The problem with dissecting a book is that -- just like dissecting an animal -- at the end of the exercise, the subject of the dissection is dead.

While mulling over a good book and discussing it can be enjoyable, the attempt to squeeze deep meaning out of something that the author put in by chance simply kills the joy of a good book.

Besides, I find that often the books that tend to be chosen for literature classes (at least in high school) tend towards empty, meaningless "classics" about empty, meaningless people. Reading this sort of book really ends up sucking the joy out of an English class.

My favorite 'English' class in high school was a journalism class, which was centered around learning to write well and communicate something effectively, with none of the BS about "hidden symbolism".

I proudly got a D on an English paper once, when the topic was "how does the symbolism help us understand what the author is telling us", where I answered that it didn't help in the slightest, and that, truth be told, if the author wanted to tell me something, he ought to have come out and said it directly instead of beating around the bush with "symbolism" that to me was as clear as mud, and that in the process he would have saved us all a great deal of time because his message wasn't really all that difficult to summarize in a paragraph or two.

"I proudly got a D on an English paper once, when the topic was "how does the symbolism help us understand what the author is telling us", where I answered that it didn't help in the slightest,"

I think I've already used this story once on HN, but what the heck.

The assignment was to address Orientalism in Antony and Cleopatra. I pointed out several instances of Orientalism in Antony and Cleopatra, then as a conclusion, said that I actually didn't think there was really any Orientalism in Antony and Cleopatra at all, but "found" some to fulfill the assignment.

When I got my paper back, it had positive remarks in the margins, until the remark at the end saying "Jim, we need to talk about this."

I got an A in that class.

Do you know how zen koans work? They help you understand yourself. They don't do it by telling you about yourself, but rather by tricking your mind into paying attention to nothing other than yourself, even though you might not consciously want to.

In the same way, symbolism is intended to trick the mind into grasping a concept it consciously has problems with understanding, or perhaps outright disagrees with. It's like grinding a vitamin into dogfood--the dog won't notice, but it's getting healthier. You might be an ardant anti-___ist and never want to hear a single word on ____ism, but a carefully crafted allegory about ____ism might have you more of a believer than you knew.

The thing is, I'm not a dog, but a person, and I am actually quite willing to listen to people I disagree with as long as they are polite and reasonable.

There's listening, then there's listening. When someone is really learning, you are dealing with the edges of their model of the world and their conscious perception. When you are really teaching, you are playing in this dangerous interstice. Sometimes, the best way of teaching people is tricking them. Sometimes, if you just tell them, they'll just rationalize what you have to tell them away.

This is more apt to apply to classes in history than to computers, however. Even then, there are popular misconceptions to deal with.

Sounds like jesus:

Mark 4:10 When he was alone, those around him and the Twelve asked him about the parables.

Luke 8:10 He said, 'The secret of the kingdom of God is granted to you.'

Mark 4:11-12 'But to those on the outside, everything comes in parables so that they may look and look but never perceive, listen and listen but never understand.'

Trick the mind, not the person. Symbolism may convey something you can't understand through normal conversation.

I'll grant this. However, I'm willing to say that most literary criticism is based off of imagined rather than real symbolism.

DavidW, what was the book?

Don't recall, sorry.

I wholeheartedly disagree.

I know literary criticism is about as popular as Windows ME here, but reading good examples of it can be as enjoyable as the text itself(1). Of course there's always the question of how much authority the critic has -- but it's kind of like having someone with a lot of expertise explain the Linux kernal to you, even if it's not Linus.

To your last point -- I feel bad for you if those are the kind of books you had to read in high school. What were they?

(1) If you want to know what I'm talking about, try the Viking Critical Edition of Don Delillo's 'White Noise'. It has examples of criticism both of the kind I'm talking about and the kind that pg and others rightly mock.

I haven't read any especially good literary criticism, however (as I obviously failed to make clear) I do enjoy reading and discussing a book.

What I hated was attempting to mash meaning into every word in the story, even when there was obviously none intended by the author. An example I remember was when, in The Great Gatsby, it was mentioned in passing that someone had blue eyes, and the teacher went on and on about how that represented sadness, how it showed the economic differences between the classes, etc, etc. No, it meant that the eyes were blue. stop putting words in the author's mouth.

As for the kind of books that I had to read -- I found the Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood) to be utterly horrid. Bad writing, large plot holes, poor continuity, etc.

To be fair, many of them (eg, A Streetcar Named Desire) I disliked simply because I found the characters distasteful and unappealing. ("meaningless people with meaningless lives")

I got so fed up with discussing Phineas and Gene in high school that even the mention of them makes me convulse in hatred. That story did not just die while we were dissecting it. Its corpse rotted away and its bones decomposed completely, leaving nothing but a faint stench.

I can still hear my English teacher saying their names over and over again...

I really enjoyed Handmaid's Tale when I read it.

Of course, I didn't read it for school, which might make all the difference.

Me too. I found it fascinating. I also didn't read it for school, but ironically 'borrowed' one of the copies from the English class that was currently studying it.

it's called the Linux /kernel/

The arts and humanities are just terribly taught. People notice it more with regard to English than art or music class, because you have to take English every year pretty much anywhere, while usually you stop taking art or music before you realize how bad it is.

I had a lot of great science and math teachers and a few great history teachers. I had some good English teachers but none who were really great. I think that's because people with math and science degrees have plenty of job opportunities, so only the ones who really want to teach high school even consider it. Probably the best English teachers I had were baby-boomer or older women who would have done something else if not for workplace misogyny. As they retired they were generally replaced by ignorant young women.

I love reading and I can write lucidly, but I knew people in college who had had really strong English instruction and can analyze a novel on first reading in ways that wouldn't even occur to me after a month of full-time study.

I think part of the issue here is the nature of the beast--for most English teachers, teaching is less about showing their students how to successfully parse the symbolism and subtext, and more about clubbing them over the head with the teacher's own interpretation. I imagine it's easy to fall into that trap. If you give a student the tools to find the answer instead of just giving the answer, you risk the possibility of the student coming back with something you deem "incorrect". In quantitative subjects, it's easy to say, "Nope, that's wrong. The answer is this..." In the arts and humanities however, one can almost always argue for the validity of his/her interpretation. So, an English teacher has a difficult job. On the one hand, you can give your students methods to come up with their own interpretations of the readings (which will inevitably result in "incorrect" interpretations and conflict as the students fight with you over the validity of their ideas). On the other hand, you can teach your own answers, and encourage your students to lightly reinterpret and regurgitate them. In keeping with that old saying about teaching a man to fish, many (if not most) English teachers simply give their students the fish. So, when the pupils come upon a teacher that assumes they already know how to fish, they starve. Disclaimer: I was an English major in college, so this is based on my own experience.

This is perhaps why I went to grad school for Software Engineering instead of Computer Science: the mix of objective and subjective interpretation in the same course. e.g., one of the reasons I enjoyed my Patterns and Architectures course was the discussion around popular, useful patterns and when they fail, or when doing something generally considered the "right way" is a really bad idea. I hate being told "X" is the right answer in all situations.

Tolkien is a strange exception to that rule. You can get into endless debates about symbolism or about the influences that Tolkien built on, and end up enjoying his work more than you ever did before. I can't think of any other author who's like that.

That is because, unlike most authors, Tolkien was actually trying to put symbolism into his work--he wasn't trying to just write a novel; he was telling an epic. Being a linguist, he recognized that, in the many retellings of an epic, small embellishments are added in order to provide side stories and submorals.

Tolkien certainly isn't the only author who has ever deliberately inserted symbolism, though. He is, however, one of the few among them who isn't painful to read. There's certainly plenty of symbolism in D.H. Lawrence, but it was put there for the express purpose of being dissected by literary critics.

I'd argue that the subjectiveness of a paper isn't as totally devoid of a good method. If you, once you were out of the woods from writing you paper, read it you could probably tell the teacher what grade it should receive. If you couldn't, if she gave you a great paper, (say an A paper) and you could easily compare the relative merits of each paper. You'd know immediately if your paper was worthy of an A or not.

Its probably all the more difficult for the teacher to grade the lower end of the scale. Giving a B grade is probably pretty easy. The paper was pretty good, but not an A. From there on down it gets difficult to wade through the errors and bad constructions to figure out if perhaps the ideas were of B quality but everything else was a C or D. I'll bet that the lower end of the scale is the most difficult and gives the most grief.

Its like judging climbing routes. They have this whole rating system (5.8, 5.9, 5.10a, 5.10b, 5.10c, 5.10d...) that is wholly subjective, much like an english paper. However, if you were told that something was a 5.10a, and you could climb it, you could surely judge climbs around it. "oh, well that climb was pretty hard, I just barely made it after several tries at the crux (the hardest move). It must be a 5.10b or c."

On a side note, grading "quantitative" tests isn't easy or grief free either. Math tests with lots of mistakes are frustrating. You want to give as much credit as possible for correctness, but for a multi-step problem, how does one assign points for correct ideas but incorrect implementation. What if they screw up the first step, that didn't allow them to do any of the other steps, but they had the right idea for those? Its quite challenging.