The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
English help.
Mim
dead.Registered User regular
dead.Registered User regular
Man, I feel all over these boards lately.
Well I recently became an English major at my school. The school itself doesn't have a simple writing major or I would have switched into that. That's not a problem though, I do love to read and I think there are tons of things I can learn from this.
I did take AP English in junior and senior year of high school but my junior year I was suffering from a severe case of depression leaving me to be in and out of the classroom and apathetic about everything around me. Senior year we focused more on poetry and the difficulty from that lead, again, to some apathy. All my fault really.
Now I'm really wanting to learn about themes and I'm actually doing my reading assignments and trying to figure everything out. I feel behind however and that whatever I say in my English class sounds dumb (to myself). I feel as though I'm only getting half the story and I can't figure out how to get the full meaning out of it. I know annotating helps with this, but I'm not sure if I'm doing it correctly or if there is even a correct way to annotate it.
I know that there are no real wrong answers when it comes to analyzing literature but I'm still getting the feeling there is.
So H/A how do you properly analyze literature? What are your annotating tips and tricks? Any useful books I could pick up or websites that will give me the chance to really understand the reading material I'm given in class? Is it simply re-reading the text twice or is there something more?
Like our last text was "The Lottery" and though I tried to read closely, I still couldn't figure out the theme! Though in the author's other text "The biography of a story" she said there really was no meaning to it (if I read that correctly).
TLDR: Help me figure out how to analyze literature and annotate text the right way. Website and book recommendations a plus.
Well I recently became an English major at my school. The school itself doesn't have a simple writing major or I would have switched into that. That's not a problem though, I do love to read and I think there are tons of things I can learn from this.
I did take AP English in junior and senior year of high school but my junior year I was suffering from a severe case of depression leaving me to be in and out of the classroom and apathetic about everything around me. Senior year we focused more on poetry and the difficulty from that lead, again, to some apathy. All my fault really.
Now I'm really wanting to learn about themes and I'm actually doing my reading assignments and trying to figure everything out. I feel behind however and that whatever I say in my English class sounds dumb (to myself). I feel as though I'm only getting half the story and I can't figure out how to get the full meaning out of it. I know annotating helps with this, but I'm not sure if I'm doing it correctly or if there is even a correct way to annotate it.
I know that there are no real wrong answers when it comes to analyzing literature but I'm still getting the feeling there is.
So H/A how do you properly analyze literature? What are your annotating tips and tricks? Any useful books I could pick up or websites that will give me the chance to really understand the reading material I'm given in class? Is it simply re-reading the text twice or is there something more?
Like our last text was "The Lottery" and though I tried to read closely, I still couldn't figure out the theme! Though in the author's other text "The biography of a story" she said there really was no meaning to it (if I read that correctly).
TLDR: Help me figure out how to analyze literature and annotate text the right way. Website and book recommendations a plus.
BlueSky: thequeenofchaos Steam: mimspanks (add me then tell me who you are! Ask for my IG)
Mim on
0
Posts
It doesn't help that I've had teachers of the opinion that the author's intent is meaningless, if a reader can intrepret something in a way, then that's how it is. Which reeks of bull to me.
I guess my point is, if you don't see anything deeper there, there might not be. If a character says he likes grapes, maybe he just likes grapes, and it's not a telling insight into his childhood sexuality or something.
You're a smart man.
I've actually heard that argument (I posted on an LJ community) that the author's intent was meaningless. So it seems like a common train of thought.
I don't want to use cliffnotes, I want to really try my best at being an English major because it feels right for me to major in it. But I don't want to fail it either. I know not to analyze a text about marriage and say its about godzilla running through Japan. But I do want to go "When I read this, I felt that the story was really about loneliness, by these sentences here and here and how it really effect someone's ability to fit in with society".
Because right now, when I say something like that, my teacher goes "Yes, but what else?" and I'm really thinking "THERE IS MORE?!!?? WTF LADY?!?".
Not that's she's a mean teacher or anything, she's actually quite nice.
You don't need more books or whatever to help you, you just need to keep going to class.
For The Lottery, one theme is adherence to tradition. Another is ancient rites in modern times. Generally it's "old stuff that happens that doesn't make sense any more, but still happens anyway. And to the main character, of course."
What's the theme of Catcher in the Rye? Boy is depressed at becoming an adult. Lord of the Rings? Perserverence through adversity. Of Mice and Men? The world is complicated.
It's usually really broad -- more broad than a basic plot. The movie "Eternal Sunshine..." has, as a plot, "boy, girl, memory erasing machine." The theme is "love is more than just memories."
As for speaking up in class, as long as you're not being obnoxious (aka dominating class discussion), don't feel bad saying what you're thinking. I've known a few annoying classmates who act obstinant and essentially try to dismiss discussion (stuff like "this is offensive, anyone who likes this offends me"), and they're usually shot down by the professor. But just because what you have to say sounds simple, it doesn't mean it's dumb. Similarly, if you don't understand something, that's the point of class discussion -- to ask and figure it out. Believe me, your classmates did not learn anything significant in high school simply by going to class. Some may have done more research into literature, but that just means they can respond to your question independently of the instructor.
But yeah, a lot of times meaning or thematics are complex and/or simple. For example, at my work I just worked on an article for an opera journal, discussing an opera titled "Moses und Aron." Well the name should be Aaron, as the author did not intend to refer to the hebrew name or old germanic names. He dropped the 2nd A so that the title would be 12 letters -- because he was a numerology nut and didn't want the title to be 13! How's that for meaning behind the title ;D
Generally that's what they're going to teach you at Uni.
I've also found that instructors do this because they have something specific they want to talk about, and they're trying to get one of the students to bring it up (so it's not just a lecture class).
So, in The Lottery, yes it's about loneliness, which you can see due to some sentences. But what about what *isn't* written? That's usually what those kind of discussions are about.
It's fortuitous that you're a writer because writing and analyzing literature can have a lot in common and the easiest way to explain it, as far as I'm concerned, is to look at it from a writing perspective.
Basically what you want to realize is that there are always observations you can make about the text. Whether they are right or wrong doesn't factor in to it, because the kinds of observations I'm talking about are questions of interpretation. The best way to start out analyzing in my opinion is just to try to see lots of things in the text. Grasp for something. If the prose is short at staccato, the writer might be trying to emphasize action or lack of time; if it's slow and lugubrious, they might be trying to draw out a scene to make it feel painful or poignant or whatever. Maybe this isn't what they're doing at all, maybe it's lugubrious because they're paid by the word, but the idea is to start making these connections.
Then you go deeper. You've got all sorts of things like "this part doesn't have an punctuation and I'm supposed to read it quickly" or "this character's internal monologue is much more detailed than the author's own descriptions so I'm supposed to think a lot of this is just in the guy's head." Once you start recognizing all these different things that may or may not mean anything at all, you can start matching them up to the actual meaning. Maybe the story doesn't have one single thing that it "means," but everything says something. Nobody just writes some piece of crap for no reason, or if they do, it rarely ends up being a subject of literary analysis by English majors. The kind of stuff you read, like "The Lottery," is going to have at the very least portions of the text that are written a certain way for a certain effect, and almost everything will have overarching points. The way you make it to these themes, especially the larger ones, is to try to fit what you've already picked out of the text onto some sort of framework you establish for the overall piece.
Basically you're taking all those chunks, all that discrete stuff that you noticed about the story that is all a result of the way the writer chose to write, and you're trying to fit a purpose to it by providing a framework for the story that those little chunks can substantiate. If something's anomalous, you could ignore it, but generally your best bet is to assume that everything that you identified as being important actually is important and is there for a reason.
This works as a process on each piece, but more generally it's a progression within you. At first when you do this, even picking specific parts out of the story to analyze will feel arbitrary or incorrect. You'll tend to think that the way the sentence is written or the way the story is structured or the way the character talks is just an accident of the piece, that the author isn't writing in some special code in every single word that you have to pick up on. When you do this, though, you just have to force yourself to see things.
As you do that more and more, it will become much easier to see these things. It's no longer arbitrary: you can see common threads between pieces, common ways that writers choose to emphasize something like monotony or excitement or lust or disdain or any of the millions of things people write about. Everyone doesn't do it in the same way, obviously, because every writer is different, but they're all writing about things and they're all matching their words to what they write about.
Even once picking these specific things out becomes easy, fitting them to the overall story is also going to be a challenge at first. You might see perfectly well that a writer chooses to make a certain section exciting or a certain character boring or a certain place distinct, but that doesn't suggest anything to you beyond "the author wanted to say something about that dude so they said it." What you do here is the same thing: you force it. In some ways it's easier to force it, because you already have a lot of evidence, and you just need to find some compelling way to explain that evidence as a part of the overall meaning of the piece. It's also harder, though, because this is the really deep part of literary analysis: not figuring out how an author chooses to convey things, but figuring out WHY those certain things were conveyed.
There are infinite reasons for writing, just as there are infinite ways of writing, so the sky's the limit as far as fitting all those chunks into a "meaning," but the more you do it, the more your internal bullshit detector is going to stop beeping at your explanations and the more you're going to realize that, if you take a close look at something you're reading, there are things there to discover, and in fact if you do it often enough, you'll find that for a lot of stories there is common agreement on a "meaning" and quite a lot of concurrence as to what sections of the story support that interpretation. It's good to pay attention to these kinds of explanations when you're first starting out, because not all pieces yield one explanation. "The Lottery" isn't a good starting place because there's not a lot of agreement on its themes or anything, but if you take something like The Great Gatsby, everyone agrees that it's about the American Dream, and everyone can point to a few parts that are clearly relevant to that interpretation. If it helps, you can look at stories like that, that have clear-cut themes that almost everyone agrees on, and try to see how the evidence in the story supports that explanation of a "meaning."
Do this enough, and you'll hopefully be able to suggest your own "meanings" even for complex stuff that not everyone can clearly agree on.
In the spoiler I've stuck a list of books off the top of my head that have widespread agreement on the themes, so that if you're a fan of any of them you can think back to your favorite parts of the book and try to discover what about that would make people support that interpretation of the book. Obviously all (or almost all) of these books have a lot more to them than just the one sentence theme I give, but we're talking about something everyone agrees on here. Some of them are exceedingly obvious, but that's perfectly okay. The idea is analyze WHY the book provides evidence for something that obvious, and HOW this evidence supports the obvious conclusion:
Catch-22 - Absurdity of war
1984 - Surveillance is bad / The government's influence on what is "true"
Animal Farm - Communism sucks
Moby Dick - Obsession with revenge
Lord of the Flies - Human nature is base
Invisible Man - Racism is dehumanizing
As for the "everyone is just making shit up" part: well, yeah, at first. That's the idea. The point is, for the books I've listed above, those themes are clearly not "making shit up." They're there, and almost everyone sees them there. Everything's not that easy, though, and "making shit up" is functionally indistinct from "hypothesizing about the meaning that the author has conveyed." Literary analysis would be a science if there was no "making shit up" involved. What it comes down to is supporting the shit you make up with evidence from the text, and your ability to both find that evidence and to interpret it in a way that leads to greater meaning.
tl;dr - just do it.
The associations made are drawn from previous works read and previous experiences had. You read something and it seems familiar to something else you've read or some other "thing" you know. It could be the familiarity doesn't come until you've been parsing it and listening to other people discuss it.
Or you read something and it evokes an emotional response and you want to understand why, so you look closer, re-read the passage, re-read the entire book up til that point, try to figure out why.
The way to increase "getting it" is to read the works with other and discuss or to increase your library of associations by reading more or by going out and "living more" to gain direct experience. You could read analyses of the works, though you need to be careful not to just wholesale take the interpretation and use it without giving credit where it's due.
I'm just wondering if maybe you're focusing on something that's not constructive: being able to read something and quickly turn out an analysis that is somehow complete.
It's never complete, there's always room for more interpretation. It's the teacher's job to prod you along.
If you're looking for easy associations look to other works. Almost everything written is informed by other works like the bible, Don Quixote, Ulysses, Shakespeare, Greek/Roman classics, works by philosophers, whatever.
The other nice thing about this approach is that nobody can argue with you. If someone were to try and say that the story was not about a goldfish (which it most likely isn't), that person automatically looks less intelligent than you. Nowhere in the story did it strictly indicate that it had nothing to do with goldfish, and to say so would only imply that a person was less insightful than you to the rest of your uninformed classmates. To really nail their coffin, you can add a tidbit about how the author was very fond of goldfish (or whatever subject is at hand) because it is highly unlikely that anyone would know otherwise.
That's very kafkaesque. ;D
http://www.ipl.org/div/pf/entry/48496
Cherry-pick the stuff that seems useful for you, but it's a good place to start.
More than that, you should probably get involved with more than just classes if you are serious about being a writer. Extra-curricular writing at school is appropriate, but if you want to find something online, there are many writer's workshop sites out there. I recommend Critters:
http://www.critters.org/
While Critters focuses on Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror, they have been around for a long time, and it's a good place to go reading. Don't jump into critiquing other people's work just yet... as with any Internet activity, lurk a bit, read a bit, and make sure you read all the darn FAQs.
The downside to this is that you've turned a quest for meaning into an effort to look smart by obfuscating things that it's generally agreed can be found in writing. Unless you truly believe that every single writer just writes random stuff for no reason other than what they think they can get paid for, coming up with a bunch of goldfish bowl crap that nobody can prove wrong gets you nowhere. I can claim there's a magic dragon in my garage that's incorporeal and invisible and tells me things, and you can't disprove that, but that doesn't get us anywhere. Literary analysis does get us somewhere, and if you go into it looking to learn instead of looking to appear intelligent (which I'm a little dubious about but whatever), you don't get anywhere.
On the count that I've ignored the quest for meaning in literature, I respectfully disagree. My goldfish story conveys a deep meaning, and in fact summarizes many popular stories we've all read. I interpreted the OP's post as not only a quest for meaning, but also one to be respected by his peers. While my response was only 46% serious, I do believe I have SOME ground to stand on. The likelihood that any student reads a story and is able to glean from it the author's actual meaning is next to 0. The stories we hold the highest in our society are those that leave the widest margins of reader interpretation. If you read Death of a Salesman and (by some bizzarre circumstance) were able to make the conclusion that it represented the story of a lonely goldfish's quest to break free, then you, my friend, have found meaning in literature. My example only meant to convey that there is no correct answer to these excercises, they only aim to teach you HOW to find meaning. Once you start looking at things in a very abstract manner, the concept often pops into focus.
On the count that my inability to disprove the existance of your magic dragon gets us nowhere, I also disagree. While I remain skeptical, I can't help but be just a little jealous of you.
What about annotation you guys? I know personal thoughts help but if I'm lost about themes how much does that help to jog my personal feelings?
Also, I do have some trouble with the "look at what's not being said" part of lit analysis because I always wonder if maybe the author just didn't write it or is it normally much more glaring than that? Or how a certain literary device is used unless it's blatantly obvious like in Alice Walker's "Color Purple".
I'm glad to be an English major, and I will strive to be the best at it (even though it makes me feel like I'm asking dumb questions sometimes) but I wish sometimes there was a set answer. Sometimes.
It is all up to you to seek it. Good luck
i believe that with subtextual meanings there is a 'right answer' a lot of the time. the problem is it's unavailable, and probably always will be. what you need to do is show that your interpretation is righter than the last guy's.
I don't think the OP is asking how to waffle through literature classes. I think the OP wants to get more value out of the classes, now that he/she has some premonitions of a future profession (a writer).
Well, I've not read Shakespeare, but the quick response woudl be "what is society if not an extension of family?" Especially when it comes to royalty -- royalty is useless without a society, without subjects.
I don't annotate, but I'm not an english major. It's a style thing -- some people really like to highlight or keep notes. I tend to generally "space" a book/text in my head, kind of like "which half of the book, ok which half from that point, ok skim no it's before here, no after here, ok here it is" and for me it's as fast as having a highlight or note. But that's because of how I am, not because it's right or wrong.
Read more Salinger. Catcher in the Rye is pretty lame if you just read it straight. All of his other texts are also pretty blah if you just read them literally. Granted, Salinger is also a recluse so there's no "right way" to read the texts, but the stuff that's out there is very much about what isn't being said, or what isn't literally in the text, without being whimsical or flighty.
Plus you'll be able to do it in a weekend; most of his stuff is short stories and there isn't very much.
The thing I personally like about Salinger is that it's not laden with symbolism or "cleverness." I had a great deal of classic literature ruined by overzealous high school teachers who put a lot of emphasis on different "symbols" in the text, and it just made me feel like the author was being terribly clever with it all, rather than writing a story.
After all, the point of writing is to reach your reader, not to impress on them how clever you are. That's also why I've never been able to start House of Leaves.
There's plenty of set answers. The thing is, there's no point in discussing the set answers. It's like "Did Frodo complete his quest?" Of course, but that's not the interesting part. Why did he do it? Well there's a couple answers to that, and it's more interesting to talk about.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_theory
It'd be good to briefly read all the entries on the different schools, as it'll give you a good idea of how to look at a text.
As an English graduate, my major philosophy was to form my own opinion about the theme (or whatever I had to write or talk about), then make sure I had evidence to back it up. I read with a highlighter in my hand, marking any passages that I thought were particularly important. I also used an index card as a bookmark, and I'd write down any thoughts or ideas that hit me as I was reading.
It's also helpful to do a search in the academic journals about whatever it is that you're reading. It'll give you a good overview of scholarly opinion on the work you're reading and can open you up to new ideas. They're also incredibly useful while writing papers. You can generally access them through an electronic database at the library and often times you can use it while at home or in your dorm.
Beyond all the grammar classes I'm going to sign up for later in my degree. Which, how are those by the way? Are they going to drive me insane?
Also, I recommend figuring out now what the hell you plan on doing (realistically) with your major. I'm going back to get certified as a teacher because English majors aren't really so much at the top of everyone's most wanted employees list right now. YMMV, of course, depending on your other skills and your location.
This isn't exactly true. If someone tells you Robert Frost's "Stopping in the Woods" is about a bank robbery, what they haven't performed isn't analysis, it's creative extrapolation and they are wrong.