this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2026
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Also:
English Teachers: "Lets now analyze and decode the deeper meaning the author meant in chapter 23 paragraph 6" Authors: "There was supposed to be a deeper meaning?"
English Teachers: “You are already dead"
Salman Rushdie: "I know that was figurative, but it still hurts!"
Salman Rushdie:"I support genocide and zionist fascism!"
English teacher: Omae wa mou shindeiru
Authors: Nani?!
[HORRRID SCREEEEECH]
Being able to analyze a piece of writing for authorial intent, conscious and unconscious, intentional and unintentional, is a good skill to have.
That's not even getting into understanding metaphor, simile, and symbolism in writing which can also show the author's intent and how the author views topics.
A fun little example by me:
I was velociraptoring around the kitchen at 2am.The cheese cried out, but it's pleas fell on deaf ears.
There's a lot that can be interpreted from those 2 sentences. Why was it written? What does it describe? What metaphors are deployed and why? What symbolism is used? Why was symbolism used? How does the writing make you feel? What was the author doing in their kitchen at 2am? How does the author view their actions at 2am? And on, and on, and on the analysis can go. And it only stops when you choose to get off of Mr Bone's Wild Ride.
Now a less fun example is the kind of language someone might deploy when describing a group of people they do not like. How would a fascist report on a crime? A new food bank? The results of a sporting event? The release of a new video game? A new movie? Etc, etc, etc.
Being able to parse media is the biggest defense against being manipulated by propaganda.
So take the time to take a proper gander at the media you see and consume.
EDIT: TLDR Media Literacy is a learned skill that anyone can and should learn and practice.
EDIT2: me seeing the results of praising media literacy in an anti-media literacy thread
Sometimes the curtains are just blue
And sometimes they're not. The point is to know how to recognize when there's a difference.
Death of the Author is real and the creator doesn’t really matter once the art is finished.
I got smacked down so hard when I suggested that instead of identifying symbolism and metaphors in the writing we should be looking at the author's intent in the context of their time.
Author intent stops meaning anything outside the head of the author anyways. Individual perception is the only source of meaning. No one can understand a subject without the context of their culture and personal experiences. Hence why two people can interpret the same subject in different ways that are both valid.
That may sound overly reductionist, but that's genuinely what it boils down to. Someone's artistic intent could be pretending to be stupid to prove a point, but if the audience only sees a stupid person, the author has no control of the message.
In the context of they sorts of literary analysis done at the high school or early university level, there does end up being a right and a wrong. Maybe that's what turned me off to that sort of discussion: the downplaying of my experience with a work in favor of the "right" interpretation.
This is a common low-level approach to literature, but I think it’s a really stupid and bad approach. In some ways, it’s a response to the political demand to quantify and standardize education. I think it turns many people away from reading.
That’s because you can never know the author’s intent. That’s a very outdated (and very overdone) way of thinking about literature. It’s also one that we have realized isn’t actually very useful for the purposes of most literary analysis. While it can be useful to look at the historical conditions under which the text was produced (New Historicism), there is much more insight into what literature “means” when we look at aspects of the text itself such as symbolism and metaphor, because these aspects can evolve with the text and with time and with the reader, and this unfolds many more possibilities about ourselves and the work of art. There is certainly a place for combining New Historicism with other forms of literary analysis to use knowledge about the historical conditions to inform the interpretations of things like symbolism and allegory, but attempting to ascertain the author’s intentions is a futile endeavor that usually makes for a lackluster analysis.
You're obviously levels beyond me understanding and analyzing literature, and I defer to what sounds like your knowledgeable position. Maybe I always missed the point, maybe I had teachers who weren't that great, or maybe I am just not wired for it. Analyzing a fictional character's motivations seemed like asking why grass is motivated to be green.
Honest question: if I was interested in expanding my mind on this topic could you recommend some reading? Or is this the sort of thing only years of study would help?
It’s more likely than not that your teachers kinda sucked. I found that very little of my English and literature education prior to undergrad taught me much about what literature even is, let alone how to interpret it.
If you’re interested in expanding your mind, there are plenty of resources you can do it with, but it might be best pursued under some sort of tutelage. If you’re particularly self-motivated, you can pick up a book on literary analysis (I recommend The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends) and read about the history of literary criticism and analysis. But be warned—the reading is not easy, and some things will likely go over your head or remain indecipherable. Derrida is a mindbending trip and Lacan doesn’t make much sense to even the most advanced readers on a good day.
Otherwise, I’m sure there are some YouTube classes on literary analysis (see if Crash Course has any!) or find some classes at your local community college!
Honestly, even reading through the Wikipedia pages on literary criticism and literary theory would give you a good starting point. You can start learning about the various approaches and schools of thought, their strengths and weaknesses, and figuring out how you can apply them to the stories in your life. As you dig deeper, you’ll start to see some of the big names cropping up, and if one particularly interests you, there are tons of PDFs that you can find online.
Well that, at least, makes sense in that it's really just an exercise in finding evidence for your argument.