Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums High School I am very disapointed

Literary Analysis is the KEY to improving critical thinking.


As a scientist, I have to disagree that this is the ONLY route to critical thinking... just noting. It is certainly A key to it, though, and I don't disagree (at all) that it needs to be intensively modeled and explicitly taught to students.

The point is that they were supposed to be "taught" these skills in the junior high honors class. My son did fine (A-) in last years Humanities with strong writing grades. So I am unsure if past teachers did a poor job teaching the skill OR the fact that since he can string together a coherent & grammatical essay hid his lack of understanding.

They DO literary analysis in the honors English classes. They do a LOT of it, but don't spend a lot of time discussing the mechanics of writing it into a paper. A literary analysis paper is a different thing than writing a Social Studies report, or a lab report. It is also different kind of critical thinking than the analysis needed to understand higher level math for example. Looking for hidden meanings/themes in a book is a different skill than analyzing why a science experiment failed, or where the bug is in the code, or how to best build that mathematical 'proof'.

My own strength is math/computer science and I am a voracious reader. I made it through university without taking much literary analysis. Trying to understand "why" a writer thinks something is important something I find particularly perplexing. I do enjoy exploring the themes/moral of a story. But when I am asking "why" a writer wrote in one particular way I'm likely to say 'because it makes a good story'.

Yes, to my DH, literary analysis always feel fraudulent and highly speculative, to say the least.

DD similarly feels that much of it is tremendously overwrought... you know, that originally Jane Austen was probably not actually thinking terribly hard about the "symbolism" of particular word-choices, or anything. KWIM? On some level, it's like looking for deep meaning in Louie-louie or going into numerology with the phone book or something.

She's learned to fake it somewhat, no question-- but she's definitely a person who finds rhetoric an easier thing to learn, as much FUN as literary analysis is in discussion, anyway. She likes discussion in groups quite well-- but kind of takes the attitude that it means whatever you WANT it to mean to you personally, and that doesn't make it analysis. Overthink it if you want, but it doesn't change the original work of art/literature. This is like asking "What do you suppose da Vinci meant with that in the Mona Lisa?"

She really hates being told to write literary analysis in definitive terms and voice when she writes, though, using formal writing conventions. First person opinion-- not a problem... but definitive statements as though they were FACTS? No. I have to agree with her there-- it IS just her opinion, and it's subjective, her interpretation. So she writes it as so, but then gets dinged for being soft or 'passive' in her statements.

"One might conclude that..." and not "It is clear that..."
(My girl is SO like a scientist.)

[quote=HowlerKarma]Literary Analysis is the KEY to improving critical thinking.


Or, based on that statement, detrimental to critical thinking, leading to false hypotheses.

Wasn't this about the child's learning in the classroom or not? If the teacher is relaying the info, then the child is not paying attention, something that happens with HG. If the teacher is not relaying the info, then most kids should be having trouble. Talk to other parents.

DD has a bad grade 4 teacher. The other grade 4 teacher is good. Happens. I talked to other parents, they feel similarly, I respond by taking DD more by the hand when she does a project. Showing her how to do her reference page. I ask her about the outline, if there is an outline for the project. I never had to do that in the last few years. It was done at school.

LOL

I think that the reason literary analysis is overdone in high school is that it is really the only academic subject where a student can have something approaching an original idea and then defend it using textual evidence (from the work itself). As long as whatever the idea is can be supported with evidence, it's good to go. That it's really just a load of BS isn't relevant.

Despite what K-12 educators want to think, this generally can't be done until graduate school in the other academic disciplines. There is simply too much background knowledge needed to produce original work. Generally the undergraduate years are devoted to obtaining that background knowledge.

I always had the same problems. Plus it seemed presumptuous to say what the author meant.

Ah, no. There are better and worse interpretations of literary texts. Not, IMO, a load of BS to learn how to do this well.

It reminds me of the first time I answered a question something like "Why did the author write this story?"

"To make money by selling books" was not the right answer, as I quickly learned.

Perhaps-- but my impression has always been that it's mostly about how well one can defend one's assertions using the source material, and not necessarily what seems to be consensus about meaning or interpretation.

LOL at "presumptuous." YES. This is exactly how my family feels about artistic analysis in general terms. I've often wondered if Shakespeare wouldn't just shake his head and laugh at the "scholarly activity" and serious arguments in academia re: his works. Many indications are that he simply didn't take his OWN work that seriously as capital-A-Art." Oh sure-- he took his craft seriously as entertainment at the time, but the first folio wouldn't even exist if not for the fact that his FRIENDS thought he was something special.

I'm undecided personally about what that ultimately means for psychoanalysis of Iago or Ophelia, myself. In terms of basic legitimacy, I mean. I'm definitely not a revisionist-- and I think there is worth to consider what those characters reveal about basic, unchanging facets of human nature... but inherently, one might just as easily do the same with JK Rowling's characters, too, YK? Only difference is that we can ask the author what she intended, in the latter instance. Even so, all art (and certainly music and literature) tends to assume a life of its own that the creator never really anticipated/intended once it becomes "noticed." Many authors, composers, and artists are openly bemused/amused by this fact.

The other thing which comes to mind is a quote that I used to smile at on a colleague's door.


In the words of E.O. Wilson; “Scientists, being held responsible for what they say, have not found postmodernism useful.”


A riff on this pithy one-liner.

Okay, it's a little off-topic, but amusing-- at least to me-- in light of the current discussion.

There are some terrifically funny links toward the bottom of this oldie-but-goodie, too:

http://www.pathguy.com/postmod.htm
(Check out the Calvin and Hobbes comic toward the bottom. This is the strategy that DD has eventually taken as a high schooler. I call it the Dr. Strangelove school of rhetoric-- she learned to quit worrying about objective truth in literature, and write-write-write for word count and triple-word-scores.)
The postmodernism essay generator is a real hoot, too.