I’m sorry if you felt languages were insulted, despite the fact that I never mentioned any languages at all.
Look dude, you obviously have some particularly strong feelings on this subject, but why don’t we let this discussion get back to the OP’s question instead of the shortfalls of the American culture and education system, which are too numerous and controversial to discuss here.
It seems like you have some kind of chip on your shoulder about literary/artistic analysis. Do you not perceive it as a legitimate exercise.
As far as doing it in school is concerned, the point is not the outcome of the analysis, but rather the process. The point is to teach you to think in a certain way, to be critical, to look for meaning, to look for patterns, etc. Do you not consider this valuable?
What in the world are you talking about?
Listen constanze, I know you have a major chip on your shoulder about Americans, and to be honest I kind of understand why. And yes, it’s true that we know a lot more about them than they know about us, what with how their culture permeates the whole world and everything. But the OP wants to know how literature analysis is done in other countries. That’s not the time to start tearing him a new arsehole for daring not to know it yet.
Anyway:
In my case (French-language school in Quebec), what you call “grammar analysis” (and I believe is called “sentence diagramming” in the English-speaking world) was done in the first few years of high school. Literature-heavier classes came later in high school, where we learned how to find and understand symbols in written literature, and to put this literature in its historical context. Then, the compulsory French classes in cégep (equivalent of American late high school/early college) taught us some formal types of essays about literature. We also had to do some literary analysis in our English as a second language classes, but as far as I can remember it wasn’t as hard as in our French language classes, being more geared towards ensuring we understand the story’s text correctly. Nevertheless, this ensured that we were exposed to English-language literary works.
Actually, I don’t believe the IPA could really be used to create a writing system for a language, not without making a few changes anyway. The IPA is a means to allow us to write an exact transcription of a speaker’s words. Given that different speakers will say the same words in a slightly different way, choosing what transcription to keep would require us to make a value judgement.
As pointed out, Jragon was talking about languages that do not have a written form, not languages that use non-Latin writing forms. I don’t know how you got that out of what he wrote. Now, it is true that in those countries, education is usually done in the colonial language or the country’s lingua franca instead of in the students’ oral-only language. But here you seem to be the one who’s dismissing these students’ “literature” (or rather oral tradition, in that case) as unimportant, given that their language has no written form and that its speakers don’t have much political power.
I don’t know why you think I’m being elitist here,
a) No, I believe they all deserve it, but sometimes cultural perceptions differ. I was thinking that perhaps the people of the culture may not focus on the same things all the time, like how in East Asia many schools focus more on rote memorization and reproduction than our schools do. It’s a different cultural approach to teaching, and I could see literature analysis, like anything else, be something that cultures differ on the value on.
b) But there are plenty of other things that are useful too, linguistics or intimate knowledge of grammar might be considered more worthy to some people. Some schooling systems may even specialize earlier, and end up excluding it for the majority of students. I’m not overly familiar with the English school system, but I believe after they take their O-levels they choose two subjects to specialize in and don’t take classes in other subjects for the most part, am I right on this? If that were the case, it’s possible that analysis may be in the upper levels that not all students get to.
c) No, I loved my two analysis classes in college. I understand that it has practical applications in understanding legal documents, figuring out scientific articles, and appreciating literature in a higher form. However, there are some cultural differences I’ve been surprised by before, I was willing to accept “no, they all pretty much see the value of it.” But the thing is, not all cultures will see that it’s valuable enough to teach as a standard subject, just as the American culture doesn’t always see the value of other things that we don’t focus on teaching (such as not being too big on forcing kids to get a second language).
And over half the languages on the planet are endangered. Most linguists are racing to get them transcribed and documented before they disappear, most of them aren’t written, which makes transcription on paper very important.
By definition, an unwritten language doesn’t have a body of literature. So literature analysis isn’t very relevant. Furthermore, I can’t think of any school whose medium of instruction is in an unwritten language.
Well, that’s why I asked if they had anything similar for their oral tradition or stories. I wasn’t aware if there were any schooling systems with no written language of instruction, but just in case, I wanted to see if there was analysis of their oral lore or something.
Sorry, “may” see the value of. It’s not inevitable.
I should clarify what I meant when I said I was “meh” about literature analysis. I think we go too far with the fiction analysis in the US. I want to have it, but I had at least 4 years of fiction analysis, and maybe 3/4 of a semester on non-fiction analysis. Fiction analysis is a good exercise and tool, but most students probably won’t really need fiction analysis directly in their jobs, and may struggle applying the techniques to non-fiction. I’m “meh” about the state in the US because I think we should spend more or less an equal amount of time on non-fiction articles and essays, which we sorely neglect in favor of analyzing more poems. Like I said, it’s a good exercise, I just wish we’d focus a little more on analyzing lower level scientific articles, newspaper entries, journals, historical articles and the like. Hell, even “take out your textbook and analyze the goals and implicit knowledge in chapter 3” would be a cool thing to see.
Sorry for the triple post, I just keep thinking of new things to say.
It’s certainly legitimate, most of it is that, in the US, we bleed the well dry so early we start getting into funny territory sometimes. Maybe it’s partially the instructors and not the process, but a LOT of my schooling has involved some really unique leaps of logic and encouraging us to pick apart the meaning of words to an absurd degree. It’s never a possible case that MAYBE the author simply used that word because it sounded pretty, every single word, period, and comma is steeped with deeper meaning and insight into the work, and never a simple quirk. I’m sure this is true for many poets who have dozens of pages of notes for a 3 stanza poem, but I’m not convinced of this when it comes to (most) novels, movies, or video games.
It’s very useful as a tool, for the most part, even learning to deconstruct fiction can greatly enhance your enjoyment of it and you insight into human culture, but sometimes we get rather ridiculous around the 3rd year of rehashing poetry analysis, and things start spiraling out of control. It’s creative, and the fact that you can MAKE such unique interpretations and support them is a bit fun, but sometimes it feels like we go a wee bit overboard when analyzing the implicit hatred of ambiguously gendered people in the movie Wargames, when a lot of the “evidence” is likely happenstance or side effect of the narrative structure, rather than a conscious or unconscious effort to reinforce the cultural stereotype that people must be categorized by gender. Sure, I can see why something MIGHT imply something else, but it often strikes me as the kind of fan wankery you see on message boards, taking one line from a minor character in episode 2 and using it to decide that the entire series is super secretly the creator’s magnum opus about why women belong in the kitchen. Or the times we analyze Shakespeare, and for some reason half of the symbolism suspiciously reflects modern cultural mores, rather than critically exploring the mores of his era.
It’s not that I hate literature analysis, it’s fun, creative, and productive. But in the American school system we go very far overboard with it, and often infer things that I think are a bit suspicious and need to be thought critically about, instead of shooting down all objections with “any interpretation with any evidence is reasonable.” I really liked my college English teachers because as crazy as they got sometimes with the odd interpretations, at least they agreed that some interpretations are just stupid if they don’t have sufficient evidence behind them, and left the presence of evidence up to argumentation.
In India, they memorize literature analysis by rote. I’m not kidding.
You’re missing the point. The point is to show you a way you can approach analysis. The point is not whether your conclusions or speculations are correct. The point is to give you experience in picking apart texts “to an absurd degree.” It’s to exercise your mind in the area of deep critical analysis.
Who told you that it’s “not a possible case”? The point is that it’s not relevant to the exercise you’re undertaking.
Spiraling out of control? And what happens? Mayhem? Chaos? Students deranged by out-of-control analytical exercises shooting up the campus from bell towers?
Blatant disregard for what might be true is silly though. I can understand a high tolerance for being incorrect, given the subjectivity of the material, but encouraging taking things out of context and stretching them beyond credibility hurts more than it helps. I can understand allowing that for maybe the first year, but after that there should be much more of a focus on Occam’s Razor and an attempt to derive what’s true than simply using the tools with reckless abandon. An important part of critical thinking is to consider possible interpretations before you divine the right one, and “insane” interpretations can help with this greatly, and I could see assignments saying “make five short interpretations of this work, with disregard for how valid they may be.” But full scale analyses of works should be approached the same way interpretation of a scientific article or mathematical proof is, with encouragement to be able to recognize and throw away illogical interpretations, to use Occam’s Razor, and to attempt to divine something with enough evidence that most reasonable people would see it having merit, even if they still have room to respectfully disagree.
When you do arithmetic, they don’t award you full credit for “kind of” doing subtraction, or getting the process of solving for a variable “kind of right” in algebra, except in the first few assignments where they may be more lenient. It should be the same for analysis, except instead of one correct answer, there’s an unknown set of reasonable answers, and often unreasonable answers are rewarded and lauded for their “creativity,” (within reason, I’ve never seen anyone bad enough to award credit for writing about hot dogs when analyzing Pride and Prejudice) rather than criticized for their lack of logic and critical thought, and the student’s eagerness to apply the tools with reckless abandon.
This depends on the purpose of your undertaking.
It hurts what?
Are you sure you grasp the point of studying literature qua literature?
Why? Says who? Under what circumstances? To what ends?
It seems to me you’ve failed to learn what your English teachers have been trying to teach. To that extent, yes, it seems that their methods have been ineffective.
Let’s say you have a legal document, and you were trained to analyze via works of fiction in that manner. Suddenly you get people finding silly loopholes that don’t exist and getting themselves in trouble, because they were convinced ONE WORD made the entire thing different. Or reading a proof and deciding it’s invalid because a couple words have a subjective meaning, rather than simply choosing the meanings that make it correct, because that’s probably what they meant. Or freaking out at a friend or significant other because of some perceived slight that only makes sense if you ascribe more motive to their word choice than most people probably do. Learning to think OF these interpretations is a fine exercise, accepting them as valid and sound without good evidence is another thing entirely.
I guess I don’t understand: what’s the point of awarding illogical interpretations? I’m not saying you can’t analyze things in a creative manner, I’m just saying that you should at least consider the evidence behind it, and be able to recognize when you’re choosing a less likely interpretation. Analysis without regard for what’s true or plausible isn’t critical thinking, it’s just thinking, there’s nothing critical about it.
Why would anyone analyze a legal document using a technique used for analyzing literature? They’re completely different kinds of exercises.
You don’t need to have a background in analyzing fiction in order to come to this point. It’s pretty well-settled in law that the use of ONE WORD can make the entire thing different. In any case, there are developed methods of analyzing legal documents in the same way that there are methods of analyzing fiction. Neither legal scholars nor literary critics are in the habit of confusing them.
The purpose of literary analysis is not to help you win arguments with your girlfriend. You’ll have to look to a different discipline for that.
Literature and fiction are not sets of facts that are there to be proven. And they are not there solely to represent the intent of the author. It’s a completely different form of communication than other things, such as legal documents, with different purposes.
You continue to fail to grasp the point of literary analysis in a classroom. It’s not there to reward right or wrong; it’s there to teach a process. You’re there to exercise a certain skill, not to find answers.
The overall technique is different, but the underlying tools are mostly the same, it’s just the exact way and order you apply them are different. My point was that in school most people are taught almost solely fiction, when non-fiction should be taught almost equally, because otherwise people won’t have the experience to figure out how to apply the tools to a non-fiction situation.
I never said they were sets of FACTS, nor that they should only represent the intent of the author. An author (especially a poor one) can write meaning they didn’t intend to, that’s a good use of analysis, especially when proofreading your own works. But if you’re going to claim that the book hates black people, you really should have more than a sentence and a couple of word choice blunders to back you up. There’s a distinct difference between a reasonable interpretation and an unreasonable one, and reasonable ones have evidence behind them in the text itself, otherwise you’re not analyzing the work itself, you’re analyzing some random smattering of out of context phrases with disregard for their probable meaning. It’s almost impossible to prove an author’s intent, but you can infer what’s probable, and what’s probable is the set of things the rest of the work points to. There are even some valid interpretations that start with “I don’t think the author meant this, but the entire narrative structure and general themes imply…”
But again, what’s the point of the process if there’s no regard for right and wrong? Sure, I could teach people to hammer a nail with a socket wrench, and I’m teaching the skill of hammering, but it doesn’t change the fact that I’m teaching them to use the wrong tool for the job.
The point of these analyses is the exercise critical thinking which is DEFINED as “higher-order thinking that questions assumptions. It is a way of deciding whether a claim is true, false, or sometimes true and sometimes false, or partly true and partly false.” Not paying attention to this undermines the entire point of teaching the skills to allow for critical thinking.
See, this is where you’re going off the rails. There is no “right interpretation”. There’s not even a collection of “right interpretations”.
If you approach literature as a puzzle to solve, you’re missing the point of literary analysis. (Or rather the point of literary analysis as it’s been understood for the last 100 years.)
A text can produce a multitude of readings. Many will be mutually contradictory. Some of these will be idiosyncratic or bizarre. However the contradictory, idiosyncratic and bizarre interpretations can also be true – true in the sense that they illuminate our lives in meaningful ways.
The point of literary analysis is not to teach students to decode difficult works. It’s to teach students a more open-ended way of reading that allows them to experience texts in deeper, more interesting ways.
(BTW, in regards to the OP, much of what is taught in literature courses in the U.S. has its roots in French and German scholarship.)
All of which has nothing to do with whether any particular literary interpretation is reasonable or incorrect.
Missing the point. Literary analysis is not proofreading. And it doesn’t necessarily matter whether a poorly written work is “misinterpreted.” The point is to teach you another way to experience fiction.
Maybe, maybe not. But the point of literary analysis is to reveal the flexibility of literature as an experience and ways that literature can exercise the mind, not as a method of divining literal truth.
Sorry, poor word choice. Reasonable interpretations, which can indeed be mutually contradictory, or weird. There isn’t a right answer, but I’d argue that there’s a set of reasonable interpretations and unreasonable ones. This set is also up to interpretation, not everybody will agree an interpretation they disagree with as valid, depending on how different it is from the evidence they see. But I think there is a general way that most reasonable people use to determine whether something is reasonable or not, even if it’s not always EXACTLY the same set. There’s a difference between claiming something and then using a couple words to prove a 50k word book means something, and using recurring themes, arc words, etc. Even interpretations that seem silly can be valid, if you have compelling evidence, as opposed to a reasonable sounding interpretation that only has a sentence and a minor character’s hair color that may be unreasonable and invalid because there’s not much support under review. That’s what critical thinking is, analyzing things above their surface reasonability or silliness and seeing if they really have a valid, logically coherent point.
No, but allowing for unreasonable interpretations muddles the use of the tools so that using them in other contexts is suspect.
I was giving an example of how the analysis could be used, seeing when people may misinterpret your work, there are other uses, including sheer enjoyment and fun.
But I don’t see the point, beyond a reasonable amount. I can see assignments to that effect, but every literary analysis course I’ve been in said one of the main goals is to “refine critical thinking skills.” Literature as an experience is great, and I support getting kids and teenagers alike into it, even have it as some of the assignments, but when a course claims critical thinking skills, it should at least focus on determining reasonable vs unreasonable to some degree.
No, it isn’t. If that’s what you’re doing, then you’ve learned your lesson poorly.
Can you give an actual example rather than your rather vague speculative examples?
It’s a critical thinking skill. It isn’t all of them.
Doing what? Using the tools improperly? No. But when teachers reward ridiculous, poorly supportable assertions, it weakens the exercise and its applicability to other areas of expertise.
Not off the top of my head, no.
It isn’t any of them by definition if it doesn’t focus on truth values.
There are certainly some interpretations that are more LIKELY within a particular interpretive community. But I wouldn’t call those inherently more reasonable.
Again, I think you’re missing the point. You’re approaching a literary text like an argument, when actually its more like a ball.
What is the correct way to play with a ball? Are there “reasonable” and “unreasonable” ways to play with a ball? Is there value in learning to distinguish between reasonable and unreasonable ways of playing?
The idea of literary analysis is to teach you how to play creatively with a text. In doing so, it may be useful to demonstrate how other people who are good with playing with a text have done so. But that doesn’t mean that their way of playing is more correct or reasonable than yours is.