English class, stop killing frogs
Does literature analysis ruin stories?
Analyzing humor is a bit like dissecting a frog: You learn how it works but you end up with a dead frog.
Switch out ‘humor’ for ‘text’, and you’ve got yourself the experience of a English class literary analysis. And I’m not just writing this because I got bored in English, and went through a why-am-I-learning-this crisis (who hasn’t?).
Genuinely, there’s some problems with this.
First things first, why do we even analyze literature?
To appreciate literature
One reason could be to understand the story and author more, to further appreciate the writing.
School sure as hell failed that.
From a survey that I sent out to my school, (which got 200 responses), 46% of those who enjoyed reading didn’t enjoy class literature analysis.
If this 46% were students who didn’t enjoy reading, that might be more understandable. But we’re talking about people who already like and appreciate reading and books.
Obviously, something’s gone wrong.
It can be agreed amongst most that reading is one of the best ways to improve your writing, and has tons of other benefits, as many articles have already talked about.
But if you’re only reading in class, it doesn’t matter if the class is to improve your writing, your appreciation of writing or whatever — you ain’t getting anywhere. You have to actively want to read, to continue learning outside of the classroom.
But, why in the blazes would anyone pick up a book and continue exploring literature, after the experience they went through in class?
And for that 46% who enjoy reading, will literature analysis kill their passion?
This is one of the responses from the survey:
‘It’s the equivalent of being sent to a guillotine, please just stop it and end our pain, even the guillotine or any other form of execution would be less painful than writing literary analysis. It just kills off everything I like about reading. I hate my English teacher with a passion now because of that. I was enjoying The Sound of Waves but it just sucks now because of all the analysis I had to do on it.’
To improve your writing
At least school did a bit better on this.
Yes, we learnt about ‘literary and stylistic techniques’ through literature analysis — similes, metaphors, personification, repetition, rule of three etc etc. Those can come in handy when writing.
But writing is so much more then pieces of techniques, more than searching up words in a thesaurus. There’s passion, there’s experience, and there’s instinct, things you just can’t get from analyzing text.
Still, it would all have been fine, if only it wasn’t so —
Boring.
And I’m someone who loves reading, writing, and language. I’m like, that kid who reads a linguistics book in their free time.
If I’m getting bored, can you imagine the atrocious pain analyzing text would bring to people who didn’t like English?
A problem that I find here is that we keep on learning the same thing, over and over and over again. Just the topic of similes alone has been talked over in class for at least 6 years.
It’s actually bordering on absurd.
To understand the author’s message
Another reason could be to understand what the author wants to express.
But here I must ask…does it even matter?
Some time ago, I wrote a paragraph of fiction that was later on analyzed in class.
It was a very curious experience. In my writing, my classmates found new meanings that were unintended, and picked out phrases and ‘special’ words that were instinct to me.
What I intended didn’t matter, because in the end, it’s the reader who creates the meaning.
The story itself, the true story, is the one the audience members create in their minds, guided and shaped by my text, but then transformed, elucidated, expanded…by their own experience…” — Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game introduction, 1991
It’s practically a writing milestone to have your work misinterpreted — it means you’ve reached a wide, varied audience.
And if the author truly wanted to tell the reader something specific, they would write is so their intended audience would be able to understand, without having to write a freaking 500 word essay about it.
The problem is not literary analysis
The problem is that it’s mandatory, and the way it’s done in school.
Analyzing stories has its merits. I know people who do enjoy it, and frankly, occasionally I do too.
This writer, Krysta, shares some points on this — some people find that analyzing the hidden meanings is what makes literature come alive.
But, that shouldn’t be enough for it to be mandatory to everyone who attends school. There’s good intentions, but the way it’s done in school is just not it. Either that, or it just doesn’t belong in school at all.
Literary analysis…it’s meant to be personal and unique. But school is streamlined and standardized, and having everyone doing something different is hard to manage.
If you have a different interpretation from everyone else, you’ll rather not express it. Because there’s a risk in assessments — do something new, and you don’t know what you’ll get.
School doesn’t encourage nor breed the want to express your true personal analysis on literature. Without that, what are analysis essays but empty words, written just to pass the exam?
This response strikes home and cracked my heart a little:
“I love analyzing hidden meanings behind texts, but doing that in class takes all the fun away from it. Despite being asked for our views, I feel like there is a fixed interpretation that we have to use for class.”
Like so many things, the intent is good, but how it’s done isn’t.
So, now what?
Anybody can complain, but the hard thing is creating a solution.
And yes, it’s hard, so I don’t have a solution.
But I do have some key points:
Encourage opinion. One way could be to to have smaller classes. That way, it’ll be more like a friendly group discussion rather than listening to the teacher talk with occasional comments from the students.
Or on a bigger scale, you could change the exams, perhaps by giving feedback through usual class work rather than a one-time exam — quite a few responses to the survey said that exams affected how much they enjoyed literary analysis.
Some things are just meaningless. Sometimes, a blue curtain is just a blue curtain. Sometimes, a character’s name is their name just because it sounds nice.
Not everything is so full of meaning, and some details are just details. Without actual evidence from the author, it’s all pointless conjecture, and we pretty much become literature conspiracy theorists.
Let the students choose the story. Okay, I get it, sometimes we don’t know the texts that will be best for analyzing — that’s not our job. But, you know, it makes sense for us to have a say before we dedicate hours of time into our work. This article has the right idea:
“Students should be given the agency to decide if they want to wait to interrogate those [the story’s] themes until after they’ve read the text again, as a writer.”
You may have noticed, there’s something in common with literature analysis texts — Most students only read them because they have to.
Once upon a time, Shakespeare was the hot new entertainment of the Elizabethan Era — what viral YouTube videos, or teen drama books might be to us now. But to your average student, it’s synonymous with boring essays.
Why can’t we analyze the Hunger Games? Harry Potter? The Queen’s Gambit? The Pandava Quintet?
Honestly, I’m a bit apprehensive putting this idea out there…because if this is the only thing that were changed, it would make things 100 times worse.
I don’t wanna hate those books, ok?
From the survey, quite a few older students mentioned their experience of analyzing The Sound Of Waves (Yukio Mishima), and how the analysis killed it for them.
I couldn’t help it…I went to borrow the book ASAP, because I just had to enjoy the book first, in case it becomes another dead, dissected frog.
One person cannot fix a problem like this, and the points above are rudimentary and only just a start.
If you’ve got anything to add, I would love to hear your ideas, and perhaps, one day English class will become delightful again.
