Or use cameras. Or telerpathy.
Or just tell the whales to suck it up, it’s only a twenty minute flight.
In my high school senior English class, one of the stories we read was E. M. Forster’s “The Celestial Omnibus.” One of the characters in the story is named Mr. Bons, which, as our teacher pointed out to us, is “snob” spelled backwards. Of course, from then on we were always careful to note the backwards meanings of the characters’ names in all the stories we read.
Yes, one should be aware of allegory or symbolism in literature. Yes, authors sometimes intentionally include hidden meanings in the details in their works, the importance of which can be anything from just an Easter egg to the key to understanding the whole point of the story.
I take the point of the O’Connor anecdote to be a warning against assuming that everything in a story has a Deeper Meaning, and that the key to understanding an author’s work is to correctly decode the hidden meanings that she has encoded in the details of her story.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
To me, its a shocking display of a lack of barn-yard solidarity
Agreed on that one - unless the wedding is held somewhere that never gets rain, precisely because the bride can’t stand the thought that her outdoor wedding would be ruined, and the one freak hundred-year storm also happens to be the wedding day. “The coincidental overlap of two unlikely circumstances to create a negative outcome that neither circumstance would produce on its own” is a very common use of the word “ironic” and is what most of the song describes.
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
The problem with that is idea that the author is the sole arbiter of meaning of a work has been discredited in literature for quite a long time. It’s merely one of many possible interpretations. This is known as “Death of the Author,” and is a huge part of the history of literary criticism. Nowadays, such criticism uses different lenses–ways of viewing the work–to try and find meaning, and what matters is how well supported the ideas are, not what the author intended.
There is, I admit, the more recent concept of the fictional canon which does to some extent reestablish the author as providing the preferred meaning to a work. But this is only so for plot details, for the purposes of establishing a consensus about what “actually happened” in the fictional world. This is useful for serialized fiction, or any other fiction where the fictional universe is ongoing. It does not mean that metaphorical aspects are determined by the creator, nor does it invalidate the concept of “head-canons” or “fan canon,” the former being personal interpretations that don’t care if the work says differently, while the latter is something that is consistent with canon but has not been established by the author, but is generally accepted as true by the audience.
The idea of there being one correct way to interpret things is often considered to be the removing of intellectual rigor from literary analysis, an attempt to dumb it down and eliminate the long history of the subject.
You can, of course, still choose to try and figure out what the author actually meant, or even what they subconsciously meant by looking at their personal history and the culture at the time. But a good analysis need not be restricted to such in modern literary criticism.
Those using their preferred interpretation method to try and shame more open-minded literary analysis are seen similarly to those adults who argue against Common Core math because it’s not the way they were taught as kids.
He said he named the piece after it was written and he has a point – Mouvement Symphonique No. 1 – doesn’t exactly conjure up any mental images. Mouvement Symphonique No. 2 was named Rugby and gets a fair amount of critique and play although not so much as No. 1.
Meanwhile Mouvement Symphonique No. 3 never got a name and got hardly any attention even though one commentator called it Pacific 231 Returns.
It was a good marketing move.
Oh, I know he said that. I don’t believe him; I’m convinced he had trains in mind from the beginning. I know I’m not the only person who thinks Honegger was being disingenuous.
Yeah, but some times people read way too much into things. If I wrote a book and it became famous, someone would probably have a great time dissecting why I named the bad guy Jason, arguing that the meaning - healer - was an ironic this or connect it to the Golden Fleece or whatever when the simple truth is the character got named Jason after a bully at a job I had.
Me neither. But at least now I finally understand the 2020 re-make: “This Little Pangolin Went to Market”
A good example of this whole issue is the Trump supporters who were filmed dancing to “Killing in the Name”.
For those who don’t know the song, it’s about how many people who are police officers are also members of the KKK and similar right-wing groups. Lots of people commented on the irony of Trump supporter not knowing that this song was supposed to be a warning.
But I thought, “Hey, listen to the song, but put yourself in the mindset of someone who thinks the KKK is a good thing. Of course they love the song!” I mean, really:
Those who died are justified
For wearing the badge
They’re the chosen whites
You justify those that died
By wearing the badge
They’re the chosen whites
Those who died are justified
For wearing the badge
They’re the chosen whites
You justify those who died
By wearing the badge
They’re the chosen whitesSome of those that work forces
Are the same that burn crosses
Some of those that work forces
Are the same that burn crosses
Some of those that work forces
Are the same that burn crosses
Some of those that work forces
Are the same that burn crosses
Yes, a lot of right-wingers don’t realize they are actually part of the “machine” Rage Against the Machine rages against. In fact, their video for Sleep Now in the Fire was filmed guerilla-style on Wall Street and has someone holding up a “Trump For President 2000” sign ironically.
I had expected the teacher to call it bullshit and give me a bad grade. It had nothing to do with the poem and any decent teacher would have called me on it and failed me. Ultimately, it shows that the teaching of literary criticism was a kind of cloudcuckooland where anything goes as long as you can justify it.
The point is the obvious one that the black hat had no meaning other than a description of what he was wearing. It was not a symbol, it was never intended to be a symbol, and trying to make it a symbol did not do justice to the story. It’s merely intellectual masturbation and doesn’t expand knowledge. It just shows off the ego of the critic.
It could actually discuss what was in the story, not a free association of what the interpreter throws in to try to look smart.
But tell me, given your argument, would you say Charles Manson was correct in his interpretation that the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter” was a call for a race war? Should that be considered a valid interpretation of the song?
Maybe she was reacting to academics like this one/ (a hilariously good scene in a pretty bad movie) 
It’s a high school essay - the point was to show that you could write a coherent argument, not if you could guess the secret meaning of the poem intended by Robert Frost.
But what use is that point? How was the critic supposed to know that there wasn’t any symbolic intent there? Is a cigar only ever just a cigar, and anyone who thinks differently is automatically a fool?
So, a book report? “In Moby Dick, Captain Ahab chases a whale, but in the end, the whale kills him. The End.”
I’m not familiar with the specifics of Manson’s interpretation of the song. From what I know of the guy, I doubt his explanation would make much sense to me, on account of all the crazy. But “Is it correct?” isn’t a meaningful question in this context.
What counts as being “in” a story? Is it only a series of events? Or are we supposed to ignore theme, controlling idea, metaphor, motif and the dozens of elements that make literature literature? For as much as some writers create these things unconsciously, some of them are quite deliberate about it. Oftentimes one story has layers and layers of meaning, and trying to identify those layers is no more mental masturbation than the extraordinary effort it took to get them in there. In Something Wicked This Way Comes, Bradbury uses motif to describe the two boys, one of blond hair and summer and light, one of darkness. Was Bradbury aware he was doing it? Doesn’t matter. He did it. It’s there. It would be silly not to recognize how motif shapes understanding of the events in the novel.
I’m kinda in between. Some years back I enrolled in a course on children’s literature. During a break, I was chatting with one of the assistant professors, and he mentioned his interpretation of Star Wars: the death star represented an enormous egg, and Luke Skywalker was the sperm that caused the egg to explode into a New Hope. (To nobody’s surprise he was a firm member of the Freudian school of litcrit).
That, to me, is awful, like, offensively terrible. But it’s not awful like the scientific theory of phlogiston is awful. It’s not wrong. It’s awful like Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure is awful. I don’t care if you like it, it’s dumb as shit and gets up my nose.
That’s how litcrit should be evaluated. It’s not objectively right or wrong. It can add to the pleasure of a work by giving a new way of thinking about it, like frosting on a cupcake; or it can take away from the pleasure by making you think about something dumb or gross when you consider the work, like blowing your nose on an ice cream sundae.
I always thought that if I wrote a novel, I’d have characters named Schneider, Thompson, and Bendix. I wonder how long it would take someone to figure out where I got those names from.
B&T’sEA is a weird combination of stupid and brilliant. There’s a scene where they need to get in to the police station, so Ted (or maybe Bill) says they can use the time machine to steal his dad’s keys, go back in time, and hide them under a rock. Then he lifts up the rock, and the keys they need are right there. That’s some four-dimensional thinking right there.
I have some bad news about Bill & Ted 3.
Much like the egg-and-sperm theory of A New Hope.
This is a bit like saying you have bad news about the shrimp scampi platter at Long John Silver’s.