The books high schoolers complain about analyzing for symbolism have really obvious symbolism

Odradek

Lord Of The Flies

Animal Farm

The Raven

The Scarlet Letter

Obā-san

that is what makes it intolerable

A

Princess Alice

Today is Tomorrow said:

that is what makes it intolerable

A

well yeah but...do you really think totally uninterested high schoolers would actually be able to competently analyze fiction that doesn't make its symbolism blatantly obvious?

Crystal

I enjoyed reading The Scarlet Letter for all the tediousness others felt. Or something. Kinda just woke up.

glennmagusharvey

Crystal said:

I enjoyed reading The Scarlet Letter for all the tediousness others felt. Or something. Kinda just woke up.

I feel that same way.

The Scarlet Letter should have been annoyingly difficult for me to read, but for some reason the story and its emotions made sense to me.

Salix Babylonika

Central Avenue said:

Today is Tomorrow said:

that is what makes it intolerable

A

well yeah but...do you really think totally uninterested high schoolers would actually be able to competently analyze fiction that doesn't make its symbolism blatantly obvious?

honestly I think we tend to severely underestimate the mental capability of teenagers, so yeah.

I'm not saying toss them Finnegan's Wake or anything, just not something that's so "there is one right interpretation and that is how you will interpret this book if you want to get an A".

Calica

i found the scarlet letter hard because just parsing the sentences was hard tbh

Crystal

Calica said:

i found the scarlet letter hard because just parsing the sentences was hard tbh

I actively enjoyed that. :v

glennmagusharvey

Crystal said:

Calica said:

i found the scarlet letter hard because just parsing the sentences was hard tbh

I actively enjoyed that. :v

Same here.

This was a strange contrast to other non-contemporary-English literature works, for me.

I remember I read other things like that and didn't enjoy it.  Wuthering Heights, and probably also Great Expectations, for example.

glennmagusharvey

Well I'm not sure it was the parsing that I enjoyed.

But there was something about its comparatively overwrought lingustic style that made it appeal to me.  I don't know why, to this day.

Crystal

glennmagusharvey said:

But there was something about its comparatively overwrought lingustic style that made it appeal to me.  I don't know why, to this day.

I'll be reading it again sometime - perhaps this summer? - to see if I can find why it clicked with me, and if it still does.

Unlike you, I thoroughly enjoyed Wuthering Heights. I think at least a part of it was being the right book at the right time.

Obā-san

the Scarlet letter just felt

condescending in the easiness/obviousness

Klinotaxis

Today is Tomorrow said:

the Scarlet letter just felt

condescending in the easiness/obviousness

i haven't read scarlet letter but i tried young gordon brown and well


(hark, a vagrant)

Klinotaxis

ok well i thought it was gordon brown but it was actually goodman brown

with his wife faith

k dude

Sredni Vashtar

I liked "Young Goodman Brown". The ending, at least, is fantastic, and works on several levels.

My English class read Faulkner and Kate Chopin and The Things They Carried, so I can't complain.

Klinotaxis

it wasn't a bad story, just, damn dude leave a little mystery to it maybe

Sredni Vashtar

To be fair, Hawthorne was working at a time when that kind of heavily symbolic short fictional narrative was in its infancy in the West. He literally helped invent the form. He was also drawing heavily on the traditions of religious allegory and using them to subversive ends.

Klinotaxis

i did get that impression. the allegory thing i mean. but. i don't like reading religious allegories either, i guess.

Sredni Vashtar

Yeah, I'm not a fan of that level of obviousness generally, but I like how that story reads like a fable or a sermon, but the moral is very modern and very unsettling.

Odradek

People say analyzing books in school killed their love of literature, but generally people who say that didn't love literature farther than Goosebumps books.

glennmagusharvey

Baldanders said:

People say analyzing books in school killed their love of literature, but generally people who say that didn't love literature farther than Goosebumps books.

Well, analyzing anime on the internet is threatening my love of anime, but then again perhaps I never really categorically loved anime in the first place.

Princess Alice

Jane said:

Central Avenue said:

Today is Tomorrow said:

that is what makes it intolerable

A

well yeah but...do you really think totally uninterested high schoolers would actually be able to competently analyze fiction that doesn't make its symbolism blatantly obvious?

honestly I think we tend to severely underestimate the mental capability of teenagers, so yeah.

I'm not saying toss them Finnegan's Wake or anything, just not something that's so "there is one right interpretation and that is how you will interpret this book if you want to get an A".

"Uninterested" is the key word, here.

I don't doubt that many teenagers are plenty intelligent enough to handle literary analysis, but when a good chunk of them are only reluctantly doing it, well...I think that affects how much effort they're willing to put into it.

Klinotaxis

it's kind of like you're presented a jigsaw puzzle, and (sometimes) told by school that what you have to do is make the picture on thebox. but that's not how reading works and this analogy sucks ass