While that makes sense, I never thought that it was an invalid way to view it, just that this sort of exercise shouldn’t be the focus of schooling. That sounds like those fun little math problems teachers assign to help you practice, but are also fun. Nothing wrong with it, but the critical thinking skills that go with analyzing evidence, determining likelihood, and making coherent arguments is what school is about: gaining knowledge and articulating yourself. The type of analysis you describe is a component of that, yes, but it shouldn’t be more or less the entire curriculum, in my opinion at least.
All of the students I’ve taught English as a Foreign Language have mentioned books they studied at secondary school (it comes up in a few of my lessons); they wouldn’t have just been sitting there reading them and saying ‘I like this bit.’
Like you say, it’s fun and creative, and it’s also a useful tool for exploring all sorts of philosophies and different ways of writing. Some of it is cultural inheritance; a few years back in the UK the then-Labour govt decided to stipulate that a certain percentage of the texts studied had to be British, because they recognised it’s about cultural heritage as well as anything literary. (They did this for political reasons really, but that was their excuse).
Some of high-school literary theory is also really just because a book is a good springboard for writing persuasively, argumentatively, creatively, etc. It enables you to ask questions which would be too big to ask in the outside world - ‘why did Hamlet decide not to kill Claudius while he was praying?’ is something you can answer using only the text, whereas ‘why did Lizzie Borden kill her parents?’ isn’t actually answerable. Neither give provable answers, but at least with Hamlet you don’t have to wonder if someone else was really the killer after all. (Unless you get really postmodern, but then you’re lost anyway).
It’s not the reading of the book which is important, but the writing about it.
That doesn’t come close to ‘the fact is, the majority of languages on the planet don’t have an orthographic system.’ That article says:
They’re not talking about languages spoken by many people as a first language; they can’t be, really, or the languages wouldn’t be dying out.
But surely there are interpretations of a written work that simply aren’t supported by the text, or even by the subtext? What Jragon is describing is picking out a few words in a book-long work to support the thesis that the author supported a side of a debate that simply didn’t exist back when they were alive. Surely we can argue that this is an unreasonable interpretation of the work?
Note: I have no idea if this is actually how text analysis is done in American high schools.
Sorry, I didn’t look through the article as much as I should have, was in a hurry. I can say that all of the linguistics professors and grad students I’ve taked to have lamented this fact, so while I can’t offer a hard cite, I can say that at least a few people with some ethos have told me this.
Actually, no they’re not. And while certain kinds of tools might be applicable in some way across disciplines, there’s no reason to believe that they are to be applied in exactly the same way.
And I don’t know why you’re going on about “rewarding.” The point is to teach a certain level of flexible thinking, creativity, pattern-seeking, comparative analysis, drawing in of outside knowledge, allusions, etc. That’s one of the purposes of the exercise and it’s appropriate to “reward” successful forays in those directions.
And I’ve never been in a situation in which it is not understood what kinds of propositions have lots of support and what kinds have little support.
Furthermore, it’s not the job of a teacher to spoon-feed every application of a particular skill. At some point the individual student bears the responsibility to synthesize knowledge and skills across disciplines for himself or herself.
Really, the more I read your posts, the more I envision you as a student rolling his eyes and sighing because “the radical feminists win all the arguments in this class.” You’re severely missing the point.
Well, then. Maybe that should tell you something.
Of course it is. There are many facets and skills of analysis that don’t “focus on truth values.” First of all, “truth values” aren’t always relevant to critical thinking or analysis. As I’ve said before, it depends on what exactly you’re doing. Furthermore, there are steps/skills in the process that have their own processes or paths. “Truth values” may come into play, but at different points of the process.
And, as others have tried to say, literature isn’t always concerned with literal truth. That isn’t necessarily the point of either writing, reading, or analyzing literature. Furthermore, it is often the case that a “wrong” interpretation of literature turns out to be more interesting or valuable than other interpretations.
Societies change over time, values change over time, people change over time. In some respects. In other respects, they don’t. So there are values in finding threads in literature that reveal “old knowledge” and those that reveal “new knowledge.” Sometimes these may be contradictory. A value of literature is its malleability as well as its timeliness. An original author’s intent is often entirely irrelevant.
Whether a particular interpretation of a work is reasonable or unreasonable might not be the point of the lesson, especially for younger students.
I’m pretty sure you’re misinterpreting the problem. There are a lot of languages disappearing. But they aren’t languages with extensive literature that is currently being studied in schools. Furthermore, there are languages that have already died out whose literature is studied by a lot of people. The issue of dying languages and the question of teaching literary analysis are separate issues.
Maybe you took some really weird English Lit classes, but none of mine ever involved arguing that one sentence and a minor character’s hair color were the keys to understanding the entire work. Had I handed in a paper like that in any college literature class I ever had, I’m pretty sure I would have received a very bad grade. In high school you might be able to get away with that kind of thing as long as the paper was well-written, but we certainly weren’t encouraged to focus on a very few words rather than recurring themes, etc.
But there are quite a lot of ball games that have extensive rules and those are played more, I think without any supporting evidence, than people play completely ‘ruleless’ and this is true for literary interpretation too, at least in my opinion.
Maybe you’re misremembering, and they said that a lot of the languages that have existed don’t have a written literature? It’s really unusual these days - any time a language asserts itself enough to not be a dialect it gets written down in its own form.
I’ll give you that truth values aren’t the entirety of analysis, but it’s the definition of critical thinking, and I find most courses lacking this dearly. Perhaps it’s not lacking in the in-class debates as much, but in the assignments and their grading, I feel that critical thinking isn’t rewarded enough, eschewing it for “unique” interpretations.
Here’s an example of what I mean: In college, I at one point a year or two ago, managed to get away with an A on a paper that had an entire paragraph on the color teal as a visual element in the movie. In reality, I’m pretty sure they chose it because it looked pretty or good on the set. But between a scholarly cite on color meanings and an analysis of teal apparently it counted. Any paper I turned in with a thesis that was well supported but not “creative” enough got a B+. When you make a thesis too creative, you really have to start reaching to support it. The average in that class was a C-, and I pulled an A, and it seemed like the more I had to reach into logically shaky interpretations of words and phrases, the better I actually did. I mean, even when I didn’t I got a B+, at least, but it was disheartening that I could basically half-remember a work I experienced years ago, pick out some vague symbols, and write paragraphs about them and do two full letter grades better than the students who had just read the work and found recurring themes and symbols instead of “the color teal.” I feel most of the students in that course had deserved my grade much more than I did, because their symbols seemed more legitimate and their interpretations more reasonably supported. I especially feel that I didn’t deserve it considering I got the one professor that is supposedly one of the toughest yet fairest graders you can get for the basic English courses.
Nope, I just asked a professor and she said this is correct, and this isn’t a professor at Podunk U, I’m at the University of Arizona, which is fairly high on the charts in linguistics. She says that most (naturally occurring human) languages have absolutely no orthography. To perhaps get past definition differences, here’s the definition of language they use:
“A systematic, rule governed form of human communication that uses arbitrary signs (spoken, signed, or written) in a creative way.”
Note that this is a “politics free” definition of language, and doesn’t attempt to delineate languages based on common political or social boundaries, or on mutual intelligibility.
You misunderstand my point. Hamlet is like a ball in that you can play a variety of different games with it by applying a variety of different “rules”. A Marxist reading will not be the same as a queer reading or a structuralist reading. Each may illuminate interesting truths, some of which may have been entirely unintended by Shakespeare. But there’s no way to say which set of “rules” is more true or reasonable. Some ways of reading might be more common or comfortable, but that’s a function of the reader’s circumstance, not a property of the text itself.
I found a cite for the no orthography thing from the NYT:
Like I said, maybe you took some really weird English Lit classes. I don’t know why color symbolism in film would be considered an appropriate topic for a “basic English course” to begin with. While there’s a place for film in literature classes, focusing on visual elements in film doesn’t seem like a very good way to teach the basics of English literature. Was this perhaps a composition class?
Not having read any of the papers involved, I have no way of knowing whether I’d agree with your assessment of the quality of your classmates’ work. It is, however, entirely possible that the professor was a nut. Whatever was really going on with this class, it was just one class. It doesn’t mean all literature courses are just teaching students to invent 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”. The class you describe doesn’t sound like anything I ever had in school.
It was a literary analysis course, albeit one that took a broad definition of literature.
That was an example from one class, this same thing has happened in all four-five of the English analysis classes I’ve been in. I suck at writing an analyzing and get As and other people are good and get lower grades.
ETA: I have no problem with composition courses, they’re much better in structure and evidence based reasoning skills.
Even as described, the exercise doesn’t necessarily seem all that outrageous. It’s not about “truth values.” it’s about teaching students to look at a dork with an eye fir details, to draw connections with aspects of life, learning, philosophy, emotions, politics, history, etc., outside the work and constructing an argument. It’s about learning the form and the process of critical analysis. For the purposes of learning it’s largely irrelevant whether the student’s conclusions are reasonable or true. It’s about learning how to think. Testing the quality of those conclusions comes later. Or, really, not necessarily at all. As mentioned already, one of the features of a work of fiction is the role of the reader or the viewer in shaping it’s meaning. The idea if objective truthfulness us less important in literature than it is fir other things. And frankly this us also something that us important for students to learn and learn well. Look at our frustrations with Dougie Monty’s approach to movies as music. He hasn’t grasped the fundamental role if fiction in human life. It’s not necessarily about objective or reasonable truth and that in itself is important to a full inner life.
If your English Lit classes were all graded unfairly then I’m sorry for your classmates, but all I can do is repeat that I never experienced anything like you describe. I can’t imagine that any professor I ever had would have given an A to a badly written paper with a BS thesis that was supported with only one or two vaguely relevant cites.
No, I had about 6 citations and several paragraphs I spent days formulating and proof checking, but that one paragraph was complete stupidity and the rest of the class deserved a better grade for being perfect, while I deserved a near F for blithering stupidity.
Well, we can’t really take your word for it. As this discussion stands, it’s taking place entirely in your head. Give us the texts if the papers you’re talking about and then there’s something to talk about. Without that, we might as well be trying to talk you out of the belief that the last time you drank an espresso, you were served by Jesus.
But I’m stupid, it doesn’t make sense for me to get an A. I’ve observed that other people are smart and know so much more than me, it makes sense for them to get As. Anything different raises my suspicion instantly. Sadly, this has been the case for most of my schooling, where I get a good grade and smarter, better people don’t. I thought I finally figured out why for analysis. I guess not, and I’ll be left wondering forever why my blithering stupidity gets me good grades. I figured the only conclusion was that illogic and stupidity is rewarded, while logic is frowned upon.
It’s just a WAG on my part, but perhaps you are able to master a technique being taught without understanding its significance. It’s not out if the question that you might doing something right but not getting what it is. And perhaps you are making errors in evaluating the work of your peers. Maybe they aren’t that much smarter than you after all. Or maybe they are, but not in the way you think. All that is just a guess. What seems to be reasonably clear is that there’s a good chance that you have missed the point of teaching literary analysis, and, perhaps to some extent, literature itself.