I had an English teacher that thought “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” was about suicide. Also “The Road Not Taken” was about suicide. I guess he though Robert Frost was a pretty depressed guy.
I read Last of the Mohicans…and Mark Twain was right.
(One of the relatively rare cases where the movie is vastly better than the book.)
I honestly believe that that’s the first pun that ever made me LOL.
Which is why there are so many denominations of Christianity.
Another, IMHO, is Master & Commander. I tried, really tried with the book. I found it boring and impenetrable in the same way as Last of the Mohicans.
I had an English teacher in both 8th and 9th grades who was obsessed with diagramming sentences. Each time we learned a new part of speech, we would be shown how to diagram a sentence as an example, complete with words on pedestals, in parentheses, reached by dotted lines and diagonal slashes. Fine. That’s OK as an example to promote better understanding of how the parts of a sentence affect each other, but…
Every single damn quiz, test, mid-term exam and final exam was diagramming sentences. Nothing but sentences you were expected to diagram. I found diagramming sentences to be a ridiculous waste of time and I never could remember what went where, so I routinely flunked.
I have made my living for many, many years through the spoken and written word, and have a better than average command of the English language…and I still couldn’t diagram a sentence if my life depended on it. She was just a bad, lazy teacher who did nothing but make her students dread the study of language rather than find enjoyment in it.
I have friends who keep urging me to read that series…but I keep hearing opinions such as yours, which counteract that urging.
(So I compromised and have been reading the “Alan Lewrie” novels by Dewey Lambdin. Age-of-Nelson British Navy sea yarns…with cussin’ and fuckin’ and low ribaldry. They say that Horatio Hornblower is for followers of literature, and the Aubrey-Maturin books are for intellectuals – but the Lewrie novels are for working-class soap-opera fans!)
I had to learn that. At the time, I got quite good at it, but as I haven’t actually done it in some forty years, I don’t think I could, today, if I had to. Damn, I can’t even keep object and subject straight.
Is it “The subject hit the object?” Or the other way around?
There is a third possible strategy, which is simply “saying something intelligent and interesting about the text”. I’ve never really understood the problem there.
(That said, this isn’t always what happens even at a professional level, to put it mildly. I *did *study literature at university level, and, well, hoo boy, if you’re good at bullshitting, you would have fit right in. The bullshit runs so thick in much of modern literary “theory” that you’d need a backhoe to dig it out.)
Huh? Who is doing that?
All our English teachers kept asking “compare and contrast” questions when every dictionary in the room defined compare as “to examine, looking for likenesses and differences”. I defy anyone in the U.S. to find a dictionary from the sixties or seventies having a different #1 definition.
Authors do have hidden meanings in their work, and it’s not unheard of that they discover it years later. Joe Haldeman wrote a story “More than the Sum of His Parts”* and years later asked a student of his what the meaning of the work was. The student said it was about Haldeman’s recovery from his injuries suffered in Vietnam. Haldeman never thought of it that way, but realized the student was right.
Myself, I wrote a story “The Transformation” that, years later, I realized was about my divorce. Again, I never thought it had anything to do with that when I was writing it.
Authors always put their concerns and assumptions in their work. So it’s not unreasonable to interpret the work and discover themes and assumptions, some put there deliberately, and others by accident. The trap to avoid is to assign meaning where it’s not actually there. In one English class, we called this “the Misfit’s Black Hat.”
*Working title: “Tom Swift and his Electric Penis.”
Did you mean “resolve?”
There’s a couple of problems with authorial intent when it comes to interpreting art. The biggest, of course, is that the vast majority of artists aren’t around anymore to tell us what they meant anymore. So that right there limits this approach to a narrow slice of artists who are either still living, or who produced significant autobiographical information during their lives.
It’s also important to consider the difference between what the art is saying, and what the artist is trying to say. If everyone who reads a book comes away thinking that it’s about X, but the author insists it’s really about Y, is that a failure in the audience, or the artists? One important aspect of this approach to interpreting art is recognizing the difference between what the artist meant to say, and what he’s actually saying.
As to the idea that subjective opinions don’t need rational arguments, I think that rather misses the point. The conclusion is not the part that’s interesting. It’s how you arrived at that conclusion that’s the point. If you want to argue that The Great Gatsby is all about gay sex, people are going to listen to you because they want to see how you get from point A to point B. What’s actually at point B is largely immaterial. And if your argument is trite, or ignores things stated plainly in the text, people aren’t going to be particularly impressed by your efforts.
“Compare and contrast” is a standard idiomatic phrase. It’s right in and of itself and doesn’t have to look to dictionaries for support. That’s how idioms work. They can use words in variant ways, or make no logical or grammatical sense, or fail to obey any ordinary laws. They’re working language in action.
I call B.S. on that. It’s just hypocrisy, pure and simple, for the teachers to preach “use your dictionary!!” day in and day out, and then say by example that what is in them doesn’t matter. And believe me, they preached the dictionary use hard.
Phrases are different than words. You should have been taught that. You should have been taught about idioms, too. I bet you were at some point. Are you sure the school’s to blame?
The English teachers did exactly what I say they did. I stand by my opinion and will not back down.
BTW, it’s properly “different from.”
I’m writing in casual style on this board, not for an academic paper. Except for adding a comma after “of course,” I don’t see any issue with the sentences (and even that can be stylistically defended), unless you dislike the parentheticals (or think that run-ons are simply long sentences. They are not.) Of course, those parentheticals are intended for the off-hand stream-of-conscious tone of the post. That’s how I talk in real life, and that’s what I try to replicate in writing.
That sounds about right. All my college professors liked the offbeat interpretations–as long as they were intellectually supported–and even my high school English teachers enjoyed it. I was a little bit of a game theorist about my approach to English papers. I figured most of my teachers were sick of reading the same thoughts over and over again, so my best bet for a good grade was to find a different take on the subject from my classmates. That approach served me well.
Neither of those are unheard of interpretations for those two poems, especially the first one. In fact, I’d say the suicide interpretation of “Stopping by Woods…” is pretty common. That said, that’s not how I personally interpret it, and, if the teacher was claiming that to be THE interpretation, that would be incorrect.
That was my issue with English classes, as well, and what made it so difficult for me. With subjects with clear right and wrong answers, it was easy to know what exactly you had to do to get a good grade. For example, in a related class like copyediting (which was in the journalism school), it was easy to ascertain whether you knew the rules of the Associated Press Stylebook or not. In writing a paper about Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” not so much so. (Yes, that’s an intentional “sentence fragment” if anyone feels like being pedantic and pointing out some sort of irony.) Grading is much more fluid and subjective, and you’re being graded on critical thought processes more so than factual knowledge of the material. At least that’s how it was with my teachers. I found this very challenging and difficult, more so than my math and science classes (and this is part of why I never expected to end up with an English degree after I finished college.)
I never studied literature at a tertiary level - but I did well at secondary school.
Mostly because I would read a book 5 or 6 or more times, until I could pull quotes out of my arse to support whatever the fuck I wanted to argue.
Some books I enjoyed, some I didn’t - but one thing I have always hated is a “search for deeper meaning”. Sometimes a story is just a story - and I will take away from it whatever it means to me, without it needing to be an allegory, allusion or whatever the hell other things you want to claim.
And for what it’s worth - I make my living by writing - but I couldn’t for the life of me diagram a sentence or tell you the difference between a verb and an adverb - let along talk about prepositions, passive voice or any of the other things that my 10 year old kid is now being taught.
Gaudere’s Law, of course. “Copy editing.”