Friday, August 31, 2018

I'm getting sick of lit-crit

I know this makes me somewhat hypocritical as a critic, but I have come to despise a lot of modern literary critique. I see so many reviews and analyses that have to be ignorant of either context, the source material, authorial intent (Yeah, I know, Death of the Author and all that) and even the content of the work itself. Why do people do this? Is there some benefit to it? If so, what? What benefit is there in ignoring the objective truth for the sake of a thought experiment? There is such a thing as objective truth and objective falsehood. There's also such a thing as objective nonsense, and I cannot say how many times I've seen articles written by people who were paid to write them who couldn't have had the slightest clue what they were talking about based solely on the fact that they either talked about things that didn't happen in the work being discussed, or went on at length about something that literally didn't matter and had no meaning at all.
This typically happens with recent movies such as Man of Steel, and classic literature such as the works of Shakespeare, various myths and legends, and songs as well. The Beatles notably wrote a few songs that were utter nonsense in an attempt to confuse literary critics who analyzed their music, at least if I still recall correctly. In fact, I think the entirety of Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol's artistic careers were attempts to destroy the people who tried to find meaning. Sometimes there's no greater meaning, sometimes a spade is a spade, or as Freud put it, "A cigar is a cigar."
Every time I see something like this, I'm reminded of a fictionalized, yet entirely appropos scenario wherein an author writes "The curtains were blue." and some literary interpreter or critic goes on some spiel about the curtains being some emotional symbol, when what the author meant was "The curtains were blue."

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