chamerionwrites:

beka-tiddalik:

alexkablob:

mylordshesacactus:

real talk though why is fandom apparently 90% populated by people who still think their high school english teachers were just, like, making up the entire concept of textual analysis.

#I want you all to go to the board#and write fifty times#I Will Not Take Something As Gospel Truth Solely Because A Character Says It At Some Point

Because they couldn’t connect to the texts that their English teachers were trying to teach them textual analysis with. A lot of the classics are dry, written by old white men about younger white men, and held up as standards of literature, rather than what they actually are: books that were popular/influential in their time. 

And look, I think it’s worth reading the classics just to figure out things about the people who talk them up. Someone who likes Hunter S Thompson is probably an anarchist at heart. Someone who uncritically likes Ian Fleming is a misogynist. That kind of thing.

I don’t want to come off as harsh with the wall o’text but I can’t let this one go.

#1 - You do not have to LIKE a text in order to analyze it, any more than you have to like the periodic table to balance chemical equations. An intellectual understanding of narrative form & structure is not remotely the same thing as an emotional connection to a story, and it’s honestly bizarre to conflate them. 

In an ideal world, yeah! Lit teachers would pick engaging texts and/or work hard to help students engage with texts that might be outside their comfort zone. But nobody’s claiming that people’s failure to grasp foundational math and science concepts is totally understandable because their textbooks were dry. We’re not talking about obscure layers-deep symbolism that relies on the reader’s familiarity with the specific cultural and historical context in which a novel was written, here. We’re talking about concepts as basic as “unreliable narrators exist” and “symbolism is not in fact a fake thing that your teachers made up.” 

Just…think about how weird it would be if people went around unironically declaring that fractions are meaningless witchcraft because they were bored in math class, as people frequently do when discussing literary analysis. Math and science knowledge is viewed as valuable BECAUSE it’s difficult and occasionally dry. It’s just literature that has to be not merely enjoyable but effortless before we consider it worthy of study. 

Frankly it has everything to do with devaluation of liberal arts and especially art, and with disdain for artistic interpretation as some kind of pointless reading of tea leaves as opposed to a set of genuine and genuinely useful skills (abstract conceptual reasoning, pattern recognition, structuring an argument) that one learns via practice and effort.

#2 - There are endless reasons to criticize the western literary canon and the way it’s taught, but again, the notion that you have to be able to connect with a narrative on some deep personal level in order to engage with it is nonsense. In fact it’s the selfsame logic of all the dudebros who dismiss fiction that doesn’t center on straight white dudes because I can’t put my finger on it but I just don’t ~connect~ with the protagonist, you know? Fiction stretches your empathy muscles the same way geometric proofs stretch your deductive reasoning skills, which is part of the reason lit classes are a valuable educational tool in the first place.

Is it fair that everybody else is constantly being asked to empathize with the perspectives of straight white dudes, when straight white dudes are so, so rarely asked to return the favor? No! Not in the slightest! But I don’t see how it’s helpful - or even accurate - to concede to the whiny dudebro logic that people just aren’t capable of connecting to perspectives and experiences outside their own.

Again, I’m not saying that everybody who doesn’t see themselves represented should suck it up. I’m saying that - specifically because this is a problem, and a vitally necessary one to address - it’s important to talk about that problem with clarity rather than echoing the arguments of people we don’t want to echo.

#3 - Relatedly, you’re really overlooking the fact that sometimes textual analysis can just be you and your spite-fueled 20k word essay that says, in essence, “I fucking loathed this book and here is my extremely articulate and well-argued explanation of why.” If it is in fact articulate and well-argued then any decent lit teacher (and there are a lot of bad ones, which again is an issue worth discussing but not the one we’re addressing here) will return it to you saying, more or less, “I feel privileged to have witnessed this elegantly merciless dissection, also here’s an angle you may have neglected to make it even more thorough.” There’s a reason it’s called criticism. Textual analysis includes Chinua Achebe and Viet Thanh Nguyen telling Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now to meet them in the pit. 

#4 - I’m glad you’ve specified “uncritically” here but - no? You can’t actually make reliable snap judgments about people based on what art they like?

The beautiful infuriating thing about stories and symbols is that they resist singular interpretations. That’s why they’re good tools for discussing subjects (like human emotions) too complex to reduce to variables on a sheet. They can stand a certain amount of internal contradiction and actually be stronger for it, like tensile architecture. 

Likewise people are complicated and the stuff they take from art is not always predictable, either as a creator or a fellow audience member. Plenty of Hunter S Thompson fans are just there for the air of transgressiveness. Paul Ryan likes Rage Against The Machine; David Cameron claimed “The Eton Rifles” was one of his favorite songs. Somebody at Marvel made the frankly astonishing decision to use “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” as…uh…marketing. There’s a lot of ostensible satire (eg Fight Club, movie-version Starship Troopers) that is beloved of the people being satirized, and anti-war themes bypassing audiences is so common there’s a meme. (And a lot of counter-memes.)

As irritating as this is when it’s just people spectacularly missing the point, there can also be a lot of subversive power in reading a text against itself. And sometimes people just encounter one at an important time in their lives. Sometimes it sparks an understanding or captures an experience they’ve never seen captured before, and that makes it meaningful to them. Tolkien loved Norse mythology and so did Nazis and he was pretty peeved about it. Meanwhile there are some undeniably uncomfortable elements in Tolkien’s work that white supremacists respond to, even as others respond to the anti-war sentiment or the insistence that power corrupts or the portrayal of heroism as small and bruised and gentle. For the most part it’s not what someone likes that teaches you something about them - it’s WHY they like it. 

Not coincidentally this concept - that the substance of an argument is at least as important as the conclusion, that nuance is everything - is pretty fundamental to textual analysis, and another reason it’s valuable to learn.