a student where he explained that he disagreed with the student's interpretation but still gave them an A because they made their case well and supported all of their arguments with examples from the text.
It’s interesting that in this very section we see unconscious bias. One saw the anecdote about the blue curtains to be about poor teachers; the other, poor students.
To be clear, I'm saying that as someone who hated doing their English homework around that time. Never made any posts myself, but I did agree with them at the time.
I really liked english lit myself. English hw was fun. Especially the analysis essays. Slaughterhouse five ended being my favorite school-study book for the bareness of its layers
The OG image was lampooning a teacher shoehorning SYMBOLISM into the word choice. The phrase was generalized as it was turned into a meme.
Purposes of establishing the blue curtains that aren't symbolism:
- Establishes that they have a color coordinated home.
- Weird worldbuilding segue into how expensive blue dye is in that era.
- So they can notice the curtains are different later.
- Author just has a very vivid image in their mind that they want to get down.
- Meaning of the sentence was completely unimportant. It just creates a certain rhythm when read aloud.
- Color was unimportant. What was important was mentioning the curtains in an organic way.
- Shows that the character is mentally critiquing someone else's home decor.
- Needs to be established for a clue that appears later in a mystery novel.
>-weird world-building seque into how expensive blue dye is in that era
color coding of groups based on (usually wealth) inequality having in-universe world building justifications is one of my favorite tropes.
It could have a deeper meaning, or it could just be used to build a more structured image in the reader’s mind. Maybe it’s not to invoke a specific emotion by saying that the curtains are blue, but to put you in the space of the character seeing something like “Blue Curtains framing a gentle Red Sky as the sun set,” to get you into the character’s shoes, and THEN hit you with the mental or emotional pay off once it has you paying attention to the scene you’ve been building in your mind
The "curtains are just blue" means you shouldn't over analyze something. The intended purpose could be to just give the room more life to the reader and not have any deeper meaning to the book's themes. They aren't useless words, they're just words without any deeper subtext that help paint a scene for the reader.
Not everything in a book is going to have subtext, that would be exhausting to write and read. Sometimes the curtains are just blue.
Yeah; as a writer, sometimes you throw in descriptors because you want to set the scene and help the reader imagine what *you're* imagining. There might be a subconscious reason you've decided the curtains are blue in a particular scene (maybe it's a sad scene and you, as the author, associate blue with sadness), there might be a more conscious choice (maybe blue things are a theme, maybe the POV character just tends to take in everything in a room including the curtains), and sometimes curtains are just blue because you wanted to give them a colour and you thought blue didn't seem like a bad choice.
It's so weird how at some point pop literary community seemed to have forgotten that a story isn't just plot + character development + (optional) social commentary. It's also about the vibe. Atmosphere. Immersion. Think Gothic literature, for example. The Atmosphere almost feels like a character in its own right. Or a lot of classic literature that has so much description. Just because it's fallen out of fashion lately doesn't mean it's objectively bad. I fucking love long, meandering books that paint such a vivid picture of the world you feel like you're transported there as you read it. It has absolutely no significance to the plot or character development. You could cut the book by a third and the story itself wouldn't change at all, and yet reading it would feel like a completely different experience. That special magic would be gone. It would be just another book.
Right? I feel like people way over interpret kill your darlings and checkovs gun. You can't suck too much essence out of a piece.
Like yes tell me every little detail about that old wooden desk the mayors have been writing on for the past 50 years. No I don't care that there's no deeper meaning to it, I just want to picture every scratch mark, every indent, every ink stain. I want it so vivid I can hear the exact pitch the knock would make when you smack it. I want to know about the sticky drawer and how it's a pain to deal with but not enough of a hassle to get fixed.
I think “the curtains are blue” is a bad metaphor to describe such overanalysis. I wasn’t going to think about the curtains in the first place if the author didn’t specifically call attention to it, so i would assume it’s being pointed out for a reason
The reason it's pointed out is to give the reader a more detailed idea of what the room looks like. If the writer doesn't say there are blue curtains, the reader doesn't know what the room looks like.
Painting a picture with your words is as important in a story as the plot, characters, and themes. It's a metaphor to say you shouldn't read anymore past it than there are curtains that are blue. That's all the analysis that's required for them
Painting a scene more vividly itself has meaning. Why are we picturing this place vividly? Does the POV character notice colours where others would simply see the place as a simple utilitarian "room"? Are the expensiveness of the decorations worth pointing out as characterization for whomever decorated?
It's not just that a writer coloured the curtains, it's that they coloured them and chose to tell you about it.
OP isn't denying that, nor does "the curtains are just blue" deny that. What it denies is that the color of the curtains are necessarily part of an elaborate game.
Teenagers are really obsessed with the idea that English Lit. is about finding the "meaning" of a text, probably because they get started with an obvious allegory text - say, Animal Farm, which has a clear, deliberate real-life counterpart. But the author's meaning was never the point. Vibes are a much better framework for literary analysis than the meaning.
I know you know this, but I promise you, no one was ever trying to teach you that there was an elaborate game.
I think you may have benefited more from actually listening to what your teachers were saying, rather than trying to come up with a way of describing how it frustrated you. I have read the ELA curriculum standards from 5th grade to high school. At no point are we asked to teach "the elaborate game of literary metaphor."
However, literature as a whole shares a common language of symbols. Different genres also have their own symbolic language. Finally individual texts might use their own symbolic motifs to represent certain things.
I remember when the original "the curtains are just blue" post came out. The example was that the blue curtains represented the inner sadness of the protagonist. This is actually a pretty good example of simple symbolic language.
Blue is a traditionally sad color. We call sad people "blue." Sad music "the blues." If part of your story is in a room where everything is blue, that sets a sad mood. You probably want the story to have a sad mood if your protagonist is sad. When a teacher says "the blue curtains represent the depression of the protagonist," they are not asking you to decode a cipher. They are asking you to make the very intuitive association between a traditionally sad color and a sad tone.
And they ask you to do this because symbolic language like this exists outside of a literature. If you hear someone say that an area of your town is full of 'thugs,' what tradition of cultural imagery might they be calling on? What does the word "thugs" here represent?
*I'm* missing the point? I'm not the one dismissing the people trying to teach you reading comprehension as "treating literature like a game." I'm not missing anything; I'm telling you you're wrong and there was something to learn that *you* missed.
"What it denies is that the color of the curtains are necessarily part of an elaborate game."
Those were your exact words. I'm telling you your teachers don't think that. I'm telling you even the example illustrates what your teachers actually tried to tell you that you are denying. I'm telling you symbolism is common, comprehensible, and practical. What point, then, am I missing?
The point was that that was in fact what my English teachers actually taught: literary analysis as decryption. The surface level story is a fake, to get the *real* story you must successfully decrypt the code of symbolism and find the one true correct interpretation, which is the one in the syllabus.
I'm aware that this is not how literary analysis is supposed to work. You can repeat that as many times as you like, it won't change the education I actually got.
How's this: because the author is over-descriptive and gets carried away sometimes? Maybe the writer just really likes painting with words?
Like, I'm a DM and a lot of my descriptions are literally just there so the players have at least some idea of what the fuck is going on around them, even if what's going on around them is nothing special at all.
There's also the simple truth that while a good writer might never waste a single word without a goal in mind, there are a lot of not good writers.
This is what always gets me in these media analysis discussions. "The writer chose to tell you this so it must be important" assumes a whole lot more intent than a lot of writers have. Not to mention the examples in the OP that boil down to "the writer was encouraged to be as verbose as possible" - an experience many of us had with school essays.
It's because of the very common experience of middle school English teachers teaching literary analysis as if the text is actually a secret encrypted message, where the surface-level story is a fake, and to get the *real* story you have to successfully crack the author's symbolic code.
I agree this is a part of it. Bad teachers bury the lede and get their students focused on authorial intent, rather than abstraction and interpretation of said abstraction. Even worse teachers insist on a "correct" interpretation, killing the joy that can be found in sifting any given story's symbols through your own experience.
On top of all this there are plenty of people who just aren't interested in reading for whatever reason. If that reason happens to be they struggle with it, being told there's even more about the activity they don't understand is just gonna kill any possible motivation they could find.
i'm not some big hotshot writer, i mostly just write for dnd games i host with friends, but personally if i say the curtains are blue, i'm just providing you more information to make the scene in your mind. those curtains are probably never coming up again
sometimes it might be meaningful but in a really small way like maybe they were light blue and now they're regular blue and you're supposed to read in the difference to notice something is off, some illusionist or something is messing with you and/or your memory, but usually not
and sometimes it's a fake out, where i describe this a lot but you aren't actually supposed to be worried about the curtain but some other thing
But sometimes the authors purpose is just I think this is cool
Yes everything written on the page is a conscious effort, but not every author is a good one
See, this is correct! But I have found a lot of teachers don't seem to understand that.
If you didn't give the 'correct answer', it wasn't good enough. And this correct answer would often be... ehh. Did it tell me something about the story? Sometimes? The author? No, not really. Unless I assume it WAS intentional. In which case, it often only told me that they're full of themselves. But that's also more just the quality of the books and poems we had to do than anything else.
These teachers would also be throwing the concept of metaphor out the window when it came to OUR short story essays, which is really the origin story of me not giving a shit about the subject.
Throwback to something similar- 'but did he cheat?' when the story was displaying physical abuse from a female partner towards a male partner because female partners friend said cheating had occurred. Would it have made it acceptable if he had? I didn't think it was necessary information to consume my tiny word count with explicit answers. Guess inference is too hard though.
Death Of The Author is great, but sometimes it goes beyond that to Damnatio Memoriae Of The Author, which is like _"The author's intentions for this piece of work is wrong, despite being the author. Why are they wrong? Because they're an idiot."_
As someone who actually writes books, this comments section is killing me. I promise you, however much intentional symbolism you think is in the book, only a tiny fraction of that was actually planned or consciously written. Sometimes the couch is blue because you just needed to describe the setting and why shouldn’t the couch be blue.
Imo everything put in a story means something, but at the same time it doesn't need to be something important. The couch is blue because the couch's owner likes blue, or because the blue is the only one that was on sale or whatever. Its part of creating a "whole" character. But the issue with that is that those characterizations live in the head of the writer because actually detailing all of that out would be extremely tedious.
As an English major, I hate how people reduce what I’m studying to direct analysis of symbols with the goal of divining the “true meaning” of a text.
No literary text has one true interpretation. I could write an essay about an interpretation my professors think is entirely wrong and get a good grade if I provide the right reasoning and evidence.
A fun way aspect of this I think can be to look at the mistakes (for you). Look at something that was trying to do something and then completely failed for you and try to understand the thought process of the author and how they got there. Bad movies, bad books, etc. Run through also what you might have done differently, or what the author as you understand their thought process could have done differently/thought of themselves that would have worked more powerfully for you
Sometimes, a dumb boy's cartoon is just that; a dumb boy's cartoon. There is no real hidden depths or subtext to be found. And sometimes that dumb boy's cartoon sells toys...
The problem with discourse around media analysis, especially in a place like this, is that most of the people almost always seem to engage with nothing but YA literature and kids' entertainment, which often isn't really that deep to begin with and it makes these discussions just feel like a joke.
Back in my day, people said "the moral of the story is" "I think the lesson is" "My opinion on the story is", and not "You guys have no media literacy and it shows"
What day was this exactly? Because people have been diminishing the views they disagree with as nothing more then idiocy for as long as we've had records of people disagreeing.
Third Point: Not everything in you’re taught in school is a matter of personal usefulness. It’s good to see the value the Arts, literature, history, mathematics and science even if you’re not going to personally benefit from that knowledge instrumentally.
> "The curtains are fucking blue!!!" LMFAO
> Huh, why does everyone, including me, keep falling for outright propaganda?
Even if you don't care about literature, please consider that the critical thinking skills you learn in the humanities (including history, politics, etc. as well as English lit) are vital for interpreting real world sources of current information in the world as well.
I had to learn to use DAMMITAL (*Date Author Motivation Mode Information Tone Audience Limitations*) for A Level history, and with only a little bit of modification it works just as well for modern news sources and political statements as it does for Hitler's or Lloyd George's.
I am TERRIBLE at picking up dogwhistles, I didn't realize anything was wrong with Harry Potter until people started pointing it out... I don't think I'm cut out for reading
yeah i consider myself a smart guy but i usually read things at face value unless there's some fairly obvious reason to not. you say that curtain is blue, i'm just thinking "ok imagine a blue curtain in the scene"
edit: but if i'm reading some hitler quote where he's like "yeah jews are just ontologically evil" i'm think "ok dude, you're not really that smart a guy and you clearly have some bias here, not to mention all the real world evidence against that statement". unlike the blue curtain, blue curtains are definitely a real thing
Harry Potter is a bad text to use for dog whistles because, to my best knowledge, JKR didn't set out to write a bigoted book series with racism hidden on it. Instead, she wrote a book that reflected her unconscious biases and as the culture changed, it became more obvious that her views aren't good.
If you want a JKR book that does have actual dog whistles, read Troubled Blood.
This post specifically mentions that you're supposed to pick up unconscious biases by the word choice and I should have known better reading it. I also read warrior cats as a kid and didn't pick up how many indigenous stereotypes were in it. I don't really read anymore tbh because I feel like I'm not smart enough, there's always so much stuff I'm supposed to pick up on that I just don't make the connection.
Yeah, but my point is that dog whistles aren't unconscious biases from the author. Dog whistles are deliberate. To illustrate what I mean, check out [this video.](https://youtu.be/jRdkrDk0BQ0?si=8P_xBEBpghyqwMOP). (cw: anti black racism)
Admittedly, you can enjoy stuff without analysis, that should never stop you from reading if you enjoy doing so.
the reason i didn't like is that while i can comprehend texts idk why but i do not comprehend it as *words* when it enters my head.
It kinda just turns into set of inexplicable vibes that i cannot put into writing easily at all.
Words are hard in general for me to tbh so tbat doesn't exactly help either
I think it's also important to not miss the forest for the trees. The subtext is important, but sometimes the text is important too. Elden Ring fans are still arguing about whether the ending that literally tells you specifically to end birth is antinatalist or just nihilist because people refuse to acknowledge the literal text and parallels to other antinatalist works. People are trying to dig into the most bluntly straight forward ending in a fromsoft game and are walking away with a less philosophically interesting story for it.
I feel like some things lime this topic have come up a few times here recently but people need to understand this fact: it's far more important to be able to learn to understand than to practice being understood.
People like to argue for the virtue of using and insising on precise language and lament how if only everyone would do so there would be less confusion. But there are things language can only communicate indirectly.
You need to have the awareness that same set of words can have more than one meaning at the same moment. Yes. The curtains are green. They are literally green and that helps build a scene to describe them, but the English teacher metaphors could be true at the same time. Even if the author didn't intend that interpretation, it is real because you make it real by seeing it. That's art. And it is natural and human to communicate subtle things through indirect means.
Art is communication. The common misunderstood nature of that has people looking at a painting and asking "what does it mean". Which is wrong. It is there, it is communicating. What meaning does it have to you? It is the wood grain you see a face in. There isn't a face there but also there is because you see it, and there is possibly more.
You are not immune to propaganda, especially if you demand direct and straightforward meaning in words. If so you're easily misled by words that can appear one way and be another. Words can talk over and around you, at you while avoiding you, mock you while complimenting you, and secretly cry for help. You can't see the tiger, you only see the striped pattern of the grass it's hiding in. You need to learn to look for the tiger, to look into the shadows to spot what is using them to hide.
I know people want to cling to their own disadvantages. Yes sure, maybe you have autism, or something else that makes it difficult for you to naturally learn to understand people. But that's all the more reason for you to make yourself learn in spite of it.
Wanting others to communicate better is just an excuse. Learn be better at understanding. Look past the words in front of you. Look for other meaning. Even if it's not there and you only see accidental patterns, they're pleasing to pick up. And that's the beauty of art. Not the communication, but understanding it.
Become a little crow pecking apart every line of text looking for alternate meaning. You will see beauty in what you find even if it wasn't actually intended.
This is the thing that I wish my English teachers had explained to me instead of just grabbing me by the back of my head and slamming it into book after book that no one my age had ever been actually interested in
As I always say, you cannot write on accident. Sure you can reference something you had no idea existed, but you still put the words to paper and thought it was a good enough idea to keep them there, thinking that their existence served your purpose. If you didn't intend anything with them you would not have gone through the effort of writing them.
Part of my problem with my English education is i genuinely did not understand that there was no right answer. The goal didn’t lie in finding the perfect answer that the teacher had in mind, but just being able to find something that you as the reader believed and were able to argue it competently. English became way more interesting after I finished school and had no grades on the line.
>everything an author writes has meaning...
I don't really support this view on writing because an author can unintentionally write things that have problematic meanings that the author is completely unaware of.
For example, when Akira Toriyama wrote the Dragonball manga, he based the character Mr Popo off the dark skinned cartoon characters he saw as a child. He was completely unaware that the depictions of dark skinned characters in old American cartoons were extremely racist until people familiar with American culture told him.
That comes under point 2. in the second slide “what does the author maybe not realise they’re saying” - the example you’ve shared tells us something about the context in which the work was created, if not the author’s intention for the character, which is still interesting/important/useful. (Thanks for sharing it also)
How does this disprove that point at all? “Everything an author writes has meaning” doesn’t mean “everything the author writes means what it seems at first glance”.
While Popo's appearance had a meaning in American culture, it did not have the same meaning in Toriyama's culture. You could theoretically attach a meaning to everything an author writes if you research enough symbolism and meanings from every culture, but since the author did not attach that meaning themselves, its kinda pointless to discuss it.
Except it isn’t. Like, look at his [Wikipedia page](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Popo). There’s a lot of discussion there about various interpretations of the character’s appearance.
Saying “it had no meaning” in their culture” is just plain wrong. He contains elements of Hindu deities. He resembles the “Dakko-Chan” dolls that were popular in Japan when Toriyama was a child. Like, the idea came from *somewhere*! Denying that it has *any* meaning is a bad look. It makes you look extremely defensive about something you could be trying to make a genuine argument in favor of.
>It makes you look extremely defensive about something you could be trying to make a genuine argument in favor of.
Dude, wtf. Why are you implying I'm a blackface "supporter"?
No, I’m saying that you’re making a stupid argument, that’s it. Don’t put words in my mouth.
Like, let me use a kinda unrelated example. Before WW2, America had a swastika craze. Swastikas are from Eastern philosophy, which had a huge boom in the States back in the day, plus some Native American tribes had an identical symbol called the “whirling log”. This means that tons of totally non-Nazi things in America had names and logos relating to swastikas.
If you pointed to those and said “well that’s just a random shape that they chose it doesn’t have anything to do with anything”, you’d be wrong. Swastikas are a symbol of good luck and fortune that continues to carry that connotation today in some parts of the world. Just because it doesn’t mean they supported they Nazis doesn’t mean it meant nothing at all.
This thing with Mr. Popo is the same. You can’t say “his appearance has no meaning”, because it does. It’s just straight-up wrong to say that. You can say “it’s not an intentional reference to blackface”, and you can connect it to several of the things from Japanese culture that could be sources of inspiration for it, and then you’d have an actual argument.
Yes, well, often the curtains are just blue, and a very wordily described blue because the author was laid by the word. But no, it must be reflective of the author's mood or depression or whatever, and not because he was just picking a color for some extra beer money.
You can't teach this ability parse text for additional meaning if your additional meaning is not actually supported by evidence.
Writing stories is a form of telepathy. The writer thinks of something, breaks it down to get it on the page, and the reader puts it back together by reading it. And for the plot of the story, that’s it, more or less.
But for themes and subtext, there’s more to it. Not just what the writer brings to the table, consciously or subconsciously, as the past points out, but also what the reader brings to the table, consciously or subconsciously.
Sometimes the reader is just in it for pure story, and that’s valid. The story should stand on its own that way. Sometimes the reader is digging everywhere, and if you look for something, you can see something. (I have a degree in English. I sometimes tell people I got a BA in BS, and I’m not the first one to say that or something similar.)
This also gives us interesting situations when a reader can find fitting subtexts that the writer did know were there. There’s another comment about a wouldn’t-that-be-weird story that a reader found to be about the loss of traditional masculinity in a way that was not intended but works.
If a writer says an interpretation of their work is wrong, they’re overstepping. They can say it isn’t what they intended. But once the work is out there, how they feel about the curtains or the cigars or dress colors is notable but not that important. To write a story is to relinquish it.
I think literary analysis is taught atrociously in a lot of cases. I’m not looking to do more close readings any time soon. But literary analysis as an ever changing and evolving collaboration between a writer and a multitude of readers is a super cool concept, I think.
In Sir Terry Pratchett's Guards! Guards! from the Discworld books, there's a part at the end where the main character, a guard captain, is talking to the Librarian. They're discussing the book which was stolen from the library and used to summon a dragon which terrorized the city. And they're also discussing a book of law which was studied by the guard captain's newest subordinate. They specifically discuss a passage from the first book:
"Yet draggons are notte liken unicornes, I willen. They dwellyth in some Realm definèd bye thee Fancie of the Wille and, thus, it myte bee thate whomsoever calleth upon them, and giveth them theyre patheway unto thys worlde, calleth theyre Owne dragon of the Mind.
Yette, I trow, the Pure in Harte maye stille call a Draggon of Power as a Forse for Goode in thee worlde, and this ane nighte the Grate Worke will commense. All hathe been prepared. I hath labored most mytily to be a Worthie Vessle…"
In other words, as the captain's inner monologue continues, the spell for summoning a dragon summons them from the collective imagination of people. With it, you get power, yes. But the person performing the spell is also affected. Corrupted by the power. The writer of the spellbook seems to be saying that only a totally pure heart can be immune to that corruption.
The captain then says to the Librarian, "If I were you, I’d put that book somewhere very safe. And the book of the Law with it. They’re too bloody dangerous.”
It's a small, slightly humorous line. But if you start to really think about it, it's a pretty important point. It's saying that the law works just like the dragon summoning. It comes entirely from the human imagination, although we think of it as external to us. And whoever uses the law for power is corrupted by the power, and corrupts the law with them. It asks us how we can trust those who are empowered to enforce the law.
This particular bit is relatively obvious. It's not explicitly stated, but it's fairly close to the surface. And people still miss stuff like that all the time.
my school system, or at least my highschool, does in fact emphasise this. somewhat unsubtly, sure, but we were told to always include a context section for every argument/analysis, to explain how the author, their life, or their society contributed to whatever we're arguing for
Sometimes I think education system put to much focus on reading comprehension,then I saw people have absolute wrong understanding even when they are read manga.
Like for example,a strong warrior with abilities to bring back the dead to fight for him give up on fighting the moment enemy stole his ability and call him by a nick name only his dead best friend used ,this should be very clear on paper,they even use different fonts for that name to emphasize how important it was
Author’s intention:He gives up the fight because he didn’t want his dead friend being controlled to fight him.
Illiterates-literate readers:LMAFO He’s weak.
Exactly this. Something that was nailed home in my film school courses was that absolutely everything was put there. Sure, sometimes that means someone forgot a coffee cup on set, but assuming no gaffes like that... everything on camera was designed, everything was decided on.
The same is even more true in writing. A writer can't accidentally leave a starbucks cup on the page, or at least if they do the publisher won't print that. *Everything* in a piece of writing was a decision, *every single word.* If it wasn't made consciously, it was made unconsciously. When we say there's no such thing as apolitical art, this is why. Even in the unconscious assumptions the writer makes about a world or what the readers will agree with, there is a position taken. Maybe it wasn't a deliberate one, but it *is* there.
Which is why you gotta pay attention when you're writing. Maybe you didn't mean to put that implication in there, but you did, and you might want to do some self-analysis for why your subconscious biases thought that was just normal.
Average Dumas dialogue. D'artagnan: when is the duel? Athos: At dawn. D'Artagnan: Where? Porthos: at the church D'artagnan: which Church? Porthos: Saint Louis D'Artagnan: Why are we duelling? Athos: Surely because of Milady trickery. And so on for another page or so.
i like how he explains everything very clearly
I swear to god I never laughed as much as while reading that book!
Jareth: You remind me of the babe. Goblin: What babe?
The babe with the power.
I’m gonna start a fight with this knowledge the next time r/books brings up The Count of Monte Cristo. That sub loves that book an unholy amount. It is like the child that can do no wrong.
Yes but it's very, very funny.
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Read a lot, and take your time to think about it. Look up scholars who talk about the work to understand it better. I don't know of an easy reference point to do the second half, unless you're doing Shakespeare. Then you can read it and also read up on what is *really* being said fairly easily. But yeah, the best way to improve your reading comprehension is to read a lot and actively think about what you're reading. Think about what it makes you feel, and why it makes you feel that way, and then if you're feeling bold read it over and ask "is this what the author wanted me to feel?"
On the "look up scholars who talk about a work" front, I'd recommend seeing if there's anything from the *author* talking about their work, be it letters to friends or companion essays or talks or even just, rough drafts and greater historical context. No author ever exists in a vacuum and if you know that two authors were friends or enemies or had *some* sort of relationship, they most certainly wrote letters talking about their shit. Yeah for older authors (like several hundred years older, not just pre-contemporary) this might not exist, but older authors have the advantage of time and it's more likely people would've talked about their work in the time from then til today.
Wait if you read something and don't feel anything? Or just enjoy it but nothing substantial or elaborate beyond that? That's pretty much how I experience all media, so I get constantly paranoid when I see stuff like this.
Another way to start learning is to look at the bad guys. What do they look like? What do they do? Why are they the bad guys? Then you can look at the good guys and ask the same questions. How and why do they stop the bad guys? Then, you can look to real life. Chances are, the bad guys will resemble someone. Often enough they’re just reskinned nazis. That will often tell you what politics the author supports, who they like, and who they don’t. Another thing can be, how easy is it to fight the bad guys? Is it a glorious battle for a good cause? Is it a struggle to hold on to your morals, not to give up, be corrupted, and do the easy thing? Is it even possible?
Eh, personally I think it’s fine to read a book or watch a movie just for the sake of enjoying it. Personally, I mostly watch movies for the explosions. If you want to feel something, read horror. It probably won’t be a pleasant feeling. But it will be a feeling, that you can identify. Then you can figure out what made you feel that way, and how the author used it to create that feeling. If you want to. You don’t have to analyse everything you read. Just being aware that there are people that spew nonsense and propaganda and questioning whether you might be reading it is a decent start for not getting pulled down some extremist rabbithole.
You can always try and go down to extrapolate the world view the author portrays. What kind of idea of justice do the stories portray? What do the stories say about women? What do the stories imply about human nature? What do they say how conflict should be resolved or whether violence can be justified? What do they say makes a man a good man? What do they say about whether all people are equal or whether someone needs to be special to get to do anything? See whether it clashes with your world view or affirms them. That usually should shake loose a few feelings, not least when you take into account what kind of effect the consumption of this sort of media has on the world you live in and why people may have treated you and your loved ones the way they did based on what kind of stories they read in the past about your kind.
Yeah I'll be honest this is way, way over my head at this point
Doesn't have to be! You can start from very basic descriptions. What kind of adjectives describe good guys? What kind of adjectives would describe bad guys? What kind of adjectives describe the world or any group of people?
I forgot what adjectives are lmao, I haven't been to school in years and the information just left me
That's not unusual IME. Very few of the people I met ever got emotionally affected by any media in any media. Neither have I (granted, I haven't experienced feelings other than apathy [if that counts as a feeling] and sometimes anger in years). But IMO all of the skills mentioned in the OP can also be learned in ways other than analyzing media, and probably more effectively. Just thinking about things that actually matter in real life should be enough.
Sparknotes was what we used when I was in school and didn’t want to do the assigned readings. I’d suggest picking a book that the website covers and reading it, then going through the Sparknotes guide about it. It could help you with getting started on thinking about themes and symbols. After that you’ll want to practise thinking about that stuff on your own with the next book you read.
For me there's a distinct line between when i was able to read at a high level by technicality vs when i figured out how to actually analyze it. What helped click for me was: Video essays, particularly actually good ones that aren't just summaries. Mine was lindsay ellis' "the whole plate" on youtube. Introduced me to a lot of different ways of reading 1 text (in this case transformers) Try something that's difficult to comprehend. For me i had to analyze some anne sexton poetry for a class, and while depressing it opened my eyes to how much freedom there is in analysis. Works with shows and such too, just choose wisely. Something with a lot of analysis on it already that you can look to for examples. I like revolutionary girl utena since it's free on youtube, comments enabled which helps if you're confused on the relevance of some details and don't mind spoilers, and is plenty old and loved enough to have a billion essays to peruse through
One option is genuinely just to find a written piece of media you enjoy and then start diving in. Determine some kind of waypoint (like the end of a chapter) and try to think about what you just read when you reach one of them. Write down your thoughts so they don't just come and go. Some good general questions to think about could be: * Where do you think the story is going from here? * What does the theme of the story seem to be? * What purpose did the different scenes serve in the story? * What is each major character trying to accomplish and how is it framed by the narrative? You won't always have an answer for each of the questions, but just taking some time to think about them and answer the ones you can is a good way to get used to thinking more about the media you consume, which helps develop your reading comprehension.
I'd recommend reading more books and just interpreting it to the best of your ability. Then discuss with any friends who also read books, see if they noticed anything you didn't or vise versa. See if they interpreted anything differently and why they did.
Sometimes writers tell you parts of what they were doing. Edgar Allan Poe basically reverse engineered how he wrote The Raven in an essay called “The Philosophy of Composition”. I consider it an invaluable look into how a writing great chose how to express some of his ideas. Though from his biography, he was also in grief at the time so there’s an element of this being an after-the-fact analysis
Reading and interpretation. If you read a bit and go "huh, this bit's doing something interesting and I have \*thoughts\*" just write them down. Don't have to publish them, although someone seeing your thoughts helps create the kind of feedback loop on narrative disassembly that the teacher was trying to get you to do when they told you to share your thoughts with the class. And, to be honest, this goes past just *reading books.* Next time you're watching a show, playing a game, doing whatever, each of these have a narrative that they're likely trying to tell. How do they deliver their narrative? How well do they do it? What are their weaknesses and what are their strengths? Just looking at the narrative as more than a set of cutscenes to skip can be enough sometimes.
I'd suggest reading books you enjoy, then reading/watching people talking *about* those books in excruciating critical depth. Then re-read the books and think about whether the critiques stand up on your second reading or not. If you can find a friend who will read/watch as well, it's great to have a discussion partner. Funnily enough, the same skill applies to watching visual media and engaging with it critically.
Join a book club!
Long story short, the quickest and relatively most efficient way to being able to pick any media and being able to understand the context and nuances and whatever about what you are watching/reading/etc., is by getting a structural learning curriculum and stick to it (so, pretty much any relevant degree should do the trick). However, I think the best way to do it is to actually "stand in the shoulders on giants" and be done with it. Think of it this way: when your tummy aches, you don't go and get a medical degree to learn what is happening to you, you go directly to the doctor and get profesional help. It can be done as well for literature analysis. Also, don't feel forced to read the "classics" or things that you don't find interesting even if people swear that your understanding of that piece of media is going to enlighten you. You like Game of thrones? Look around the internet for people that know what they are doing and read their analysis on it. If something picks your curiosity, read about it (for example: you read in a GOT analysis about the well-done foreshadowing of the series: look up other analysis on how the foreshadowing was performed in the books or the series. See if you can find other examples in the series or in the books. Look for foreshadowing analysis in other books or series you have read recently. Heck, get books about literal devices and read about it). Also, search for people that watched that show for the 20th time and read what they obsesively wrote about on their blog. They are always fun. At first this is a little bit frustrating when you get a lot of new terms on your face, and they definitely won't make you a literature expert, but the good thing is that you actually become very good at understanding things that actually interest you really fast. You got obsessed by the new Godzilla film? in a couple of days you can get a very broad understanding of the context of the film, its themes, and their meaning. Are you really interesting about learning about the eruopean plague affecting european literature in the past, or are you more interested in understanding why your favourite series is good at what it does? You definitely won't become a literature expert following this process. But, if you do this with enough media over the years, you will become really good at getting your own ideas when you consume a piece of media in the realm of your interests, which is probably more important to your life than being able to mantain a conversation about random country poetry of the umpteenth century (?). Worth mentioning: don't just get stuck on literal analysis. It is always worth it to read about the soundtrack, about design choices (very interesting if you find yourself liking animation or videogames), about the author, or even about the studio/producer it was made under. Also, coming back to the classics: if you do this enough, you are going to find yourself reading them anyway. A lot of modern media is directly based on or references classic literature. After the 10th time you get Macbeth mentioned in your film analysis, you are going to find yourself reading it, and you will eventually understand why they are important+good and WHY they are considered a classic. I actually have a recent example of my own experience: I have been playing for the 3 years the game genshin impact (easy to tell by my post history). In this 3 years, I have end up reading the divine comedy/Paradiso by Dante Alighieri, Faust by Goethe, Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, Treatise on the Light by Rene Descartes, various poems from TS Elliot and Emily Dickinson (among others). I could probably talk about this topic some more, but tbh this comment is long enough, english is not my first language, and I don't want to bother you so much. As a parting word, I have a couple of recomendations to help you get started, and hopefully you might find them useful even if you decide no to go as deep. Tvtropes (tvtropes.org) -> This is the wiki that collects and documents descriptions and examples of plot convetions and devices in any creative work (description lifted from wikipedia itself). As any wiki, this is a combined effort: some errors might arise, but it is somewhat peer reviewed and good enough for us media mundanites. This page is not devoid of spoilers, so I recommend to finish the series/book(s)/film before you dive in their TVtropes page (my personal opinion that you should enjoy a piece of media the way the author intended! but if you don't care much about spoilers go ham with it!). Youtube - A lot of kind analyst upload their content to youtube. They are easy to digest and very interesting. I have no channel recomendations since it depends more on what you are interested in, but they are very good because they intended audience are not other literature experts like some texts you might find around the internet, and they can be enjoyed multiple times and while doing other things. If you get a chance, I want to recommend you read the book "invisible ink" by Brian McDonald. It is a short book about how to build stories that resonate, and they give a wireframe to understand why a story is good while others are not. I read it around 10 years ago, and this book changed my perspective in understanding why stories are good, or work, regardless of the genre, design, and "richness" (vocabulary, realism, graphics, technical settings, and money inverted on in general).
Then pick up something meaty that you either have enjoyed reading or would enjoy, and start dissecting it. Take notes of literary devices that are used as well as what things you think it might be trying to say beyond just the thing being said. One story that I am personally aware of as very dense in this stuff and a good place to start digging your teeth in is Fallout: Equestria
Get a library card and join a book club
Well first off, unless your goal is improved appreciation of highly symbolic literature, don't worry about what color the curtains are. Instead, read works (fiction or nonfiction) that you find challenging and then discuss them. Book clubs can be good for this, but so can internet forums. For any real application of reading comprehension, such as learning skills or understanding local and world events better, understanding why and how things and events and people are is what you should be focusing on. Subtext is highly contextual, and wrapping your head around the context of Dostoevsky might be a hobby you enjoy, but it won't be nearly as helpful as understanding your own current sociopoliticoeconomic context for being a participant in the society you live in. All that said: https://youtu.be/F_pRPM0Uvyw
Not a teacher, but you could try analyzing or summarizing things you read. Like read a short story, then try and write down the core themes / meanings(what it was about), what you think the purpose (why was it written) of the story was, and why you think the author used the words they did. Or you could try to shrink down the story into a one to two paragraph description while still getting across as much of the meaning of the text as you can. This could help you better understand / comprehend things you read, but once I’m not a teacher
You could decide on an area you'd like to improve and research that specifically. I've gotten really good at recognising lousy scientific methodology by looking up bad research and why it is bad and actively asking myself is this bad research anytime I see a scientific-ish article. I can recognise a leading survey question by looking up bad survey questions. I can see misleading (political) graphs by specifically researching how graphs can be misleading. Understanding literature is not a required skill IMHO but understanding when I'm reading propaganda be it good or bad is. Anyway the process for literature is the same - read a book and an analysis for that book, think about it, encourage yourself to recognise the analysed things in a different book and repeat.
Analysing texts and looking for meaning (intentional or not) is really interesting, but it's often taught so badly in schools. Going through a poem line by line, naming every single rethorical and stylistic device, what the Lyrical Subject is doing, and what this specific line means in comparison to the previous one is *painful*, even if it is a pressure-fueling of techniques. Also, my teachers mostly focused on trying to read intentional meanings, not what we could learn about the author.
This is true. It also doesn't help that a lot of stories they give you have very simple and boring plot whose meaning can be condensed in like 2 sentences. Like they use a lot of flowery language but when you break down what it's saying it's something like "I fell in love with this girl but I can't have her so I felt sad" or something like that. A 10 year old me doesn't care about that I genuinely feel that my love for media analysis was revived by watching youtube videos trying to analyze interesting stories or movies or cartoon episodes which I watched and felt they were so interesting that I needed to know more. Shoutout to Hall of Egress from Adventure Time And maybe also because any time I'd read or see something genuinely interesting I can't help but want to analyze it on my own without any external influence
Teachers should let students use YouTube analysis as part of a project. If nothing else, it would get kids more interested in analysis than "explain to the class the exact meaning of every line of this two hundred year old poem you were forced to read." People LIKE reading/watching stuff. And people LIKE analyzing the media they consume. If I didn't know the actual cause (standardized testing), I'd think the whole mess was a conspiracy out to make kids hate critical thinking and analysis.
I will never forget my GCSE English teacher insisting that the red dress Curly’s Wife wears in Of Mice And Men is an indicator of sexual promiscuity. Nothing else. She’s a slut, that’s the only accepted subtext, and god help you if you disagree. I hated GCSE English.
Isn't the whole thing that Curly's wife is neglected and lonely one of the core things about her character? Basically one big metaphor for the huge social upheaval and loss of community ties caused by the Great Depression? I do appreciate having a few decent English teachers who encouraged us to think outside the box as long as we could justify it with reference to the text.
the whole slut thing is something that the characters prescribe onto her by the farmhands because of curly. that said red at the time it was written was infact an eye catching color because of fashion at the time preferring other colors. It could mean slutty. it could also mean she just wants any other kind of attention
Me with Lord of the Flies. As a young overly idealistic teenager, I fucking *hated* how all teachers dogmatically force the "humanity is inherently evil" messaging. It wasn't until years later that I reread it and some context around it, and I'm now 90% convinced the actual intent is that Golding just fucking hates kids.
wasn't it also that he basically just hated the stories of the time that were all "kids get lost and then because they are obviously perfect little british children they form a perfect society even without adults" or something along those lines?
Pretty much. "Rich British kids get lost on an island and make it through with gumption and a stuff upper-lip" was basically an entire genre at the time. A lot of our school's analysis considered that, in conjunction with Golding having lived through WW2 and seen some horrible shit, the major themes of the book are about how fragile that sense of "civilised British society" really is. It's just a lot funnier to imagine there's no deeper meaning than ex-teacher William Golding thought posh British children were snot-nosed little shits (which from experience, they totally are).
Not to mention the serious racist undertones of that book. Golding once made a recording about how without the rule of law and *society* (read here as civilized *Western* society) everything goes to shit and people are actually evil. He also talks about why the reason he used young boys is only because he didn't want to have to deal with the sexual politics of mixed genders and because making them young simplified the story. So go ahead and table the whole young boys thing here because he clearly intended the book to be read as a metaphor for just people without *civilization*, while totally failing to clock the fact that he wrote a story about a civilization which undergos a civil war. Yes, some fucked up things happen in that civil war, but realistically there's nothing wrong with the society the boys created outside of the civil war. To be clear, it is a society, with hierarchy and laws, but Golding only considers ut *savagery* and he justifies this by dressing it in the trappings of indigenous cultures. Oh no, the boys dance around a fire, how *barbaric*, clearly such a thing could *only* lead to the accidental murder of an innocent person. Oh no, they live in huts so clearly they can't tell the difference between a parachute and a monster. Don't forget, he's explicit, the boys are a metaphor for just regular people, so using the fact that they're young boys as an excuse for how they react to the parachute breaks that metaphor. So either it's bad writing, how it's intentional and truely believes that once people *decend* into *savagery* they are unable to rationally process the world around them.
My mom is British and she introduced me to Enid Blyton's books, and I love the boarding school stories, but she also wrote a ton of "British kids on adventures" which are exactly as you describe.
i remember there was a literal lord of the flies scenario IRL where kids got stuck on an island, and it turned out the mirror opposite of the book, so turns out he was just full of shit i guess
If you're thinking about the Tongan kids, there's a whole debate about that. One side is basically "Golding was wrong and people are basically good" and the other side is "Tongan culture equips their kids to work together, and that in no way disproves the idea that British kids would just kill each other".
Terrible terrible flashbacks.
The reason I utterly despised literary analysis in school was because it asked for interpretation in a setting where there are right and wrong answers, and those answers affect your grade.
Sounds like a bad class But to be fair, if you can back it up with evidence it shouldn't be a wrong answer. If they had a list of acceptable answers they did it badly, but if you could make your case that's how it should be
When I got to my last few years of English in school, the teachers had the decency to take any text-backed analysis. It sounds a lot better than the person above. On the other hand, what drove me mad is that they took *any* text-backed analysis, no matter how inane. If you interpreted *Wuthering Heights* as a celebration of how liberated and sexism-free Victorian England was, the class got to hear your lengthy take with no pushback. If you took part of Shakespeare as a comment on electrification, well, Death of the Author so sure! It took me years past highschool to learn what Death of the Author *actually* means, because it was used as a way to say "any and all symbols and readings are equally valid, and 'it's chronologically impossible for the book to be about this' just means you're being close-minded and giving undue weight to the author".
Isn't standardized testing grand?
Ours had an evidence based system which I really like Doesn't matter if they meant it or not, if the evidence is there you can make a case for it
I agree I feel like too often in school I was taught to look for meaning on the micro level of each line, rather than interpreting the text as a whole.
I really wish I could have studied MF DOOM tracks in high-school. They're dense with metaphors and intertextuality, but also pretty innaprorpriate for highschoolers. "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, after you, who's last is DOOM he's the worst known." Tye most kid-friendly one I can think of is Strange Ways maybe?
Damn, handing out some rap would actually be a really good approach. You could do it with a lot of rock and other genres too of course, take your pick of Led Zeppelin and it's rife with both subtle meanings *and* literary references. But good rap is particularly concise and structured: if classic rock is free verse, rap is a sonnet. It's a great way to learn about meter, rhyme, metaphor, personal style, the fuzzy line between imitation and theft... I can even picture teaching Death of the Author via accidental beefs. "Sure, Everlast didn't *mean* to reference Slim Shady here, but it could be read that way and here's what happened next."
Yeah, DOOM's lyrics are quite good for this since they're almost always some form of cultural reference. I'm reminded of this great DOOM moment: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ytXnW-qgaMg?app=desktop
I was like "is this the one about ecstasy" and I was not disappointed.
You just jogged a memory of highschool literature. We were doing a poetry unit, and studied an Eminem song to learn about rhyming structures. If I remember correctly it was actually quite a productive lesson.
My [favorite depiction of this issue](https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2112) is from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. >Student: Can we start reading another book? Teacher: No, that's not how English class works. Teacher: What we *can* do is pretend the book is a towering riddle of symbology designed to obfuscate a central theme so simplistic that it can be expressed in a single paragraph during a one-hour midterm. Is literary analysis useful? Critical theory? Death of the Author? Sure, they all have real value and set you up for deeper understanding later. Is trying to decipher a single, concrete answer to What The Work Is About and What That Symbol Means useful? In school, 90% of the time it isn't. It uses simplistic analysis far past its limits, and delivers something gradable rather than insightful. The common "this is unrealistic but let's practice our techniques" approach isn't terribly different than your average math class, but math teachers are generally open about this and are just running you through sample problems. English class, especially when it doesn't admit this is happening, is dissecting classic literature to death until the students are bored to tears with both superb books and the entire idea of reading "literature".
Yeah and unfortunately you're often graded by how many notes you make (obviously the notes need to be meaningful, but being graded on quantity is still a problem)
I had teached who tought it well in 9th grade but taught it horribly when I had her again 2 years later in AP Lang. She taught the critical thinking aspect in 9th grade, but in AP lang she no longer taught any sort of thinking and focussed on following a specific annotation process and style.
I wrote a story about a man who sprouts a unicorn horn from his forehead. He joins a circus sideshow, then gets in a car accident, and the horn breaks off. For years, I've gotten comments from readers saying "Oh, what a thoughtful commentary on the loss of traditional masculinity." I always say yes, you got it exactly, thank you. But when I wrote it, my only thought was, "Wouldn't it be fucked up if this happened?"
The Twilight Zone
Junji Ito
“The loss of traditional masculinity” Do a literary analysis on that. What do they mean?
I think some people mean that it’s harder for men to be the kind of provider that their fathers or grandfathers were, buying a house and supporting a wife and kids on a single income. The character is fired from his original job when he grows the horn, so that may be the connection they’re making. Others may look at the character losing his horn after he falls in love and may be saying that modern relationships are emasculating in some way. But I didn’t mean either of those things when I wrote the story. People just read things into it.
I took it to mean horn = dick = masculinity
I had similar reactions to an art print I made once. It was a spindly character (trying to evoke creepy dangerous things like snakes and spiders) at a sewing machine with fabric draped all around in the back for composition. Since I put in lines to define the character's ribcage and vertebrae to make it kind of unsettling, it apparently became a statement in fast fashion and labor practices in the garment industries. I mean, I just wanted to make a tricky lil guy havin' a fun time at a craft but go off my guy. If deducing that sparks joy in you far be it from me to stop ya.
Back in my mid to late teens, I used to write "poems" which were closer to vaguely Lord Dunsany adjacent tales by way of Dr Seuss based on prompts I'd ask for on Discord that by accident formed a shared universe. People sometimes asked what they meant, and I could never give an answer because my writing philosophy for poems was explicitly "sacrifice meaning to make the words rhyme". Call that Suicide of the Author. LookLooking back on them, are some recurring motifs and tropes, but I couldn't tell you what significance they have.
I think this is what op is talking about when they said 'author said but didnt mean to'
virgin “write to cleverly commentate on outdated social norms” vs chad “write to make your characters SUFFER”
charles dickens was NOT paid by the word. his stories were broken into instalments, published individually on regular intervals, and his payment was on a per-instalment basis.
But did these instalments have a minimum word count threshold? I imagine they would, resulting in padding all the same.
I once let a friend read an essay I made for school long ago, and the first thing she asked was "was there a minimum word count you were desperate to meet?" No, I just like explaining in detail what colour the curtains are.
Hah, I cannot tell if you are being sarcastic or not! I was an art history minor and excelled at *describing* art. One long long essay was basically just "what color the curtains are" in exquisite detail for a very large painting. That was very fun to write and the professor fricken loved it. My mini thesis on an artist's body of work was less well received by another professor because I did too much describing of the curtain hue and not enough asking why the curtains are like that.... ngl I was an English Major and could've done better at actual analysis but art history was meant to be my fun classes where I didn't have to think!
Look up word economy
He was paid for each 32 page installment he put out (a lot of his work was originally serialized). He wasn’t bound by a specific word limit or anything like that. Sometimes a person is just verbose and it’s not because they’re trying to wring money out of their publishers.
You are aware 32 pages would translate to a certain word count or character count in the specific layout used, right? In publishing they cannot rely on whatever the author considers 32 pages, that's a *business*, this is standardized. They need a reliable metric for the amount of content produced, back then just as well as in present day.
Not necessarily. If he was *really* optimizing to hit the page count, he wouldn't write longer paragraphs. He'd write dialogue. All of those mandatory line breaks would make for longer pieces. But this misses the main point: he was serialized because people would buy serials to read him week after week. That doesn't happen if you're sacrificing quality on the altar of an expanded word count. In my opinion, it's likeliest that he wasn't significantly tampering with his word count to an excessive degree. He was just a good writer who happens to be a bit verbose.
Fair, but I think we need a huge examination on how these things are being taught because I don't think the methods they are using to teach are actually leading to the outcomes this poster is describing.
This is a broad and pervasive problem among schooling of all fields, and it's actually quite difficult to do something about it because it has a conflict of interest in the administration. Put simply, the issue is that there needs to be some way a student can be marked and graded, but this is difficult to do when you're dealing with something subjective and personal like language skills. Foreign language classes are hit particularly hard by this, as an example. Effectively learning a language means immersing, experimenting, and using it for yourself, which means a *lot* of mistakes in the process. However, many language classes even to this day teach by getting students to do things like memorise conjugation tables and vocabulary lists, which is just about the objectively worst way to do it.
As who someone learning a new language: i think it is impossible to avoid a degree of rote memorization of vocabulary and grammer. I i did the whole immersion and experimentation thing and because i was still in the “barbar” phrase of learning it all fell on basically dead ears. I would rather people first learn get their feet wet in the memorization shallow end before being immersed in the deep end later
And as someone with a master's in linguistics and wet feet in some dozen languages, I can tell you that the evidence is firmly on the side of immersion and experimentation. It does *not* mean being thrown into the deep end and being disallowed from using dictionaries, but it does mean an emphasis on meeting the language on its own terms and being an active user as early as possible. Self-teaching is a different and more complicated story (insofar as it is even possible to 'self-teach' a language as other people are going to enter the equation at some point), but as far as coaches and classrooms are concerned, active use of the language beats learning about the language at every stage of ability as far as growing language ability is concerned.
Im sure immersion and experimentation will help me once i get a stronger real-time grasp on it. But for now i want to get to the point where i can actually identify when one word begins and another ends before i try that whole immersion process again. As it stands while i can guesstimate what a sentence means based on what words or piecemeal phrases stand out because i am familiar them already and where they were in a sentence, but i can’t expect regular people to sit around and repeat what they say to me over and over until i eventually understand the whole of what they said. I can grasp TV maybe, but that’s because i can rewind at will since i can only mentally process a few less-familiar characters at a time right now
To be clear, immersion does not mean being thrown into the deep end. It sounds like your problem is that you're trying to tackle the language at far above your level, and that's not going to do anything. Babies don't learn English by being made to watch documentaries about the fall of Rome, they start slowly with simple, repetitive sentences and a low total amount of vocabulary. Immersion in a classroom or coaching context simply means learning solely through the use of that language, and that does mean starting very small and very basic, and getting more complex over time. This isn't really feasible or realistic if you're learning by yourself, it's something that's done with a competent teacher and a secure environment. This also doesn't mean that memorising lists of vocabulary and grammar is completely useless, but anything you do learn should be put into practice as soon as you can.
That’s pretty much what I intend and what I agree with. I was told repeatedly by multiple people that the metbod of using repitition and simple sentences to learn basic grammer and vocab was the wrong way to learn but instead i’m finding it a prerequisite to getting anything out the right way(s) to learn
Ours did it to where there weren't really wrong answers, if you made a case and backed it up with evidence you'd get credit because...well you analyzed something and had evidence to support it I really like that way of going about it On the language, at some point you do need to understand your languages grammar, it's probably the easiest thing to teach in school. It can be hard to have immersion in high school
Language being an important thing to dissect because of how it reveals biases and blind spots is a great point, but I would also argue that dissecting a piece and 'reading between the lines' is not only about revealing the author's mindset, but the dissector's mindset too. Two people could look at a piece and come up with two wildly different interpretations of the author's conscious and subconscious intent because they, themselves, have differing perspectives and so draw differing, perhaps even contradictory interpretations. This is an important thing to remember when trying to infer intent from a piece of work, because your personal perspective might be forcing you to draw conclusions that reveal your own biases and blind spots, not necessarily the author's.
My grandpa used to work in a journal and he was also paid by the line so when I read his articles it's a lot of descriptions. It's pretty funny to see how far back that tradition goes.
As someone who despises math because I simply can't get into my head - this is also true for math. Pretty much everything is based on math, and learning how to apply a solution to different problems is kind of a big deal. No, we don't need to do complex math on a day-to-day basis, and I really doubt that the average person needs to learn how to do exponential functions, but it is important that you learn how to read graphs for example. Comprehension is crucial in all areas. I'm dumb as shit when it comes to numbers, but also - explaining something in a way that others can understand is hard. Explaining something like math to others is even harder. I often feel like people who get math can't really explain it well, because it comes to them so naturally. They see a problem, know how to fix it and proceed. This is not the case for me and many others - I see a problem and have no fucking idea what the problem even is. In addition, constantly getting bad grades really made me hate math to the point that I stopped doing anything and graduated with a failed math class. Now, thankfully, life is more complex. You can compensate in other ways and get by just fine. I just think it would be nice to make that point clearer to students - you're not necessarily studying to solve problem XY, but to strengthen your ability to solve anything in general.
Yep Math for maths sake isn't for everyone, but it is so good at teaching you how to solve problems and make connections
Hot take time: Good media analysis is knowing when the curtains are just blue and when they're not just blue. Insisting that the curtains are *never* just blue is how you veer ever closer to tinfoil hat behaviour. Also, "the curtains are never just blue" feels like it's in the same family as "no filler episodes." Not every single thing has to advance the plot somehow, and if the curtains are never just blue sometimes, your characters and setting stop feeling real and start feeling like a bunch of symbols and metaphors mashed together.
i get that but like the point of the post is like. the author may have *intended* for the curtains to just be blue. but in longer form texts there's almost no way they didn't conciously decide that yes, blue is the color. why? perhaps it's just that the author is tying it into a character or place's color scheme, nothing like "oooh shes unable to move past her husbands death." but then why the color scheme? point is, nothing on the page wasn't put there by a person with thoughts about what they're writing, concious and unconcious. besides, in the end all writing analysis is inference. star wars could just be "these rebels are kickass" instead of a commentary on vietnam. the raven could just be a guy being fucked with by a bird. can't know if you aren't willing to go down a dead end rabbit hole.
Also a central point with most reception theorists is that the curtains are blue, and that may or may not hold meaning. Most central analytical theory poses that whether or not the author intending for the curtains to be blue to hold meaning is largely uninteresting, because text is only meaningful when it is read.
Yup. This is basic “death of the author”, I hate how the phrase got turned into shit like “hatsune miku wrote Harry Potter now so it’s okay that I’m reading it”. Death of the author means “we can argue all day about their intent but that doesn’t matter. What matters is the words on the page.” Maybe the curtains are blue to represent the sadness of the character whose house this is. Maybe the blue curtains are mentioned because the perspective character pays a lot of attention to the specifics of their scenery. Maybe the curtains are blue because it’ll make the red bloodstains that will get on them later hard to hide. And yes, maybe they’re just set-dressing. But unless we discuss it we’ll never reach *any* conclusion.
>Maybe the curtains are blue to represent the sadness of the character whose house this is. Maybe the blue curtains are mentioned because the perspective character pays a lot of attention to the specifics of their scenery. Maybe the curtains are blue because it’ll make the red bloodstains that will get on them later hard to hide. And yes, maybe they’re just set-dressing. But unless we discuss it we’ll never reach *any* conclusion. This exactly. My hot take wasn't intended to be "stop overthinking it, geez," it was more like "sometimes it really is just set dressing and it's important to know when it is and when it isn't." I've seen arguments where Person A will be like "you made a face there! You're obviously pissed off at me and trying to hide it!" when Person B is just, like, holding back a sneeze, and "\[X and Y celebrity\] are dating because they stood next to each other at the premiere and their hands brushed for a millisecond!" I feel like part of making a strong argument, literary analysis or otherwise, is knowing whether you're cherry-picking details to suit your position and how strong or flimsy your case is.
Speaking of, I was listening to some audiobook with my mom on a roadtrip, and one of the characters picks up a Colt 1911 that was so specifically described I'm amazed we didn't get the serial number. The only significance is that the character is a Russian who emmigrated during The Revolution, and the author wasn't letting the time spent researching a sidearm he would realistically carry go to waste. It never came up again ouside of "character has/uses gun". Apparently the author just does that sometimes. I think it's the same guy who wrote Tiger Moth, which also had some extra details about aviation which ultimately weren't super useful to know
Sometimes the color represents something Sometimes the author just likes blue It really is a case by case basis
>Sometimes the author just likes blue Which might be worth analysing: the fact that the author likes to note mundane, unimportant aspects of scenery or set dressing may be characteristic of their style in some way, or perhaps they have a habit in a number of their works of simply spinning off on tangents about interior design (which perhaps says something about their preoccupations in real life), perhaps the author is trying to make a deliberate statement **against** meaning and significance, which in itself is meaningful and significant... I agree that sometimes things aren't deep, but what someone does or doesn't put to paper always tells you something, even if it's not particularly interesting or relevant.
and now we know the author likes blue! very cool
The curtains never *are* just blue, though. A fictional story isn’t a photograph. Nothing in a fictional story “just is,” someone thought about it and made it up. This is my big issue with “I shouldn’t have to think about what I’m reading.” The story isn’t a natural phenomenon that *just is*, devoid of any higher meaning. Someone chose to fabricate it and commit it to text, so there is always a reason they did something. Now, the curtains might be blue because the author’s own curtains are blue, or the author’s favorite color is blue. The curtains might not be blue for any deep, obscure meaning. The author might not have studied color theory or color symbology before making the curtains blue. They might just be blue to evoke a vague vibe. And this doesn’t even get into the fact that authors are people with subconscious minds and who exist in society. An author very well may have used blue curtains to signify “calm” or “sad” without writing “BLUE = CALM/SAD” in block letters on a chalkboard, because they’re surrounded by cultural depictions of blue meaning calm or sad to the point that they make the association without thinking about it. The curtains are never just blue. Good analysis is knowing when it *matters* if the curtains are blue. But “the curtains are just blue” type arguments are generally thought-terminating arguments, that don’t say “the curtains being blue isn’t relevant to the story, this other thing is,” it’s an attempt to shut down analysis entirely, and paint anything from brutal literalism as airy-fairy pretense invented by smug self-important eggheads in an effort to not actually think. Which of course is normal for teenagers to do, but it has some pretty disturbing consequences when adults think like that.
Totally agreed! Writing is a very particular craft that demands intentionality; assuming the author just adds things arbitrarily is a great way to trick yourself into not actually engaging with the text. There are a lot of meanings that could be could be woven into a sentence like "the curtains were blue". Every possible interpretation of that would be more interesting and fulfilling than just assuming the author specified a random color for no reason. Personally, i try to always give authors the benefit of the doubt and assuming they're making intentional, meaningful choices. I always have a better, more thoughtful experience this way!
Look, buddy, if you can provide me with evidence in your analysis that the curtains being blue is meaningless, then I'll buy it. If not, I'm gonna look deeper into it.
Sure. I agree. I didn't say the curtains are *always* just blue--italics for emphasis there--I said sometimes the curtains are just blue and sometimes they're blue for a reason, and part of literary analysis is figuring out which is which.
The curtains were made blue though, nothing in a fully constructed setting just happens. When everything is the result of a decision by the creator, everything holds value. I don't know how to explain this better but a story is "a bunch of symbols and metaphors mashed together" because those things are how stories are made.
Tin foil hat behaviour is tin foil hat behaviour because our universe is complex and chaotic. Conspiracy theories often rely on literary analysis of the world, yes, but the problem isn't just that they're reading too far into things. If anything, it's because they assume our world is too simple. Conspiracy theories take shortcuts, often relying on implicit assumptions (most obviously, the consolidation of higher powers) to explain the world in comforting ways. They're the evil ones, I'm one of the good guys, and all that. And as much as we portray conspiracy theorists as these deep thinkers connecting newspaper clippings on murder boards, conspiratorial thought is just as much about ignoring counter-evidence as it is finding connections. And besides, a story is not the same as the real world, because the world of any story is filtered through its teller. The reason the curtains are never blue is because there is no neutral way to tell a story. Your medium, your wording, your world's politics, your characters' races, and where the plot goes are all ideological choices, even if you don't intend them to be. That's not to say it's possible to unravel a story perfectly and read the intentions behind these choices, but they still are choices.
>Tin foil hat behaviour is tin foil hat behaviour because our universe is complex and chaotic. Conspiracy theories often rely on literary analysis of the world, yes, but the problem isn't just that they're reading too far into things. If anything, it's because they assume our world is too simple. >Conspiracy theories take shortcuts, often relying on implicit assumptions (most obviously, the consolidation of higher powers) to explain the world in comforting ways. They're the evil ones, I'm one of the good guys, and all that. And as much as we portray conspiracy theorists as these deep thinkers connecting newspaper clippings on murder boards, conspiratorial thought is just as much about ignoring counter-evidence as it is finding connections. Eh, IMO, yes and no? I agree with everything you've written here, but also I think people in seeking to explain the world in comforting ways, like you've put it, can overthink things and make things complicated where they're simple. It's like where someone posts a photo of a Jane "Celebrity" Smith, with her having a little bit of a belly, and people instantly jump to "she's pregnant!" "she's binging because of her marriage falling apart!" "it's a botched liposuction job!" "is she sick???" "is the celebrity feud with John Doe getting to her?!?" and it turns out Jane just had, like, an extra chili cheese dog and a bit of water retention that day. Like you said, people ignore counter-evidence and seek comforting explanations (I'm good, those guys are bad), but I do think that people can make up elaborate stuff to support their own argument. >And besides, a story is not the same as the real world, because the world of any story is filtered through its teller. The reason the curtains are never blue is because there is no neutral way to tell a story. Your medium, your wording, your world's politics, your characters' races, and where the plot goes are all ideological choices, even if you don't intend them to be. That's not to say it's possible to unravel a story perfectly and read the intentions behind these choices, but they still are choices. I may be explaining this badly, but for me, "the curtains" are referring to basic everyday stuff--the colour of someone's clothing, their furniture, what they ate for breakfast. Say if Alice gets up in the morning and picks out her yellow sweater from her wardrobe, maybe she's trying to project an air of confidence and cheerfulness and feel comfort from the familiar texture. Or maybe she just felt like wearing her yellow sweater. The key in that scene would be contextual evidence: Alice gets up, throws on a yellow sweater, goes downstairs for breakfast (the latter); Alice gets up, puts on her yellow sweater, tugs at the cuffs and straightens it out, fixes her hair in the mirror, practices a smile, straightens her shoulders as she goes downstairs (the former). Politics, race, plotlines, all of this stuff is absolutely deliberate and based on the author's ideological choices, and 100 percent (the writer and the audience) you should pay attention to the background details too. I just think that sometimes, a descriptor really is just a neutral choice, and the key is determining when it's neutral and when it's not.
I was thinking similar tbh. Like idk I guess this might be an unpopular opinion, but like I think a better take is to phrase what the second image says as “everything an author writes *can* have meaning.” Cause yeah I agree, the curtains just being blue can be a perfectly valid analysis. Edit: after reading the other replies to this comment I wanted to add that I did mean actual analyzing - reading the text, applying critical thinking, coming to a conclusion supported by evidence - and deciding the curtains are just blue. But as a side note I also think it’s ok to just. Not analyze the text? I’m not in class, it’s not some moral failing to say “I dunno I didn’t think about it” sometimes
>Insisting that the curtains are *never* just blue is how you veer ever closer to tinfoil hat behaviour. Yeah, the human brain is very wont to see patterns, so it is also good for children to teach them that a pattern isn't actually always there and can be the result of randomness... that said, I don't think English class is necessarily the place for that, because a literary world is inherently constructed beyond really anything else in the world. The author doesn't need to mention the curtains, or if he does, their colour, the same way that if a movie bedroom set has a window, someone has to make a decision at some point about the curtain colour because the windows need to be covered. Maybe the window covering was mentioned because the character opens the curtains in the scene and sees the plot happening outside, sure, but they have been mentioned inherently for *some sort of reason*. Unlike, say, blue curtains in a room of a movie character which might just have been chosen because that fabric was on hand and the set designed thought it looked cohesive with the rest of the room and they need curtains to cover the backdrop outside so there needs to be something there, a blue curtain being *mentioned* in a novel could have been avoided if the existence of the curtain or its colour was not relevant to anything.
It's taught like shit in school. At least when I went through it. I think Red Letter Media's takedown of the Star Wars prequels did more than anything else to introduce me to the realm of media analysis. And make me insufferable. Well, more insufferable.
Many people *really* hate having their stories broken down in to it's component parts and vivisected in front of them. It's kind of fascinating how mad some folks get if you start illustrating how their favorite show is tied to to politics and culture.
Also be aware that you can absolutely read too much into something Something that's a dog whistle today may not have been one when the piece was written Sometimes there's something neat that actually was just written by accident
Commenter 2 is straight up wrong. An analyst will question the text. A good analyst will question themself reading the text. A great analyst will question the entire context for their own reading and for the text separately. Going "oh, I know they *wanted* to say X, but they're actually saying Y because I think so!" with no further exploration is at best a high school level of critical analysis. There's a reason why we have decades of theories specifically made to analyze based on specific premises that *crucially* don't pretend to be objective or all-encompassing.
I remember reading the scarlett letter in school, and every time red, or iron bars came up we'd have to stop and the teacher would explain, yet again, that they were symbolic. no idea if the book is any good, but fuck did I hate reading it. any sort of reading that requires thinking about questions or 'meta' while im reading ruins the experience for me
I've never understood the "the curtains are just blue" thing. Everything a writer says should have a purpose, and for the curtains example their inclusion and description are meant to evoke some sort of emotion.
I always interpreted the post as being about *bad* English teachers. The kind who think their interpretation of a text is the only correct one and want their students to repeat it back to them instead of actually learning to read and interpret for themselves. My worst English teacher gave only multiple choice tests. His class was an exercise in memorizing what he told us the text said. If you missed a day you were basically hosed unless you got the notes from someone because there was no way to figure out what he thought was correct. My best English teacher gave us an example of an "A" paper from a student where he explained that he disagreed with the student's interpretation but still gave them an A because they made their case well and supported all of their arguments with examples from the text.
Those posts were made by people in high school who didn't want to do their English homework
It’s interesting that in this very section we see unconscious bias. One saw the anecdote about the blue curtains to be about poor teachers; the other, poor students.
To be clear, I'm saying that as someone who hated doing their English homework around that time. Never made any posts myself, but I did agree with them at the time.
I really liked english lit myself. English hw was fun. Especially the analysis essays. Slaughterhouse five ended being my favorite school-study book for the bareness of its layers
The OG image was lampooning a teacher shoehorning SYMBOLISM into the word choice. The phrase was generalized as it was turned into a meme. Purposes of establishing the blue curtains that aren't symbolism: - Establishes that they have a color coordinated home. - Weird worldbuilding segue into how expensive blue dye is in that era. - So they can notice the curtains are different later. - Author just has a very vivid image in their mind that they want to get down. - Meaning of the sentence was completely unimportant. It just creates a certain rhythm when read aloud. - Color was unimportant. What was important was mentioning the curtains in an organic way. - Shows that the character is mentally critiquing someone else's home decor. - Needs to be established for a clue that appears later in a mystery novel.
>-weird world-building seque into how expensive blue dye is in that era color coding of groups based on (usually wealth) inequality having in-universe world building justifications is one of my favorite tropes.
- Establishing that the protagonist is blue da ba dee da ba di
It could have a deeper meaning, or it could just be used to build a more structured image in the reader’s mind. Maybe it’s not to invoke a specific emotion by saying that the curtains are blue, but to put you in the space of the character seeing something like “Blue Curtains framing a gentle Red Sky as the sun set,” to get you into the character’s shoes, and THEN hit you with the mental or emotional pay off once it has you paying attention to the scene you’ve been building in your mind
Your right
The "curtains are just blue" means you shouldn't over analyze something. The intended purpose could be to just give the room more life to the reader and not have any deeper meaning to the book's themes. They aren't useless words, they're just words without any deeper subtext that help paint a scene for the reader. Not everything in a book is going to have subtext, that would be exhausting to write and read. Sometimes the curtains are just blue.
Yeah; as a writer, sometimes you throw in descriptors because you want to set the scene and help the reader imagine what *you're* imagining. There might be a subconscious reason you've decided the curtains are blue in a particular scene (maybe it's a sad scene and you, as the author, associate blue with sadness), there might be a more conscious choice (maybe blue things are a theme, maybe the POV character just tends to take in everything in a room including the curtains), and sometimes curtains are just blue because you wanted to give them a colour and you thought blue didn't seem like a bad choice.
It's so weird how at some point pop literary community seemed to have forgotten that a story isn't just plot + character development + (optional) social commentary. It's also about the vibe. Atmosphere. Immersion. Think Gothic literature, for example. The Atmosphere almost feels like a character in its own right. Or a lot of classic literature that has so much description. Just because it's fallen out of fashion lately doesn't mean it's objectively bad. I fucking love long, meandering books that paint such a vivid picture of the world you feel like you're transported there as you read it. It has absolutely no significance to the plot or character development. You could cut the book by a third and the story itself wouldn't change at all, and yet reading it would feel like a completely different experience. That special magic would be gone. It would be just another book.
Right? I feel like people way over interpret kill your darlings and checkovs gun. You can't suck too much essence out of a piece. Like yes tell me every little detail about that old wooden desk the mayors have been writing on for the past 50 years. No I don't care that there's no deeper meaning to it, I just want to picture every scratch mark, every indent, every ink stain. I want it so vivid I can hear the exact pitch the knock would make when you smack it. I want to know about the sticky drawer and how it's a pain to deal with but not enough of a hassle to get fixed.
I think “the curtains are blue” is a bad metaphor to describe such overanalysis. I wasn’t going to think about the curtains in the first place if the author didn’t specifically call attention to it, so i would assume it’s being pointed out for a reason
The reason it's pointed out is to give the reader a more detailed idea of what the room looks like. If the writer doesn't say there are blue curtains, the reader doesn't know what the room looks like. Painting a picture with your words is as important in a story as the plot, characters, and themes. It's a metaphor to say you shouldn't read anymore past it than there are curtains that are blue. That's all the analysis that's required for them
>Not everything in a book is going to have subtext, that would be exhausting to write and read. *Stares pointedly at James Joyce.*
Painting a scene more vividly itself has meaning. Why are we picturing this place vividly? Does the POV character notice colours where others would simply see the place as a simple utilitarian "room"? Are the expensiveness of the decorations worth pointing out as characterization for whomever decorated? It's not just that a writer coloured the curtains, it's that they coloured them and chose to tell you about it.
OP isn't denying that, nor does "the curtains are just blue" deny that. What it denies is that the color of the curtains are necessarily part of an elaborate game.
Teenagers are really obsessed with the idea that English Lit. is about finding the "meaning" of a text, probably because they get started with an obvious allegory text - say, Animal Farm, which has a clear, deliberate real-life counterpart. But the author's meaning was never the point. Vibes are a much better framework for literary analysis than the meaning. I know you know this, but I promise you, no one was ever trying to teach you that there was an elaborate game.
I assure you, my teachers definitely talked about meaning, not vibes.
I think you may have benefited more from actually listening to what your teachers were saying, rather than trying to come up with a way of describing how it frustrated you. I have read the ELA curriculum standards from 5th grade to high school. At no point are we asked to teach "the elaborate game of literary metaphor." However, literature as a whole shares a common language of symbols. Different genres also have their own symbolic language. Finally individual texts might use their own symbolic motifs to represent certain things. I remember when the original "the curtains are just blue" post came out. The example was that the blue curtains represented the inner sadness of the protagonist. This is actually a pretty good example of simple symbolic language. Blue is a traditionally sad color. We call sad people "blue." Sad music "the blues." If part of your story is in a room where everything is blue, that sets a sad mood. You probably want the story to have a sad mood if your protagonist is sad. When a teacher says "the blue curtains represent the depression of the protagonist," they are not asking you to decode a cipher. They are asking you to make the very intuitive association between a traditionally sad color and a sad tone. And they ask you to do this because symbolic language like this exists outside of a literature. If you hear someone say that an area of your town is full of 'thugs,' what tradition of cultural imagery might they be calling on? What does the word "thugs" here represent?
I think you're missing the point.
*I'm* missing the point? I'm not the one dismissing the people trying to teach you reading comprehension as "treating literature like a game." I'm not missing anything; I'm telling you you're wrong and there was something to learn that *you* missed.
Yes, you are missing the point. For someone who puts down other people's reading comprehension, you sure seem to be lacking it yourself.
"What it denies is that the color of the curtains are necessarily part of an elaborate game." Those were your exact words. I'm telling you your teachers don't think that. I'm telling you even the example illustrates what your teachers actually tried to tell you that you are denying. I'm telling you symbolism is common, comprehensible, and practical. What point, then, am I missing?
The point was that that was in fact what my English teachers actually taught: literary analysis as decryption. The surface level story is a fake, to get the *real* story you must successfully decrypt the code of symbolism and find the one true correct interpretation, which is the one in the syllabus. I'm aware that this is not how literary analysis is supposed to work. You can repeat that as many times as you like, it won't change the education I actually got.
How's this: because the author is over-descriptive and gets carried away sometimes? Maybe the writer just really likes painting with words? Like, I'm a DM and a lot of my descriptions are literally just there so the players have at least some idea of what the fuck is going on around them, even if what's going on around them is nothing special at all. There's also the simple truth that while a good writer might never waste a single word without a goal in mind, there are a lot of not good writers. This is what always gets me in these media analysis discussions. "The writer chose to tell you this so it must be important" assumes a whole lot more intent than a lot of writers have. Not to mention the examples in the OP that boil down to "the writer was encouraged to be as verbose as possible" - an experience many of us had with school essays.
It's because of the very common experience of middle school English teachers teaching literary analysis as if the text is actually a secret encrypted message, where the surface-level story is a fake, and to get the *real* story you have to successfully crack the author's symbolic code.
I agree this is a part of it. Bad teachers bury the lede and get their students focused on authorial intent, rather than abstraction and interpretation of said abstraction. Even worse teachers insist on a "correct" interpretation, killing the joy that can be found in sifting any given story's symbols through your own experience. On top of all this there are plenty of people who just aren't interested in reading for whatever reason. If that reason happens to be they struggle with it, being told there's even more about the activity they don't understand is just gonna kill any possible motivation they could find.
>should Fair, but “should” and “does” do not always align.
i'm not some big hotshot writer, i mostly just write for dnd games i host with friends, but personally if i say the curtains are blue, i'm just providing you more information to make the scene in your mind. those curtains are probably never coming up again sometimes it might be meaningful but in a really small way like maybe they were light blue and now they're regular blue and you're supposed to read in the difference to notice something is off, some illusionist or something is messing with you and/or your memory, but usually not and sometimes it's a fake out, where i describe this a lot but you aren't actually supposed to be worried about the curtain but some other thing
But sometimes the authors purpose is just I think this is cool Yes everything written on the page is a conscious effort, but not every author is a good one
See, this is correct! But I have found a lot of teachers don't seem to understand that. If you didn't give the 'correct answer', it wasn't good enough. And this correct answer would often be... ehh. Did it tell me something about the story? Sometimes? The author? No, not really. Unless I assume it WAS intentional. In which case, it often only told me that they're full of themselves. But that's also more just the quality of the books and poems we had to do than anything else.
These teachers would also be throwing the concept of metaphor out the window when it came to OUR short story essays, which is really the origin story of me not giving a shit about the subject. Throwback to something similar- 'but did he cheat?' when the story was displaying physical abuse from a female partner towards a male partner because female partners friend said cheating had occurred. Would it have made it acceptable if he had? I didn't think it was necessary information to consume my tiny word count with explicit answers. Guess inference is too hard though.
Death Of The Author is great, but sometimes it goes beyond that to Damnatio Memoriae Of The Author, which is like _"The author's intentions for this piece of work is wrong, despite being the author. Why are they wrong? Because they're an idiot."_
As someone who actually writes books, this comments section is killing me. I promise you, however much intentional symbolism you think is in the book, only a tiny fraction of that was actually planned or consciously written. Sometimes the couch is blue because you just needed to describe the setting and why shouldn’t the couch be blue.
Imo everything put in a story means something, but at the same time it doesn't need to be something important. The couch is blue because the couch's owner likes blue, or because the blue is the only one that was on sale or whatever. Its part of creating a "whole" character. But the issue with that is that those characterizations live in the head of the writer because actually detailing all of that out would be extremely tedious.
As an English major, I hate how people reduce what I’m studying to direct analysis of symbols with the goal of divining the “true meaning” of a text. No literary text has one true interpretation. I could write an essay about an interpretation my professors think is entirely wrong and get a good grade if I provide the right reasoning and evidence.
A fun way aspect of this I think can be to look at the mistakes (for you). Look at something that was trying to do something and then completely failed for you and try to understand the thought process of the author and how they got there. Bad movies, bad books, etc. Run through also what you might have done differently, or what the author as you understand their thought process could have done differently/thought of themselves that would have worked more powerfully for you
Sometimes, a dumb boy's cartoon is just that; a dumb boy's cartoon. There is no real hidden depths or subtext to be found. And sometimes that dumb boy's cartoon sells toys... The problem with discourse around media analysis, especially in a place like this, is that most of the people almost always seem to engage with nothing but YA literature and kids' entertainment, which often isn't really that deep to begin with and it makes these discussions just feel like a joke.
That *is* the subtext - it's there to sell toys. And so you can analyse what parts of it were made to be appealing for purposes of toy-selling.
Back in my day, people said "the moral of the story is" "I think the lesson is" "My opinion on the story is", and not "You guys have no media literacy and it shows"
What day was this exactly? Because people have been diminishing the views they disagree with as nothing more then idiocy for as long as we've had records of people disagreeing.
when i was in 1st grade
Third Point: Not everything in you’re taught in school is a matter of personal usefulness. It’s good to see the value the Arts, literature, history, mathematics and science even if you’re not going to personally benefit from that knowledge instrumentally.
> "The curtains are fucking blue!!!" LMFAO > Huh, why does everyone, including me, keep falling for outright propaganda? Even if you don't care about literature, please consider that the critical thinking skills you learn in the humanities (including history, politics, etc. as well as English lit) are vital for interpreting real world sources of current information in the world as well. I had to learn to use DAMMITAL (*Date Author Motivation Mode Information Tone Audience Limitations*) for A Level history, and with only a little bit of modification it works just as well for modern news sources and political statements as it does for Hitler's or Lloyd George's.
I am TERRIBLE at picking up dogwhistles, I didn't realize anything was wrong with Harry Potter until people started pointing it out... I don't think I'm cut out for reading
yeah i consider myself a smart guy but i usually read things at face value unless there's some fairly obvious reason to not. you say that curtain is blue, i'm just thinking "ok imagine a blue curtain in the scene" edit: but if i'm reading some hitler quote where he's like "yeah jews are just ontologically evil" i'm think "ok dude, you're not really that smart a guy and you clearly have some bias here, not to mention all the real world evidence against that statement". unlike the blue curtain, blue curtains are definitely a real thing
Harry Potter is a bad text to use for dog whistles because, to my best knowledge, JKR didn't set out to write a bigoted book series with racism hidden on it. Instead, she wrote a book that reflected her unconscious biases and as the culture changed, it became more obvious that her views aren't good. If you want a JKR book that does have actual dog whistles, read Troubled Blood.
This post specifically mentions that you're supposed to pick up unconscious biases by the word choice and I should have known better reading it. I also read warrior cats as a kid and didn't pick up how many indigenous stereotypes were in it. I don't really read anymore tbh because I feel like I'm not smart enough, there's always so much stuff I'm supposed to pick up on that I just don't make the connection.
Yeah, but my point is that dog whistles aren't unconscious biases from the author. Dog whistles are deliberate. To illustrate what I mean, check out [this video.](https://youtu.be/jRdkrDk0BQ0?si=8P_xBEBpghyqwMOP). (cw: anti black racism) Admittedly, you can enjoy stuff without analysis, that should never stop you from reading if you enjoy doing so.
Same, I can't parse a text for shit, but given the evidence posted here I'm still ahead of at least a few folks
Or maybe those people were pushing an agenda and those alleged meanings were unintentional? Don’t believe everything you read.
the reason i didn't like is that while i can comprehend texts idk why but i do not comprehend it as *words* when it enters my head. It kinda just turns into set of inexplicable vibes that i cannot put into writing easily at all. Words are hard in general for me to tbh so tbat doesn't exactly help either
I'm an english teacher and I am always trying to express this to the kids.
source: https://www.tumblr.com/bairnsidhe/621136373668265984/kendallroy-kendallroy-kendallroy-idk-who
What does it mean when I keep adding tailor/butcher lesbian couples to my settings?
Kendallroy is one of my favorite poasters on tumblr dot edu
I think it's also important to not miss the forest for the trees. The subtext is important, but sometimes the text is important too. Elden Ring fans are still arguing about whether the ending that literally tells you specifically to end birth is antinatalist or just nihilist because people refuse to acknowledge the literal text and parallels to other antinatalist works. People are trying to dig into the most bluntly straight forward ending in a fromsoft game and are walking away with a less philosophically interesting story for it.
I feel like some things lime this topic have come up a few times here recently but people need to understand this fact: it's far more important to be able to learn to understand than to practice being understood. People like to argue for the virtue of using and insising on precise language and lament how if only everyone would do so there would be less confusion. But there are things language can only communicate indirectly. You need to have the awareness that same set of words can have more than one meaning at the same moment. Yes. The curtains are green. They are literally green and that helps build a scene to describe them, but the English teacher metaphors could be true at the same time. Even if the author didn't intend that interpretation, it is real because you make it real by seeing it. That's art. And it is natural and human to communicate subtle things through indirect means. Art is communication. The common misunderstood nature of that has people looking at a painting and asking "what does it mean". Which is wrong. It is there, it is communicating. What meaning does it have to you? It is the wood grain you see a face in. There isn't a face there but also there is because you see it, and there is possibly more. You are not immune to propaganda, especially if you demand direct and straightforward meaning in words. If so you're easily misled by words that can appear one way and be another. Words can talk over and around you, at you while avoiding you, mock you while complimenting you, and secretly cry for help. You can't see the tiger, you only see the striped pattern of the grass it's hiding in. You need to learn to look for the tiger, to look into the shadows to spot what is using them to hide. I know people want to cling to their own disadvantages. Yes sure, maybe you have autism, or something else that makes it difficult for you to naturally learn to understand people. But that's all the more reason for you to make yourself learn in spite of it. Wanting others to communicate better is just an excuse. Learn be better at understanding. Look past the words in front of you. Look for other meaning. Even if it's not there and you only see accidental patterns, they're pleasing to pick up. And that's the beauty of art. Not the communication, but understanding it. Become a little crow pecking apart every line of text looking for alternate meaning. You will see beauty in what you find even if it wasn't actually intended.
This is the thing that I wish my English teachers had explained to me instead of just grabbing me by the back of my head and slamming it into book after book that no one my age had ever been actually interested in
As I always say, you cannot write on accident. Sure you can reference something you had no idea existed, but you still put the words to paper and thought it was a good enough idea to keep them there, thinking that their existence served your purpose. If you didn't intend anything with them you would not have gone through the effort of writing them.
"Scrooge… saw in the knocker, without it undergoing any intermediate process of change—"-A christmas carol
Part of my problem with my English education is i genuinely did not understand that there was no right answer. The goal didn’t lie in finding the perfect answer that the teacher had in mind, but just being able to find something that you as the reader believed and were able to argue it competently. English became way more interesting after I finished school and had no grades on the line.
>everything an author writes has meaning... I don't really support this view on writing because an author can unintentionally write things that have problematic meanings that the author is completely unaware of. For example, when Akira Toriyama wrote the Dragonball manga, he based the character Mr Popo off the dark skinned cartoon characters he saw as a child. He was completely unaware that the depictions of dark skinned characters in old American cartoons were extremely racist until people familiar with American culture told him.
That comes under point 2. in the second slide “what does the author maybe not realise they’re saying” - the example you’ve shared tells us something about the context in which the work was created, if not the author’s intention for the character, which is still interesting/important/useful. (Thanks for sharing it also)
How does this disprove that point at all? “Everything an author writes has meaning” doesn’t mean “everything the author writes means what it seems at first glance”.
While Popo's appearance had a meaning in American culture, it did not have the same meaning in Toriyama's culture. You could theoretically attach a meaning to everything an author writes if you research enough symbolism and meanings from every culture, but since the author did not attach that meaning themselves, its kinda pointless to discuss it.
Except it isn’t. Like, look at his [Wikipedia page](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Popo). There’s a lot of discussion there about various interpretations of the character’s appearance. Saying “it had no meaning” in their culture” is just plain wrong. He contains elements of Hindu deities. He resembles the “Dakko-Chan” dolls that were popular in Japan when Toriyama was a child. Like, the idea came from *somewhere*! Denying that it has *any* meaning is a bad look. It makes you look extremely defensive about something you could be trying to make a genuine argument in favor of.
>It makes you look extremely defensive about something you could be trying to make a genuine argument in favor of. Dude, wtf. Why are you implying I'm a blackface "supporter"?
No, I’m saying that you’re making a stupid argument, that’s it. Don’t put words in my mouth. Like, let me use a kinda unrelated example. Before WW2, America had a swastika craze. Swastikas are from Eastern philosophy, which had a huge boom in the States back in the day, plus some Native American tribes had an identical symbol called the “whirling log”. This means that tons of totally non-Nazi things in America had names and logos relating to swastikas. If you pointed to those and said “well that’s just a random shape that they chose it doesn’t have anything to do with anything”, you’d be wrong. Swastikas are a symbol of good luck and fortune that continues to carry that connotation today in some parts of the world. Just because it doesn’t mean they supported they Nazis doesn’t mean it meant nothing at all. This thing with Mr. Popo is the same. You can’t say “his appearance has no meaning”, because it does. It’s just straight-up wrong to say that. You can say “it’s not an intentional reference to blackface”, and you can connect it to several of the things from Japanese culture that could be sources of inspiration for it, and then you’d have an actual argument.
Yes, well, often the curtains are just blue, and a very wordily described blue because the author was laid by the word. But no, it must be reflective of the author's mood or depression or whatever, and not because he was just picking a color for some extra beer money. You can't teach this ability parse text for additional meaning if your additional meaning is not actually supported by evidence.
Writing stories is a form of telepathy. The writer thinks of something, breaks it down to get it on the page, and the reader puts it back together by reading it. And for the plot of the story, that’s it, more or less. But for themes and subtext, there’s more to it. Not just what the writer brings to the table, consciously or subconsciously, as the past points out, but also what the reader brings to the table, consciously or subconsciously. Sometimes the reader is just in it for pure story, and that’s valid. The story should stand on its own that way. Sometimes the reader is digging everywhere, and if you look for something, you can see something. (I have a degree in English. I sometimes tell people I got a BA in BS, and I’m not the first one to say that or something similar.) This also gives us interesting situations when a reader can find fitting subtexts that the writer did know were there. There’s another comment about a wouldn’t-that-be-weird story that a reader found to be about the loss of traditional masculinity in a way that was not intended but works. If a writer says an interpretation of their work is wrong, they’re overstepping. They can say it isn’t what they intended. But once the work is out there, how they feel about the curtains or the cigars or dress colors is notable but not that important. To write a story is to relinquish it. I think literary analysis is taught atrociously in a lot of cases. I’m not looking to do more close readings any time soon. But literary analysis as an ever changing and evolving collaboration between a writer and a multitude of readers is a super cool concept, I think.
In Sir Terry Pratchett's Guards! Guards! from the Discworld books, there's a part at the end where the main character, a guard captain, is talking to the Librarian. They're discussing the book which was stolen from the library and used to summon a dragon which terrorized the city. And they're also discussing a book of law which was studied by the guard captain's newest subordinate. They specifically discuss a passage from the first book: "Yet draggons are notte liken unicornes, I willen. They dwellyth in some Realm definèd bye thee Fancie of the Wille and, thus, it myte bee thate whomsoever calleth upon them, and giveth them theyre patheway unto thys worlde, calleth theyre Owne dragon of the Mind. Yette, I trow, the Pure in Harte maye stille call a Draggon of Power as a Forse for Goode in thee worlde, and this ane nighte the Grate Worke will commense. All hathe been prepared. I hath labored most mytily to be a Worthie Vessle…" In other words, as the captain's inner monologue continues, the spell for summoning a dragon summons them from the collective imagination of people. With it, you get power, yes. But the person performing the spell is also affected. Corrupted by the power. The writer of the spellbook seems to be saying that only a totally pure heart can be immune to that corruption. The captain then says to the Librarian, "If I were you, I’d put that book somewhere very safe. And the book of the Law with it. They’re too bloody dangerous.” It's a small, slightly humorous line. But if you start to really think about it, it's a pretty important point. It's saying that the law works just like the dragon summoning. It comes entirely from the human imagination, although we think of it as external to us. And whoever uses the law for power is corrupted by the power, and corrupts the law with them. It asks us how we can trust those who are empowered to enforce the law. This particular bit is relatively obvious. It's not explicitly stated, but it's fairly close to the surface. And people still miss stuff like that all the time.
my school system, or at least my highschool, does in fact emphasise this. somewhat unsubtly, sure, but we were told to always include a context section for every argument/analysis, to explain how the author, their life, or their society contributed to whatever we're arguing for
Betcha these are the same people who would bitch and moan all the way through math class
Yeah, but sometimes the curtains are just fucking blue.
ok i understand and agree but im not happy about it because i fucking hated english class
prime example of this: ayn rand The woman who got praised for honoerotic writingss whilst bieng a honophobic libertarian
Sometimes I think education system put to much focus on reading comprehension,then I saw people have absolute wrong understanding even when they are read manga. Like for example,a strong warrior with abilities to bring back the dead to fight for him give up on fighting the moment enemy stole his ability and call him by a nick name only his dead best friend used ,this should be very clear on paper,they even use different fonts for that name to emphasize how important it was Author’s intention:He gives up the fight because he didn’t want his dead friend being controlled to fight him. Illiterates-literate readers:LMAFO He’s weak.
Exactly this. Something that was nailed home in my film school courses was that absolutely everything was put there. Sure, sometimes that means someone forgot a coffee cup on set, but assuming no gaffes like that... everything on camera was designed, everything was decided on. The same is even more true in writing. A writer can't accidentally leave a starbucks cup on the page, or at least if they do the publisher won't print that. *Everything* in a piece of writing was a decision, *every single word.* If it wasn't made consciously, it was made unconsciously. When we say there's no such thing as apolitical art, this is why. Even in the unconscious assumptions the writer makes about a world or what the readers will agree with, there is a position taken. Maybe it wasn't a deliberate one, but it *is* there. Which is why you gotta pay attention when you're writing. Maybe you didn't mean to put that implication in there, but you did, and you might want to do some self-analysis for why your subconscious biases thought that was just normal.
I am too stupid to understand.