Neither did I, but I didn’t see it as being “full of BS.” At no point was I attempting to sell the idea that what I wrote was what the work was trying to say or what I got out of it. Essay writing, again, was just about making an argument that you could back up.
Of course I was writing to get a grade. And maybe to become a better writer. Why else would I write about so many topics that I didn’t really care about in a format that no one actually uses in real life?
This is good news indeed. I’m a writer too and former lecturer in English Lit. When I’ve finished my current book I’ll go find an English teacher to tell me what I meant.
Teachers say “compare and contrast” for the sake of those students who would only point out the likenesses if they were simply told to compare. “Contrast” is redundant for some students, but not all, and you should always endeavour to make the question as clear as possible.
I find that quite odd, to be honest. I used to be a secondary school English teacher, and the way you grade essays isn’t subjective at all. You literally go through a checklist, which includes things like “uses complex sentences appropriately,” “cites sources accurately,” “refers to linguistic devices such as juxtaposition, allegory (etc),” “develops argument in detail,” plus a load of other criteria that have good justifications. If you manage all that, you’ll get a decent mark no matter what your actual argument is. They’re grading you on your writing and analytical skills, not your opinions. There’s no “makes this specific judgment of the text” criterion.
Perhaps it was a bad teacher, or perhaps the essay wasn’t actually very good and just said “this means this” with no justification or cites given and little development of the argument. The latter is quite likely when writing an essay with the help of the author; he knows what he meant, so why would he have to give loads of cites?
That said, sometimes I did feel like I was talking bollocks when teaching English. We had to teach a certain set of poems for GCSE English that were, frankly, terrible, childish poems where you had to fight to tease out any meaning. When analysing good poetry you get a general impression/feeling/sense of beauty, horror, desolation, etc from the poem and then look back at the language and structure to tease out how you got that impression; with these poems, they left you blank, so you had to use technical devices to try and tease out an impression that wasn’t actually there.
I did feel like a fraud saying to point to this use of alliteration as implying a connection between the two words (for example) when it probably didn’t, really, but they had to write something.
Nearly all of them said English was the most challenging course to them. Most of them claim they found math and science too mechanical.
Yeah. Saying that “the reader may understand the writer’s subconscious better than the writer” is just falling right back into the intentional fallacy.
The point of the “death of the author” idea isn’t that the reader knows the author better than the author knows himself. It’s that meaning is found in the text, not in the author.
My English teachers taught me the basics of how to wright. They taught me about proper capitalization, spelling, and grammar. I owe them a lot.
The idea isn’t to determine what the author meant, but instead, to discuss what the text means.
Gaudere strikes again!
Gatsby is only a little over 200 pages of not very small print. I’m sure many people read it if nothing else because it is shorter than most other books on the approved list for book reports.
That’s one of the reasons why I chose it for A level. The book I had to compare and/or contrast it with was Great Expectations - didn’t finish that one, as I was at risk of the boredom centre of my brain strangling my medulla oblongata in protest.
For my school, that book was Of Mice and Men. Short, pretty simple to read, and slap you in the face sort of meaning.
One of my good friends is a community college remedial English teacher - which means she works with kids who managed to graduate from high school by the skin of their teeth, worked at McDonalds for a few years before saying to themselves, “I need an education.” It also means she has a Masters in Reading and an undergrad in English Lit. Her high school Sophomore had to read The Scarlett Letter. She came home with the Cliff Notes and said “I don’t want to turn you off to literature, if you can’t get through it…here.” And that is my issue with a book like Moby Dick as required reading in high school.
On the other hand, my late brother in law was finishing up a masters in education with an undergrad degree in English to teach high school when he died. He’d never read Gatsby. Or To Kill a Mockingbird. He’d read some Hemingway, no Steinbeck. No Austen. No Tolstoy. No Hardy, Forester, Wharton. He’d managed to get an English degree and be on the verge of being a high school English teacher with having a reading resume almost completely void of the “classics.”
OK, I’m on board with the idea that some books should not be taught in high schools – not because they are not good books, but because high school students aren’t ready for them. (I love Great Expectations as an adult, but disliked it when we read it in ninth grade, and I was one of the relatively rare students who did have sufficient reading comprehension skills to handle Victorian prose. What I didn’t have was the historical perspective, the understanding of adult emotions, or sufficient fluency in Dickens’s idiom to understand that the funny parts were funny. And yet, I can understand why people are tempted to assign it to high school students, because at least it is a coming-of-age tale with a protagonist around the same age as the intended audience. I really don’t understand why anybody would think The Scarlet Letter was a good idea. Fine book, but NOT for anyone who hasn’t experienced adult, complicated relationships, or anyone who doesn’t know anything about history.)
But … Gatsby? What’s not to like? It’s about drinking and partying and a stranger with a mysterious past, and the language isn’t particularly difficult. I loved it when it was assigned in high school. Pretty much everybody in my class at least liked it. I’m not sure why anybody would not like it, unless they were opposed to books with unhappy endings on principle, which pretty much leaves out the majority of twentieth-century literature.
I think the funniest thing is being asssigned the “Catcher in the Rye,” the humor completely escapes teenagers; when I read it in my 20’s I couldn’t stop laughing.
Well, I’ve never been personally all that interested in other people’s drinking and partying, especially not at age 14 when I hadn’t seen or done any of my own. I don’t remember having a strong feeling, positive or negative, about Gatsby when I read it in high school, but I do remember appreciating it a lot more (both the writing and the subject matter) when I had to read it again in college.
Then it would be better to debate any ethical topic, such as we do every day one on these boards, then to think up a set of literary symbols and debate if, how and when they are used.
He’s not the only one. Distinguished writer Mary MacArthur once wrote an essay on this topic. Here it is, it is called: Settling the colonel’s hash. IN the original nove, she wore a green skirt and sweater. Those colors are picked for symbolism in the classes that “analyze” the story. Mary argues that the only reason the skirt and sweater are green in the novel, is because they actually WERE green. She happened to wear a green sweater and skirt that day. No symbolosm intended whatsoever.
The author’s intent is not the sole, or even necessarily the most important thing about a creative work.
Among all the other problems, sometimes an author isn’t conscious of some subtle point in his own work. He might put in a play on words that he never consciously intended.
The same could be true for deeper symbolism. For example, he might describe a Muslim character as “roaring like a lion” because he unconsciously remembers the phrase “The Lion of Islam.” He echoes the phrase in the description, without actually intending it or being aware of it.
A lot of unconscious effort goes into writing, and images slip through that were never present at the conscious level. Creativity, at its best, can involve accessing this kind of unconscious blending of concepts.
(At its worst, it can lead to some awful clichés!)
I found high school English classes boring as heck, but for some reason consistently made good grades in them. Perhaps that was because I loved to read, and actually read all the books assigned rather than just skimming Cliff’s notes like many others. One author stood out above all others as truly awful: Nathaniel Hawthorne. Good grief the man’s writing is terrible. I had the same English teacher 2 years in a row and each year she assigned a Hawthorne novel. I couldn’t quite hate her for it because she also assigned The Hobbit, which became one of my favorite books.
Re: Master and Commander – I love Napoleonic sea stories, including this one, but Patrick O’Brian is definitely a little impenetrable for the uninitiated. C.S. Forester’s Hornblower novels are a bit easier to grasp. You can also watch the A&E Hornblower series starring Ioan Gruffudd (think a younger Reed Richards) which are quite good. I have recently been reading Dudley Pope’s Ramage series, which is a bit lighter.
D___ you, sir! D___! (Which is to say, rather, thank you! I hadn’t known about these! I think I may have just discovered a new addiction! Which book is the best one to start with?)
ETA: Oh, never mind! Volume 1, of course! “D___” obfviously stands for “Duh!”
I personally found the “Ramage” novels awful – struggled through two, and swore off them thenceforth. The author’s style struck me as that of a pedantic and untalented schoolmaster – earnestly, copiously and dull-ly shovelling out facts and info about the books’ milieu, with zero subtlety. I’ll admit that there are many authors whose work I dislike, for a variety of reasons…