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<p>Plenty of non-literature communications obfuscate their true intent to such a degree that complex analysis is necessary to understand their true meanings.</p>
<p>Or do you just believe everything a corporation claims in its press releases? The government says there’s WMDs in Iraq - it must be true, right? They’d never lie. Would they?</p>
<p>Learning to critically analyze writing and other forms of communication is a key skill for life.</p>
<p>While I do agree that authors do put in certain symbols in their literature, sometimes English class can go a bit overboard on the analyzing. I wish teachers would just let a story be so I can actually start enjoying it without having to hunt down the vaguest or most obscure of symbols to find some inner and deep meaning.</p>
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<p>Look at this material presented at the UN supposedly proving the existence of WMDs:
<a href=“http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB80/wmd28.pdf[/url]”>Home | National Security Archive;
<p>The intended meaning is not hidden or obfuscated; it is a manufactured lie.</p>
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<li><p>You cut out the first part of my argument. I’m saying that it reinforces bad behavior to teach that obfuscated literature is well-written and that there is the potential for students to take such lessons to heart and lower their own communication standards.</p></li>
<li><p>Turn: If it is important to learn to critically analyze press releases or other real world written works - and I think that it is - that is exactly what English courses should do instead of teaching traditional literature. Wouldn’t it be more useful to examine propaganda such as the linked presentation above and determine how the authors are able to create a false message? Wouldn’t that better prepare students to examine the real world through a critical lens?</p></li>
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<p>
I lawled.</p>
<p>^ Whoa, my bad! That’s what I get for revising a few words quickly and then failing to proofread the whole sentence.</p>
<p>Of course, maybe this is just additional empirical evidence supporting the hypothesis that traditional English courses are failing 
</p>
<p>"Plenty of non-literature communications obfuscate their true intent to such a degree that complex analysis is necessary to understand their true meanings.</p>
<p>Or do you just believe everything a corporation claims in its press releases? The government says there’s WMDs in Iraq - it must be true, right? They’d never lie. Would they?</p>
<p>Learning to critically analyze writing and other forms of communication is a key skill for life. "</p>
<p>LOL! True, we should constantly question the reliability of the information we receive. But literature does nothing to help us do this! How can it? </p>
<p>What will help us help ourselves from being deceive is knowing facts and knowledge. For example, you brought up the government. To prevent ourselves from being deceived, we should take an economics and American Democracy class so we can find out how it would benefit the government in lying to us. How would literature help us in in detecting false information?</p>
<p>@noimagination, i agree with you 100% on everything you said in this thread. You are truly brilliant. I just took AP literature, which made me realize that analyzing literature is utterly useless. I was on the verge of not being able to graduate from high school because my literature class! Can you believe that? I’m was and still on my way to one of the nation’s top ten best public universities, with a high SAT score and GPA, but was about to have my admission taken back because all the essays did not agree with my literature teacher’s POV. Why should we be forced to study something completely subjective in order to graduate? We should instead have another grammar class. Many, if not most, high school graduates can not compose a grammatically correct sentence, despite being able to compose the “best” analysis essays in their literature classes.</p>
<p>They teach teachers how to analyze literature so they can teach other students how to analyze literature.</p>
<p>In Laymen’s terms, it exists so english teachers and college professors can have a job.</p>
<p>And you can learn how to write better by reading from the works of authors.</p>
<p>You can learn techniques and styles and bits and pieces here and there and mix it in with your own finishing touch to make a style all your own.</p>
<p>The problem with analyzing literature is that sometimes such claims that such story has a meaning, even though that’s not what the author meant.</p>
<p>An example is Ray Bradbury being told by students what his book, Fahrenheit 451, was actually about.</p>
<p>Another example is the Beatles.</p>
<p>Literature is a form of art. There is no more point to analyzing it than there is to analyzing a picture. That being said, just as some painters are objectively better than others, some writers are objectively better than their peers. </p>
<p>Someone like Stephanie Meyer might just throw some emotional crap together and pander to the idiots. But, truly I tell you, there is nothing quite like reading a great work from a classic writer and being forced to think about what they are saying.</p>
<p>My appreciation for Dante, Homer and Milton is on par with my appreciation for M.C. Escher or John Williams. They all bring something to the table worth taking a closer look at. </p>
<p>What about movies? I would say that analyzing movies can be a guilty pleasure. People like Tarantino to Christopher Nolan are revered because they consistently create thought-provoking works of art. Literature is no different.</p>
<p>tl;dr: Literature deserves to be analyzed just as much as movies, music and art. </p>
<p>All this is coming from an aspiring geneticist, mind you.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Do you realize that studying how to solve a geometry proof or how to bond two molecules or write a computer program might be considered impractical and useless to some people who never plan to use these skills or information?</p></li>
<li><p>You may not realize this, but critical thinking is the basis of all we know and all the disciplines we now have to study and rely on to see the world, create new things, and solve problems, including getting along with other people and see their points of view.</p></li>
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<p>There are different schools of thought about HOW to read and analyze literature, which have different assumptions about the writing process, language, the importance of culture and history, and so forth. </p>
<p>Science and Math did not get created in a vacuum. The prevailing culture and philosophy of the time, the thinkers and cultural leaders all contributed. Literature understanding may actually get you to be a better mathematician- you will questions how things are done and why!
It is quite interesting to stand back and question where a teacher is coming from, what their training is, any possible biases and preferences and influences. Reading a book is like opening up your own mind to another world, and the mind of the author and your teacher and your classmates.</p>
<p>Yes, in Math and Science, it would appear initially that there are objective "right’ answers. But there are usually different ways to get there! A different formula, a different proof, an different order of equations, different graphical representations. This is also a kind or writing and literature.
And, there is an aesthetic quality to math and science- the elegantly simple solution or proof or computer code, the symmetry found in nature, the connection between number, words, ideas, and images…</p>
<p>You are a product of your culture and your time. Learn about it and then compare it to the past. Think about how important it is to be able to communicate what you think is important. And learning to read deeply will give you more ways to hear from others who have something important to say!!</p>
<p>The really big problem with analyzing literature is that the teachers tend to dig meaning, or make the students dig meaning, out of things that don’t have it. For instance, Shakespeare didn’t write The Taming of the Shrew to have a couple dozen of people in an English class somewhere discussing whether Petruchio’s childhood influenced his mannerisms towards Kate. He wrote it to make people laugh.</p>
<p>Answer: to fabricate beautiful BS for your English teacher, who responds by exclaiming “Ohhh good insight!” and gives you A+'s on all your essays.</p>
<p>On a more serious note, analyzing literature reveals the author’s message. And when people over-analyze an author’s writing, I think the author him- or herself didn’t write to include all the minute details, but it just turned out that way because of his or her thought process. (Does that make any sense at all? Lol)</p>
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<p>I have seen this to a certain degree. I agree, sometimes literary analysis is taught poorly. For example, sometimes teachers make you analyze every single line of a 150 page book (worst English class ever). However, other times literary analysis can give you a deeper appreciation of the text and helps you lay out your thoughts clearly. By laying out your thoughts clearly, your thinking is sharpened. This is a very good thing. I think it’s stupid to suggest that literary analysis has “no point.”</p>
<p>I absolutely love analyzing literature.</p>
<p>Analyzing literature is fun, classics like Dickensian novels etc. usually have a deeper meaning than the story itself.</p>
<p>I’ve never analyzed literature. I did analyze some salts once, but that wasn’t very interesting.</p>
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Which ones?</p>
<p>Having kids analyze literature is a pedagogical tool more than anything else, is how it seems to me. And being one, it has certain limitations in terms of how meaningful a metric it can be (this, the meaningfulness, being in terms of its ability to gauge students’ capacity for higher-order thinking, the type of thinking that gets the books written the kids read, etc.) </p>
<p>It functions to standardize what would otherwise be something difficult to evaluate by making the kids all read and analyze the same text (and not write on whatever they would want, which, arguably, might be better in some ways). But the books have to be open ended, they have to allow for multiple interpretations; but they also have to be constrained to some extent - they have to allow for concrete interpretations; they can’t be too confusing or ambiguous. Of course then the problem is finding such a book, which is really kind of a hard task (a lot of books write themselves - the author has no obvious or intended message). </p>
<p>uh, noimaginations’ points (which truthseeker endorses) I also agree with. Like truthseeker, the system (of having kids analyze literature) hasn’t worked very well for me. I failed my most recent english class (which is very sad) and didn’t graduate because of it; yet in the one before that I did very well. Teachers’ equivocal weighting of different aspects of writing (i.e the ones who appreciate kids who show careful thinking vs. the ones who are very strict with regards to format) - the subjectivity involved - has made it quite hard for me.</p>
<p>.</p>