I have been in countless English and American Lit. classes, where the main focus is reading something, then analyzing it to death, and finding things phrased as “deeper meanings”, “new paradigms”, or “symbolism”. Am I the only one of the opinion that a large amount of literature isn’t any deeper than the text on the page? Does anyone consider it even remotely possible that many english teachers are employed on the basis of being able to generate conclusions?
Well, in some cases.
Personally, I think a lot of times a spade is just a spade. People write novels/stories that become popular and generate a lot of attention, and these eventually become “good” books. And when people discuss it, come to conclusions, and analyze it, a lot of things like symbolism/etc. can be found. The writer may not have necessarily intended it, but if you look hard, you can probably find this kind of stuff in any book. That’s the beauty of English- you can write an essay/paper on anything, so long as you can support it with evidence.
Though to be fair, I don’t think English teachers are just hired to create conclusions. There is a lot of good to be found in analyzing these books- stimulating intelligent thought and whatnot.
When these books were first being read, I doubt they were analyzed to death. People read Charles Dickens and went to Shakespeare’s plays for entertainment. I mean, we don’t analyze The Simpsons (well…except for those of us frequenting snpp.com), or if we did, it would be out of entertainment. In a few years, books that we don’t consider classic or literature will probably get slapped down on the dissecting board of English classes and new parallels will be created and torn down.
Point well taken, but there are a few considerations. When you mentioned that anyone could find symbolism or what have you in just about everything, i agree. But you can find symbolism in everything. The thing that bothers me is when a writer has no intention of providing symbolism in their works, and yet this professors of deeper thought, ie literature, insist on its existence, and how we can “learn” from it. But considering it wasn’t ever applied as such by its creator, that leaves considerable doubt to the ability for one to learn from the symbolism found therein…
Its just something that has always bothered me about literature. I love a good book as much as the next guy, sometimes more, but i feel that looking to deeply sometimes overshoots magnifying its importance, but rather it destroys the elements of the literature.
Its a little like taking math for the sole purpose of being able to do higher level math. You get high enough, and there is no feasible application for it. The same can apply in literature, specifically in relation to the implications of symbolism created or “found” by any particular reader.
I think that each of the three terms you’re employing - “deeper meanings,” “new paradigms,” and “symbolism” have slightly different meanings.
Symbolism, for one, usually refers to a device used intentionally by the author to convey a certain meaning. The only problem, of course, is that unless the author is taking you page by page (or line by line, in the case of poetry) through his/her text, then much of the interpretation is left up to whomever is studying it, be it the professor or the student. No doubt, some works are highly symbolic; others, like Bridget Jones’ Diary , probably aren’t. But then it’s never always quite clear. I’d argue that there’s certain times where a particular form of symbolism is so ingrained in a culture that an author unknowingly employs it to make a certain point. Or, an author may be thinking along certain symbolic lines, using “metaphor A” and “metaphor B” to make his/her point, and unconsciously also slip in “metaphor C” as well. The author’s pen just works that way sometimes.
“Deeper meanings” seem to refer to the underlying philosophies of a text. They’re not necessarily symbolic, though they can be. On a real basic level, they’d refer to the moral of a tale, like you have in Aesop’s fables, for example. Except they’re not always stated so blatantly, so professors are employed to look for them and interpret them.
“New paradigms”, on the other hand, could quite easily be reflected in a relatively simple, “popular” novel. An unsymbolic work can easily reflect new perceptions, cultural attitudes, values, concepts, etcetera, that make it worth studying. A lot of colonial and post-colonial research is undertaken with this goal in mind: to understand and express ways of thinking about or viewing the world that had previously never really been given much consideration. I personally prefer this type of research to “metaphor hunting,” which many first and second-year university English classes do, because you get to dabble in sociology, history, religious studies, and all those other disciplines that anchor the study of literature to the real world.
So, in an extremely roundabout way, I’d say that yes, by and large English teachers and professors are employed to make conclusions. Ideally, they’ve studied enough similar literature from that era, or of that genre, so that their conclusions are not too off-base. And you can always take something away from a text that’s deeper than simply the “words on the page” (by which I’m guessing you mean the plot) because each text reveals an author’s (or a culture’s) attitudes towards other cultural objects, at the very least.
Sorry if I lapsed into Anglo-babble there… 
Hmm. Good question. Stccrd, it sounds as if you’ve been in too many classes in which the teacher has made a claim for meaning without backing it up with evidence. It’s a horrible analogy but sometimes analysing a poem or novel or whatever is like doing an archaeological dig: you find some remnants of meaning, link them to what you already know, put some ideas together and come to a conclusion. And, like in archaeology, some speculation is inevitable. But you need evidence.
I think talking about ‘deeper meanings’ is complicating the issue, since it’s not a question of any meaning being ‘deeper’, ie, more fundamental, more basic, more buried, or more repressed, or so on. It’s just than in most people’s minds (particularly good authors and poets, and that’s why good novels or poems are subject to more analysis than bad ones) there are several things going on, several personal and political belief systems, ideologies, etc, and it’s only fair and just to look at all of them. The reason why we do a lot of analysis in recent times is because we’re able to look at these belief systems from a distance and it’s easier to examine them in full and draw conclusions. For example, looking at Dickens novels, we find evidence that he drew his female characters as domestic angels, more than once. We look at other novels and the politics of the time and find that this was a common belief. Going back to Dickens we can see what he does with this belief and make conclusions about his novels.
Another reason why there’s been a lot of analysis in this century and the last is the emergence of new theories and belief systems such as Marxism, psychoanalysis and feminism. This is where it gets a bit dodgy and where people complain that meanings are being pulled out of thin air. Since (for example) Charlotte Bronte never heard of Freud, how can her characters represent the Super-Ego? One way to explain this is to say that the author felt something subconsciously that he or she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, reveal on the page. There is loads of evidence for this – for example Jane Eyre has a vast undercurrent of feminism which it’s clear Bronte couldn’t reveal in a patriarchal Victorian society.
Another reason (I’ll shut up soon) why analysing text is important and useful is how it reveals your OWN belief system and ideology. I mentioned Bronte cos I’m a feminist, and that’s important to me. When I read Jane Eyre I automatically favour the feminist bits about the rest. Someone from the West Indies will notice what the novel says about the colonies. It’s a cliché to say that you find out as much about yourself as the author when you read a book, but it’s also true. One of the good things about an English Lit degree is the amount of self-inspection it requires.
Anyway, in short: you’re wrong; plenty of literature has loads of different meanings, it’s useful to examine them, good English teachers should indicate this to you, and if they don’t I’ll tell them off for you.
Not every book has deep meaning (though the classics are more likely to), and abscribing meaning to a text has to be done with care. A good teacher can help you see things in a text that you might have missed; a bad one will string together misperceptions to fit into his own prejudices and/or show off his own self-perceived cleverness.
Clearest example: the “Wizard of Oz as allegory for Bryan Campaign” myth. Once you inject the fact that Baum was a McKinley supporter, the entire structure falls apart. Indeed, there are many pronouncements about a book that you cannot make in a vacuum (i.e., just by reading the text) – the author’s background and the background of the times have to be searched to see if there is any basis to back up the speculation derived from the text.
Similarly, not everything in a book is symbolism. Consider Flannery O’Connor. In “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” the Misfit wears a black hat. Someone once tried to tell her that that was symbolic (he was pretty much a bad guy). O’Connor refused to accept that. The Misfit wore a black hat simply because people of his social class wore black hats. To wear anything else would be a betrayal of the character, and to draw a conclusion from it is unwise. In one Master’s level class I was in, we used “The Misfit’s black hat” as shorthand for overanalysing a text.
(There was also an incident where some college English class thought the entire story was a wish-fulfillment fantasy on the part of the father. They wrote to O’Connor about it, and she blasted them for the “appalling” tendency of teaching a text could mean anything you want as long as you can justify it – one of the common principles of upper level English teaching.)
Now, there are works that do benefit from a discussion of symbols. I recall a professor talking about Ellison’s “Invisible Man.” I had like the book the first time out, but his discussion of the symbols (and he didn’t have to stretch to find them), made me realize its greatness.
Ultimately, it boils down to whoever’s teaching. The best advice, though, is to remember the Misfit’s black hat and take any symbols with a grain of salt.
Well no. Well, kind of. The best kind of teacher (I’m not one, thank God) will direct his or her students to the student’s own interpretation of the text. This was what New Criticism was meant to be all about – reading a piece of text with no presuppositions, no suggestions, no idea about the author or the time period – just the text. Problem is, this still presupposes there ARE meanings to be gleaned from the text. I imagine most teachers don’t have time to do this, so have to impress upon their students the most well known and accepted meaning each time, and go on to the next one. these meanings won’t necessarily be faddy or personal, then.
quote:
Ultimately, it boils down to whoever’s teaching.
I agree with that statement wholeheartedly. I have had a teacher or two that have insisited there are particular meanings to be drawn, and none other can be supported. I mean no disrespect to anyone who is employed in an area dedicated to Literature.
In the movie “Finding Forrester” there is a bit that got me thinking about all this. Of course, we can take into account the hollywood aspects of the movie that tend to enlarge and magnify ideas and events, but one scene caught my attention. It is where William Forrester and Jamal are talking about his famous book, and he mentions that he never wrote again partially due to the fact that people kept trying to say what he “really meant” by it and all this stuff, and i said to myself, maybe quite a few writers don’t write to introduce new ideas, symbolism, etc.
Lots of good comments. I like your story about O’Connor blasting a class for putting an interpretation on her writing, RealityChuck.
A similar story is told about C.S. Lewis, interviewed towards the end of his career. The reporter asked which of all the many people who had reviewed and critiqued his books over the years understood the best, he answered. “None were even close.”
I’ve three little things:
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For somebody who genuinely loves a work of fiction, sometimes analysis is the only way they have to keep their appreciation for the work alive. That doesn’t necessarily make their observations significant or worthwhile for someone else, tho.
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I was an English major who quit because I just couldn’t stomach critic’s opinions being treated “deep truth”. Or any truth at all. I began to feel like I was lying, writing papers. From my perspective, the foundation of literary criticism was too shaky.
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A good writer can’t keep truth out of their stories. Intelligent readers can’t avoid seeing parallels to their own experiences. So there must be some potential for truth in literary criticism.
I’m surprised that nobody has mentioned postcolonialism/poststructuralism with regard to the study of English literature (or the study of anything in the humanities for that matter.) If you think normal symbolism is a stretch, wait until you read novels trying to look for symbolism of oppression and the like. God, I hate being an English major.
But my two cents on the topics at hand. I think literature is a difficult subject to study in a quantifiable way. You can’t ask “what is this story about?” on a test, simply because that’s an easy question. I’ve found that the professors who try to link texts from similar time periods, rather than explore the symbolism inside every work, to be most interesting. The philosophical views of the predecessors and how they affected the work(s) in question fits more into my view of how literature should be taught.
I raised this to one of my own professors out of personal aggravation, after sitting through a 3-hour lecture about how “Jaws,” through it’s symbolism, was a pro-rape, pro-Reagan, pro-military film. (It’s not just English majors reading too much into things, I assure you.) The hell…?
His response was that there is a “universal subconscious that these symbols play to. Even if the author didn’t consciously intend to insert these deeper meanings, he/she is also tapped into this universal subconscious and that is what dictated his/her symbolism.”
I’m not sure if I buy into that or not–it seems like the teacher version of “Because I say so!” But anything that makes books or movies or plays more interesting and intellectually engaging is certainly worthwhile.
I have to say I agree with this. A good writer does so much on instinct - even a conciously intellectual writer, who refutes that his/her work is anything but an exercise in ideas e.g Martin Amis, can only produce a work to keep people interested if it holds certain universal truths (that feeling of recognition you get within a text, an moment or a thought that ‘feels right’ to you). A writer’s talent does not simply lie in the words on the page… hmm, how to illustrate this?
Take the Short Story genre. It is as much about what you as a writer leave out, the stuff ‘between-the-lines’, as it is about what you put down on the page. The process of reading becomes an interaction between the author and the reader, the reader taking an active creative role. If the writer leaves no work to do for the reader, there is no interplay there and the text is dull, lifeless. A good, instinctual writer doesn’t have to think about where to end a story, or about the amount of detail to use. It’s a process of what feels right, about letting yourself go, working from your subconcious but in a concious manner. If you’ve been successful, you will have created a text which engages on more levels than you were attempting. A good story will be seen by many people in as many different ways but still hold enough ‘Universal Truths’ to maintain the text’s credibility, and so continue to have life beyond a purely-contemporary reading.
This is why it is not anachronistic to take a Feminist (or even Post-Feminist) viewpoint on a text written in the 1700s, for example. Regardless of the socio-political position of women in the text’s contemporary world, women were still very much the same gender as they are now (well, last time I looked they were). So, irregardless of the fact that Feminism as we know it did not exist then, the ideas behind the theory still apply. A static text which can only be read as the author intended it to be read, which has no life outside of the words on the page, won’t hold the reader’s interest for long as it simply won’t apply to the reader’s world enough to make the world within the text believable and engaging. But an effective text, which taps into all kinds of ideas and thoughts that the writer was unaware of, will have subtlety, honesty and intertextuality, making it a good read for non-contemporaries. Even when Society has moved on from the place and time the author was working in, the text can still hold tentative future-echoes of the thinking behind a theory - Although Charlotte Bronte had never heard of Freud, the humanity behind Freud’s theory of the Super-Ego was already in place.
Having said that, one of my friends at university aced a final-year paper by arguing that King Lear’s madness was caused by the fact he was a woman going through the menopause. His argument and evidence were utterly convincing. If you look hard enough, you can back almost any conclusions you wish to make.
partly_warmer writes:
> A similar story is told about C.S. Lewis, interviewed towards the
> end of his career. The reporter asked which of all the many
> people who had reviewed and critiqued his books over the
> years understood the best, he answered. “None were even
> close.”
Could you give me a citation here? I know C. S. Lewis’s works very well, and I’ve read a great deal of the writings about Lewis, but I’ve never heard that story. It doesn’t sound to me like something that he would say. I think I can say, in fact, that there was no point toward the end of his career at which Lewis was interviewed by a reporter asking such a general question. Furthermore, Lewis didn’t have that many people trying to interpret his work during his lifetime, so there’s no reason why he would want to make such a statement.
Stccrd writes:
> Its a little like taking math for the sole purpose of being able to
> do higher level math. You get high enough, and there is no
> feasible application for it.
I don’t think you know what you’re talking about here. There’s no area of math about which we can say that there’s no possible application of it. Often areas of math are developed which only decades later are shown to be of use. I don’t think you know enough about math to be able to say which areas are applicable.
Wendell, I’m about 70% sure it was in one of the forwards to The Screwtape Letters. Until you raised the issue, I was pretty sure I got the quote about right, because I remember going back to check it at some point. Also, it may have come from The Inklings or even from The Tolkien Letters.
I’d have to agree with you though, on reflection, it doesn’t strongly sound like something Lewis would say, unless the quotation really was addressing a specific aspect of his writing. Sorry to be a tease, I memorized that quote so many years ago, it’s a little tenuous, now. I would check, but I’m afraid the quote’s in a book I loaned, and didn’t get back.
This fellow sounds like he has major expertise, however: http://www.win.net/~pbramlett/
On even further reflection, though, it doesn’t really sound like something any author would say who wanted to avoid upsetting the press and his colleagues… I think that’s why it stuck out in my memory.
That’s interesting because I stopped studying for a different reason. I was going to do a PhD but changed my mind because the tools I was using seemed really flimsy. At the time I was getting into post-modernism and the idea that no interpretation is the ‘real’ one and that we can never properly criticise a text because the author is dead and so on and it’s all the reader’s personality leaking out on to the page. So this made me feel that any criticism I made wouldn’t really contribute anything or help me at all.
partly_warmer,
I’ve met Perry Bramlett. He knows a lot about Lewis, but he’s not the greatest expert, even among the people I’ve met. I think the best among those I’ve met is Joe Christopher at Tarleton State University, but I also think Diana Glyer at Azusa Pacific University knows Lewis’s stuff well.
If I have time to do some research, I’ll look up some stuff about about the accuracy of that story.
You’ve just committed the cardinal sin of English Literature majors. Do it again, and I’m sending over Sister Mary Impedimentia and her Ruler of Death to give you such a smack across the knuckles. You’ve been warned.