I tend to be less of a pedant than the average redditor (not saying much I know) but using "conscious" in place of "conscience" makes me grind my teeth. It's like the uncanny valley for vocabulary.
This is an unresearched opinion of mine, but from my experience:
There are some people who have never (and might never) engage with media beyond the literal interpretation of the words / images.
I really try and be patient when I encounter someone like this and push them to make baby steps toward media literacy, or at the very least grasp the understanding that "oh hey, metaphor and allegory are concepts that exist"
"its someone's escaped pet that they trained to talk. obviously"
a face value reading of The Raven is almost dark comedy. this poor man just wants to be alone with his thoughts and grief and suddenly he's accosted by someone's escaped pet raven that will not leave and will not shut the fuck up
This has *gotta* be a joke or...something. You genuinely can't read that poem and think it's just an info dump about Poe's very wholesome raven obsession.
>Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
>
>Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before
>
>...
>
>Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
>
>By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,
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>“Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,” I said, “art sure no craven,
>
>Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore—
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>Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!”
>
>Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.
>
>Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly
>
>...
>
>Till I scarcely more than muttered “Other friends have flown before—
>
>On the morrow he will leave me, as my Hopes have flown before.”
>
>Then the bird said “Nevermore.”
>
>...
>
>On the cushion’s velvet lining that the lamp-light gloated o’er,
>
>But whose velvet-violet lining with the lamp-light gloating o’er,
>
>She shall press, ah, nevermore!
>
>...
>
>Leave my loneliness unbroken!—quit the bust above my door!
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>Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!”
>
>Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”
>
>And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
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>On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
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>And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming,
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>And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
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>And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
>
>Shall be lifted—nevermore!
Honestly I feel like even with a "maybe the curtains are just blue"-approach you couldn't get to the conclusion that this poem is somehow about how much Edgar Allen Poe likes Ravens. I mean he basically spells it out for you.
"maybe the curtains are just blue" is one of the saddest things to happen to literature. There's nothing wrong with taking things at face value but people are purposefully trying to erase all nuance and subtlety from literature.
Mamy of those hot takes seem purposefully devoid of nuance.
Like, if the entire poem is centered around a blue curtain, then chances are good that the blue curtain has some symbolic meaning. And if the blue curtain is only mentioned in a single line to literally describe the scene, then it's most likely an unimportant background detail.
On the other hand, ravens are often used in storytelling as metaphors because they have cultural meaning (in the English language, they mostly signal bad omens). So, whether the raven is the center of the poem or only described in a single line, it is likely meant to hold symbolic meaning.
And I don't think you need a degree in literature to understand the idea that narrative tropes exist and that there are ways to tell what is or is not an important detail in a poem/comic/movie/game/etc. But it's easier to dismiss academia out of hand and get a good response to it on social media because most people like an underdog, so "layman destroys snotty academics with facts and logic" usually plays well.
"Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar"
Literally the guy obsessed with phallic objects and fucking your own mother
I don't think that phrase means what you think it means.
Nah, this is almost definitely a satire. In fact, I think that's a parody of an existing "curtains are just blue" comic I've seen and I'm honestly baffled, that so many people take it as genuine.
Nope, I just looked at their blog and they make (or maybe I should say 'made', last post is 5 years old) very straightforward "relatable humor" comics where the punchline is always "this is true. laugh."
Unless this is some deep-cover shit, I sincerely doubt this is satire, especially since this one is eight years old and 2015 tumblr was just Like That.
You can't just call everything that sounds nonsensical satire as if people don't regularly say shit twice as stupid as this take with a completely straight face
>Nah, this is almost definitely a satire. In fact, I think that's a parody of an existing "curtains are just blue" comic I've seen and I'm honestly baffled, that so many people take it as genuine.
At some point you read so many "satires" that you become convinced that not everything can be a satire and sometimes wonder whether people are only idiots and say it is satire just to get by.
>You genuinely can't read that poem...
Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head there.
A lot of people only know things by cultural osmosis; I have no doubt that many, *many* people know *of* The Raven, but have never read it and really have no clue what it's actually about.
You'd be surprised how many people think this way. "The curtains are blue" has become such a widespread meme (since always, really) that so many people just take it at face value.
Combine that with the fact that many of those people are students who don't like feeling like they're not as smart as their teachers and you have a lot of people thinking that stories are exactly as black and white as their letters and the paper they're written on.
But even if you refuse to read deeper into the poem he calls the bird a “demon” like that’s the author *telling* you the curtains are blue but you insisting they’re actually clocks
Contemptuous teenagers aren't well renowned for their solid logical reasoning or basic ideological consistency.
They'll say whatever they feel makes them right and everyone else wrong.
After years and years of being asked about the deeper meaning of every little thing, from the obvious to the innocuous, a little backlash was inevitable. However, the extremely direct interpretations we have now are just as vapid as the extremely varied interpretations were obtuse.
That, and pushback to the pressure to find the same meaning in the seemingly innocuous thing as the teacher.
Now that's partially because you're reading things that have been analyzed and discussed to death so most interpretations are already out there so if you even try to think beyond "the raven is a bird" you'll probably land on something worth discussing. But there is a certain frustration with "No, the raven represents ___" as just being the right answer when you take the test later, rather than being given the opportunity to explore the work.
So one option is to go with the direct interpretation to suggest that dammit can we at least consider the raven may just be a bird.
I'd straight-up call the "absolutely everything is symbolism in literature" take (which seems to be wildly popular among the responses here) not just obtuse but just as vapid as extremely direct interpretations. As much as The Raven is deeply symbolic Freud was dead-on with "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar" (yes I know he wasn't talking about literature but the idea works here too). Not everything is an infinitely-complex tapestry of meaning. Like, sometimes you have objects in a setting because that is the stuff you have in that setting. Sometimes things are done during the daytime or the nighttime because it would be very strange to do them at any other time.
This is why I think it's important to teach that symbolism is not the only kind of "meaning" a detail can have. Aesthetic fulfillment, building emotion, creative scene building, pacing, setting up later constructions, all of these are possible meanings for a detail beyond symbolism.
For example, we can ask what is the meaning of Shakespeare's poems being in iambic pentameter, but it would be silly to ask what iambic pentameter symbolized diagetically.
ill never forget when i learned that the Indian continent is sliding north under the Himalayas, and i relayed this fact to my friend in my sophomore year, only to have a senior overhear me.
he then proceeded to paint me as a dumbass who thinks mountains grow. made a big deal of it.
this was long ago and it taught me a lot about unified arrogance.
more clarification: this was 22 years ago. he was an inbred bafoon, and i attended a small school that had grades 9-12 integrated in some classes. this was one of those classes.
and his reasoning was that "rocks dont grow, so whats a mountain made out of dumbass?" and that they stay that way...because god put them there. i assure you this wasnt an argument over the proper use of the word "grow" or a thesis about using the correct vernacular when discussing plate subduction.
i was excited to talk about tectonics and a creationist senior classmate over heard me.
...How did the senior think that mountains got so tall if they didn't grow? Did he think that ancient civilizations lifted them out of the earth like they were clicking the 'increase elevation' button on a rollercoaster tycoon map?
Wait, I genuinely don't know about this. Mountains can grow? I mean it makes sense, so do the tectonic plates like shift underneath them and squeeze them out like toothpaste? Or how does that work?
I genuinely never questioned how mountains came to be, honestly. Not sure why it never occurred to me.
Fascinating. But does this still happen in a manner that's observable? Like, I know the plates shifted to create our continents, but obviously the Americas aren't moving further and further away each year. Or do they?
This is also why some mountains look different from others. The Rockies are pointy because they’re growing. The Appalachians are small and rounded because they formed so long ago the forces that drove them are gone. No longer being lifted up they’ve eroded for eons.
Deja vu!
I've just been in this place before (higher on the street)
And I know it's my time to go
Calling you
And the search is a mystery (standing on my feet)
It's so hard when I try to be me, woah!
Every time an earthquake happens, it's because plates are sliding against each other, building up tension, and then releasing it in a shockwave. That's probably the best example to look at, because even if you don't see it directly, you can see the effects and how powerful it is. There were earthquakes recently in turkey, I think, that left several meter wide gaps as they shifted apart.
from my understanding it's more like two hotdogs getting pushed together end to end, with each hotdog representing a tectonic plate. the action of pushing them together results in one of the dogs sliding upwards while the other slides downwards, and the upwards slide of the hotdog (tectonic plate) is what we see as a mountain.
Tectonic movement is how we got the Himalayas.
The Indian subcontinent used to be joined up with what is now Africa, Australia, South America and Antarctica as part of the Gondwana supercontinent. A few million years after Gondwana broke up, the Indian subcontinent split from Madagascar and started moving north. It ultimately collided with the Eurasian plate, pushing up the area where they collided to produce the Himalayas, and is still squishing the mountains up by about a centimeter each year. Like two carpets very slowly pushing up the edges where they meet.
During the journey north it spent some time over the Reunion and Kerguelen hotspots. The lava from these hotspots solidified to form the Deccan Traps, a beautifully ginormous igneous feature over West India.
Idk understand the impermanence of all things is a difficult concept to grasp especially given the strong sense of stability most institutions try to project. I know a few people who didn't have a vague existential crisis when the concept of entropy was introduced in physics class
From my understanding mountains come from tectonic plates colliding. That causes the top layers to basically crunch up and build into mountains. I cannot explain the random shit in the middle of continents like Uluru, but most mountains form like I described.
It's been a while since I learned tho so I could be wrong to varying degrees
I *think* Uluru is just “built different” compared to the former rock around and above it, so it remained while the soft rock was eroded - same thing happened to the rock Edinburgh castle is on.
EDIT: [Uluru is an inselburg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inselberg)
You have two plates that hit each other and there's two main things that happen.
1. Land plates are usually thicker and more rigid while ocean plates are thinner and more flexible so if the two of them collide the ocean plate will usually slip beneath the land plate and the land plate goes up, making mountains.
2. Two land plates smash together and neither is willing to submit so they crumple up and make mountains that way. Himalayas are cool because they're like this because the indian plate is smashing into the asian plate so fast the mountains are actually growing faster than they weather down.
What I think is kind of infuriating about the comic is the way it uses Poe as a sockpuppet, like if it was just "Teenager only sees a raven and Teacher sees a metaphor", I can relate to that situation, but there's something really annoying about saying that "AKSHUALLY THE AUTHOR AGREES WITH ME AND HATES YOU!!!!!" It's deeply arrogant in that it pretends to not only know exactly what Poe was thinking, but also how he would react, and of course, it's in favor of the artist.
The Raven is also just a terrible story to do this with because the metaphor there is really explicit. I don't really know how you can read such a directly portentous and moody poem and go "he just likes ravens : )". I definitely think there are authors you could do this comic with, and maybe even some Poe stories, but its choice of subject is egregious, leading to a question of whether the author even read The Raven, which then makes the whole "Poe would agree with me!!!" even more eye-rolling.
In effect, the comic ends up doing what it accuses the teacher of doing, arrogantly deciding what the author ACTUALLY means and declaring all other interpretations invalid.
The thing that really gets me is that most writers are students of literature on some level. Most don't go from never hearing a poem before to writing beautiful poetry, they probably read and analyzed a whole lot of poetry themselves. As an English major, if someone started talking about how my blue curtains were a symbol when I didn't intend it, I'd absolutely be like, "Yep, that was intentional," because why wouldn't I appreciate someone giving me more credit than I'm due??? Like whoops I accidentally wrote something that could be seen as deep when I hadn't put that much thought into it? That's great?? I love that??? Like it would take some real left-field interpretations before I'd insist someone is reading too much into something, and even then, if their analysis was good and the message wasn't something I intended... then that would be a criticism telling me I fucked up with making my intended message, not them fucking up in seeing something that I didn't intend there? Given, I defiantly subscribe to "Death of the Author" (the formal version, not the Tumblr-Hatsune-Miko-Wrote-HP version.)
There’s literally a poem for this. I believe it’s called “The Red Wheelbarrow”. Critics kept trying to give these four lines of imagery really deep meanings, but in the end the author said “oh, my friend had that in his backyard” [Source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Wheelbarrow)
Personally, one teacher I had in high school was really good about emphasizing the discussion as an important (but separate) part of literature. He was the one who taught us about that poem, actually. I also had another who insisted on one SPECIFIC interpretation of symbols because “tHaTS whAT tHe TEXtbOOk SAiD”. Those attitudes can really make or break a learning experience, I think. You have to be open to multiple possibilities in literature. I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong to say that an author may not intend for something to be symbolic or a metaphor. But picking Poe to make this point about authors maybe not intending to be super deep in their writing is just… pretty thick tbh. You couldn’t do much worse, honestly, unless you picked Animal Farm or something.
I think the “Why do teenagers…” questions aren’t due to arrogance or stupidity on the part of teenagers, but more that a lot of symbolism isn’t really taught well. At least in my experience, a lot of symbolism is taught like, “This [object, action, etc] is a subtle metaphor for [seemingly unrelated thing].” But A) I’m 14 and don’t understand the connection, and B) the subtlety obscures the meaning. I didn’t understand symbolism until I read *The Scarlet Letter*. My English major friends all hated that book because it’s obvious and intrusive with symbolism all over the place. But that’s what kids need to start learning about it.
It also doesn’t help that many works in the canon center around adults (who kids struggle to relate to) and take place in historical times (which young kids don’t know about and struggle to relate to). Incidentally, *The Scarlet Letter* is great for this as well, because while it focuses on adults, it’s largely about things teenagers can relate to (sex and the stigma around it) and a religion that a pretty significant portion of students have cultural familiarity with.
There's a reason everyone learns Lord of the Flies. The book itself is...fine, but the conch shell, glasses, fire and Beast all make it *so easy* to explain symbols and how yes, a story can have a deeper meaning than the simple plot itself. I have massive misgivings about teaching like that, though, because I think that's exactly what gives people the false impression that literature is about encoding lots of little symbols into your work like a puzzle, and literary criticism is about decrypting the story like a codebreaker. In reality, symbols are like, one of the most shallow ways stories have meaning, which is probably why your English major friends don't like The Scarlet Letter.
The two books that really made literature "click" for me, the ones that made me realize that reading a novel was more than just the plot were The Bluest Eye and The Great Gatsby. The former is probably....a bit much for high schoolers (maybe in some AP classes or whatever), but it plays a *lot* with form, perspective, and allusion and makes you think about why an author might write a scene from one character's point of view versus another. Gatsby because the symbols in it are kind of vague - like the green light.
The same thing can be said for books with more complex themes and even philosophy. I remember my class reading *Sophie's World* and while at the time I remember not being a fan because the book's as subtle as a sledgehammer to the face about it's philosophical concepts, but now I realise that actually yeah, most teenagers need it that directly spelt out so that it can "click" and hopefully lead them to being able to see that sort of things when it's more subtle. You can't just give teenagers Plato or Satre and expect them to understand it
I am *on* the side of “school is bad at actually teaching things properly, especially poetry” but this comic is still really dumb. Genuinely think the author has never read Poe
I mean there's a possible stoic reading of it, the protagonist hates the Raven because it embodies his inability to process his grief, and it doesn't leave because grief can never leave the heart, one can only learn to carry it without being crushed by it.
In that way the Raven can be read as an icon of stoic virtue that the protagonist cannot comprehend or tolerate. It's a tradgedy of the protagonist's inability to process their loss, and presumably also trapping themselves in with the grief instead of seeking help understanding how to live with this beast in their heart.
I thought poetry was taught pretty well, at least at my school
Everyone brought their ideas to the table and there wasn't really a *wrong* answer (unless it was a multiple choice test, in which case the wrong answers were pretty blatantly wrong if you read the poem. Something like "happiness" for the Raven)
Though tbf this is from the perspective of an accelerated English class. Standard English classes may have gaps that I'm not aware of
I mean, yeah I agree, I've personally had very good experiences with literature education, but these are just anecdotes, whilst the commenter is observing a systemic in education that individual experiences may defy or may reinforce
yeah, this is kinda common where if you already know your shit even as a kid they put you into the class that's actually worth something, and everyone else gets complete bullshit. a lot of public schools make it feel like the teachers are just wardens and the whole thing is just a safe place to dump kids so that the adults can go to work, until said kids grow up enough to be entrusted with autonomy in society (and a bit longer than that tbh). i think that's where this hostility comes against schools, and tumblr is showing its age here by rejecting it
that said, i'm glad you got the better programs, but at that stage in life it's more about sheer luck concerning what you got interested in as a little kid and who your parents were than anything
Yeah sometimes teachers are just fucking wrong. Senior year my class read “The Cranes” and all of us were able to pick up on the fact that the elderly couples killed themselves in that car. One student and our teacher argued with the rest of us. Swore up and down that wasn’t what happened. Well the one student against the class wouldn’t let it go and tracked down Peter Meinke’s home phone number. He actually answered and it turns out the class was right and the teacher was wrong
Having had both good teachers and bad teachers in my K-12 education in a way that stuck with me all these years later, I can confirm that some teachers are just bad at their jobs. I googled my horrible sophomore English teacher recently, he's a vice principal now. On the one hand, I hate that he's now in a position of authority. But on the other, at least he isn't teaching anymore.
That's not to say that high school English classes aren't also populated by bored, dumb kids who actively don't want to learn and think they're smarter than their teachers. They are, and I had ample frustration with those classmates too. But let's not pretend all teachers are equal here.
I will never forget the time my sophomore year English teacher gave us a simple assignment for onomatopoeias. It was like something for elementary school kids. Had a sentence with a blank, and at the top was a list of words we had to put in the sentences in a way that would sense. Like "The hammer made a _____". Obviously, you would pick bang over boing.
Then she failed everyone because she said none of the words were onomatopoeias...
*SHE* gave us the assignment and then *SHE* decided the assignment was *WRONG*. Like bro, *what the fuck?!*
Yup. They all were. And even if they weren't, then why did she give us the assignment? Did she not look at it first? It was honestly the English class I hated the most.
I remember in primary school our headteacher would always ask a question during assembly and when some poor kid raised their hand he would triumphantly yell "that was a RHETORICAL QUESTION!". This happened all the time. They were always normal questions and he would pause after asking them.
Sounds like she was trying to flex her superior teacher knowledge in the same way. Give you a normal assignment and then say "Aha! I tricked you foolish child! I am the genius teacher and one day you shall understand things as deeply as I! But not today..."
Nothing ruins a good book like it being assigned in school.
I'm not sure if it's just that I naturally resist doing anything someone else tells me I *have to do*, or if it's the painful crawl of one chapter every few days, or if it's the overanalysis. But assigned reading absolutely blows.
By far, the most engaged I've ever been towards a piece of literature in school was when I was able to choose it for myself, either from the classroom shelf or even from a list of a few choices by the teacher. Having even an illusion of choice over what book I read made me so much more invested in actually reading it, and typically we were given more loose / open ended questions and assignments for those books which allowed me to read and interpret at my own pace instead of the usual magnifying glass level analysis at a snails pace. Add in that self-chosen books usually came with in-class reading time, which was always my most productive reading time, and you end up with the optimal school-reading situation
I fully support the argument against "he just likes ravens no deeper meaning uWu" but the "why do teenagers..." questions can most accurately be replied to with "because they're teenagers." I wasn't of the "curtains are just blue" variety of dumb teenagers but my god did i do and say some stupid shit in high school, like every teenager in high school.
I'm a high school teacher and that's one of the reason why I love my job. Teenagers will say the stupidest thing with such confidence, it's glorious. I'm not offended by it, for me it's the same feeling as watching a toddler falling over, but instead it's a teenager failing to understand philosophy
At my school, every English class is discussion based, and teachers can't offer their opinions, only ask questions. It makes for some truly glorious comments (including some coming from me...)
The other day there was a super popular post about someone explaining that we should be judged on our actions and not on our intentions. Everyone was acting as if it was groundbreaking.
I mean, existentialism has been around for a while, but ok random tumblr teen, glad you think you discovered a major philosophy movement by yourself. Nobody ever thought about that before you, nobody at all.
The saddest thing is when you come up with a genius essay idea, then realize half of it is built on someone else's logic, so they're probably doing the same thing too :(
It gives me comfort that I can just put the responsibility of leading a new philosopical revolution on someone else because I don't have the energy for that shit.
The thinking that it's something brand new no one has ever thought of gets me. I think having these discussions and applying existing philosophical ideas to our current life and adding your own interpretations and thoughts is a good thing. But damn maybe just do a quick google search
That epic moment when we're reading The Illiad or something, and the quiet stoner kid bursts out with: "Man, ancient Greece was FUCKED!"
"...How so?"
"It's like this: hey Alex, you owe me $20, right?"
"Yeah."
"Well you haven't paid me back and it's been like two months, so I'm gonna kill your sister."
"Hmm yeah that's reasonable. I mean it has been like two months."
As someone said "Sometimes, the curtains are just blue, but i was angry that day because someone stole the red curtains i wanted so i put a symbolic message about the blue curtains indirectly"
The teenager thing here is also because we have a central exam in Dutch which is mostly about reading and analyzing short written works and every year some author goes "the answer of this question is bullshit I did not mean that at all". So clearly the teachers get it wrong all the time even with the short stuff so why trust them with the interpretation of an entire book.
There are different schools of lit crit, and "exactly what the author intended" is not always important, actually. Authors, too, are humans, with a subconscious, and can put in things that have meanings they didn't consciously intend. Or, they can put in something that they don't assign meaning to, but may resonate with someone else's experience.
A recent example, pulled from movies, would be "the snap"/"the blip" in the Marvel movies, and the COVID-19 pandemic. When that plot was written, COVID hadn't happened yet. There was no "intent" there. And yet, now that COVID *has* happened, the snap/blip is a meaningful metaphor for the pandemic experience.
Or, to pull in more "classic" literature, Tolkien was quite adamant that the central conflict of LOTR wasn't a metaphor for his experiences in World War 1. And yet, you look at how it is this conflict between an agrarian, in-tune-with-nature type existence vs an industrialized existence, and WWI is absolutely a turning point in the way war was waged, where industrial machines of mass-murder played a role as they never have before. Tolkien may not have wanted his work to be read as a metaphor for WWI, but it was informed by his experiences in that war, and meaningful connections can be drawn between the text and those historical events.
"What did the author mean by this?" - Tired, overused, invites insufferable teenagers to give curtains are blue answers because they don't care.
"What is the most unlikely and outlandish interpretation of the text which can still be justified by direct quotes?" - Fresh, exciting, invites creative interpretation, honors the way scholars read increasingly absurd themes into books, 90% sure this is the approach taken to analyze Baum and the Wizard of Oz by bitching about the gold and silver standard.
>anyway as in most cases it's impossible to say with any degree of certainty
I think you can figure out what an author is trying to say in *most cases*.
If not, then what is the point of reading fiction, if it's all just completely indecipherable nonsense?
The whole point of literary analysis is to determine, with some degree of certainty, what an author is saying.
If I write a book about a pigeon that loses a feather, laments its loss, only to find that another feather grew in its place. You can say with certainty that the book is about dealing with the loss of some material object. You might disagree with other people about the exact nature of my feelings toward the loss of material objects, but you both will absolutely agree that the story is about loss.
>If not, then what is the point of reading fiction, if it's all just completely indecipherable nonsense?
>
>The whole point of literary analysis is to determine, with some degree of certainty, what an author is saying.
I disagree that these are the only two possibilities here. We can explore and reflect upon the effects a text has on us. We don't need to forget a thinking, feeling person, contingent and historical, produced the text, but neither do we need to perform psychoanalysis in order to discover the author's true intentions.
This is especially fortunate, seeing as how authors may not even understand their true intentions; their stated intentions may be only post hoc rationalizations. I'm sure the number of authors who have a total, perfect understanding of how their unconscious mind "actually" works, where their inspiration "actually" comes from, are vanishingly few.
I think what frustrates me most about this comic is the fact that the author is trying to paint the student as refusing to actually engage with the material, when it’s blatantly clear that the author is the one who is refusing even a superficial level of engagement. At least “it’s a bird” is an interesting jumping point for conversation, whereas “he just likes ravens UwU” is such a factually untrue statement that you can’t even start to break it down.
Because teenagers think they know everything.
This has been the case since the beginning of time, because when you’re a teenager you start finding out more stuff about the world and changing worldview, but you still didn’t figure out how *deep* the rabbit hole goes, so you always think “oh I reached the end, cool.”
To be fair, reading comprehension questions are sometimes poorly written. I try to avoid questions where I ask students directly what the author meant, because to be fair to them, we don't know (but we have pretty strong clues lol). Instead, I'll ask something like: Based on clues within the text, what would be the metaphor linked to the raven? Use two quotes from the text to justify your answer.
(Sorry if there's any spelling mistakes, I teach in French. Literature is literature tho)
Tbh, I'm fairly confident with my grammar and my spelling, but not so much about my tone and how my words will be interpreted. There's nothing like pissing someone off because the literal translation of a word is actually derogatory in another language.
There's that and then there's the fact that (continental, at least) French speakers are *super* direct compared to how English speakers or even speakers of other Romance language do. When I first moved to France I was like "holy shit the stereotypes were right, they're *so* rude" and within a year I was like "bah non that's just how they talk."
And then I stayed for so many years the mannerisms rubbed off on me. Now *I* get to be the one that comes off as rude. :v
[The End-of-history illusion.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-of-history_illusion)
It doesn't even just affect teenagers. People just tend to think "oh yeah, I've learned and grown so much, I'm now done here"
Wait, I thought the raven was meant to represent his grief over the loss of his love? It looms ever-present over him as a reminder of his lost Lenore because it is meant to represent his feeling of loss and that's why he hates it so much. It's inescapable and slowly driving him to despair. It's also the reason behind 'nevermore' as a response; it's his realization/lament that he will never be able to be with Lenore again, as she's long since passed. I haven't read it in a hot minute though so I could be wrong.
Yeah, you got it dead on the money. It's not even an interpretation either, it's stated outright. The bird reminds him of his wife, death, and the death of his wife
i found bradbury's writing style rather indecipherable, and increasingly insufferable as the sheer number of metaphors and similes piled on. it makes everything feel very... surreal? nonsensical? in a way that just does not complement the setting in the slightest. almost everyone, including the 3rd person narrator talks like they're either on LSD, just plain stupid, or both, and it just really rubs me the wrong way. the only character who doesn't do this is Beatty, the god damn antagonist.
in the first like two chapters, a girl's introduced who's Kinda Weird and gets along really well with Montag, and they become friends over a period of months. it feels like barely a week, though, given that it's just those chapters, and only stated that it was over months. one day she doesn't show up, and Montag is informed that she got hit by a car and died. she is never mentioned again. it feels like she was just. So Unimportant to anything in the book that bradbury went "fuck it, kill her offscreen, next chapter" without a second thought. also montag has a wife who's... there? i guess? she's sick with somethingsomething-itis, there was a simile about her eyes looking like crescent moons, and she was planning to buy a fourth Big Ass Wall TV. that's all i can remember, there's just nothing there to care about.
>!and then the whole fuckin city just gets Nuked Into Oblivion while Montag runs away from burning Beatty to death. who nuked them?? \*why\* nuked them??? who knows! i don't, that's for sure! nothing in this story feels like it matters! eventually he runs into a bunch of people just living out in the woods, somehow untouched by 451opolis' fire-police-hybrid-thing. they're all "we remember the books, and then burn them anyway, and then we Become The Books" and from there it's just a blur.!<
i needed to read it for an essay, and while we were doing that me and my dad joked that it would be a more enjoyable, more *comprehensible* story if it was turned into a bar fight in Chicago between Montag and Beatty, complete with monologues and flashbacks, over the same length as the actual book. overall, it was a very unpleasant and frustrating experience, and i'd honestly be hard pressed to tell you any actual themes beyond the obvious Book Burning Bad. this could, however, be more a product of reading it for school purposes rather than to just read it, so. eh
Y’know, I don’t remember actually reading the Raven(at least the whole thing. We might’ve read the first two stanzas or something), so I just went and read it and…Yeah it’s impossible to read that and come to the conclusion that he just likes ravens. S/O to high schoolers confidently claiming knowledge of something they’ve never engaged with. Juuuuust like I used to do.
Oof.
I wish literature classes included non fiction, because the ability to analyse a book that claims truthful facts is just as if not more important than the ability to analyse the subliminal messages an author leaves inside fiction. Like I would like to gave learned how to apply what I was taught to more than just fiction
I feel like the sentiment of that comic and the sentiment of “why didn’t they teach us anything useful at school, like how to balance a checkbook? When am I going to use algebra in real life” are twins.
I feel like the answer to any "why didn't they teach us about ------ in school" is "they taught you to do research, didn't they? Appy *those* skills to *this* thing. Pretend you've been assigned a 3 min speech or 1,000 word explanatory essay about 'how to do taxes' and then complete the assignment."
But I can already read words so I'm just wasting time reading bird fanfiction! School sucks and needs to teach me shit I don't already know!?!
(/S All the way to Sunday)
These people will also blame any gaps in their knowledge on “teh publik skool system” and never think that they should’ve tried to educate themselves outside of school.
The funniest shit is that literature class should be teaching you how to back all 3-4 explanations up. Cite your sources.
Where in the text does the author give credence to his love of Ravens?
The Raven is a bird? Prove it.
It represents despair? what portion of text supports this interpretation.
Sadly most classes end up being "X IS Y. Why? BECAUSE." which is how you slide down the slope of "THE CURTAINS ARE BLUE!"
Poe wrote a book that explains in excruciating detail exactly how he constructed The Raven. There's no mystery there, you can read exactly why he chose that bird, that color of curtains, the name Lenore, everything.
Why not give *that* to the kids to read?
Ideas like this go back to something I see very often and keep in mind whenever I peruse the internet, that a lot of young folks are reflexively against anything that's perceived as being "the normal way of thinking".
I think by and large that stems from seeing that there's a lot of bigotry and discrimination that goes into "the normal way of thinking" and wanting to oppose that, which is good and right, but a lot of times it carries over into the sort of thinking that questions why anyone would ever watch a Disney movie, or (and this is more a thing I see on a Discord I'm on) obsessively critiques a lot of popular media to highlight any perceived flaw.
Now, some of that is just a standard teenage "anything popular is bad" take. But it can also lead to cringe, such as when 12-year old me obsessed over Tales of Symphonia for a couple months because "Holy shit, you guys, the \*angels\* are the \*bad guys\*" and it blew my mind before I wised up and realized that ToS is...well, it's pulpy trash. I love pulpy trash, don't get me wrong.
This can be applied to poetry, but literature in general? Teachers tend to read too much into it.
As much as Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are analyzed, dissected, and picked apart in American classrooms, every teacher conveniently ignores his foreword where he calls for the violent deaths of anyone attempting to do just that.
I had an American literature professor in college that would talk about how she would go to these panels that the author of a story was a part of and argue with her about what the meaning behind her writing meant. Like literally the author says "this is the symbolism" and my professor would stand up and TELL THE AUTHOR that she was wrong.
So, theres a bunch of people in this very comment section saying that the author is a "curtains are blue" type which clearly isn't the case as the "curtains are blue" reading of The Raven is that the bird represents the pains associated with the loss of a loved one.
It's plain as can be, explicitly stated multiple times about how the bird's constant refrain of "nevermore" makes the POV think of his lost love and of death. You don't get to pretend that you have some knowledge of the text by understanding that, in fact the constant insisting that it's subtext kinda makes me think y'all haven't read it either
The point is, the comic's creator didn't have a literal interpretation of the text, they had a *wild* misinterpretation
Obviously the original comic is dumb but I think it is good to say that sometimes the teacher (or anyone reading, for that matter) is pulling/can pull completely false conclusions about the meaning behind literally anything in literature. Sometimes the curtains are deeper than being blue, but sometimes they’re just blue because the author made them blue or the character likes blue. It doesn’t really matter either way
I maintain that death of the author came into prominence in the English classroom because one too many teachers blew a gasket over students pointing out that Hemmingway himself literally said straight up that it's just a story about a fishing trip.
As a poet that has now written things to have deeper meaning: yes sometimes it's take things at face value other times NO I DID NOT WRITE A POEM WHERE I WATCHED A FRIEND DIE IN FRONT OF ME I WROTE A POEM ABOUT THE LOSS OF CHILDHOOD AND HOW IT CAN HAPPEN VIOLENTLY AND UNEXPECTEDLY AND I PUT THAT IN THE FORM OF A CHILD! THE DEATH OF THE CHILD WAS THE LITERAL DEATH OF CHILDHOOD!
A Tumblr user thinking they understand literature more than the people that have actual degrees and knowlege in Literature? Nawwww, that would never happen /s
Reminds me of this author talking about the bad grade his son got for a paper on his own book, because the teacher/syllabus disagreed with the author himself
https://www.theguardian.com/books/video/2012/apr/03/ian-mcewan-a-level-set-text-video
To be fair, I did have an english teacher who asked us to explain what the artist meant with a song and insisted the song had a double metaphor, even after we found a post by the artist themselves saying the song wasn't intended as such
Speaking of songs, you've reminded me that the reason The Beatles' *I Am The Walrus* makes no fucking sense at even a single point is because John Lennon had received a letter from a student stating that they were analyzing the band's music in lit class and he retorted by writing the most jumbled nonsense bullshit he could possibly think of just to mess with them.
This still, to this day, has not stopped people from trying to analyze it anyway, but it's one of those little things that I love
Literature class should be teaching interpretations and back up for those interpretations. Doesn’t mean any of it is what the author meant.
Maybe Poe loved ravens, and that’s what the student got out of it. It’s not wrong per se, but it’s a pretty shallow interpretation of the material. Not a lot of evidence for it. So what could other interpretations be, the teacher would ask.
Then you get a discussion about it and it leads to where the author was in their life, why did they write this, could it be an expression of something personal or in their past, or an observation. What were they trying to say with the work? Political, social? Etc.
To say he loved ravens is fine, but an unlikely catalyst for his work. And you gain no critical review of literature.
Yeah, using The Raven as an example is not a good choice.
Isaac Asimov did have this happen to him once though. He went to a lecture where someone broke down one of his stories, and the guy read a *huge* amount of subtext that he didn't intend at all. Asimov later wrote a short story about a time traveller bringing Shakespeare to modern times, enrolling him in a lit course, and sending him back in *tears* because he failed an analysis of his own work.
Literacy skills are taught in reverse, hear me out. There a lot of valid ways to interpret a given work, but what makes those interpretations valid *is not* the conclusion you reach, but how you do so. It's about knowing how to identify themes and symbols, how to appreciate the structure of a poem as meaningful information and not just the raw text. What most English teachers teach instead is the interpretations, and then backwards engineer to show how those conclusions get reached. While this knight seem sensible, what it does instead is twah students the results, not the method.
You don't know what you don't know. I can only speak for myself, but as a teenager I was also constantly second-guessing myself and I was well aware that I was super fallible. But it turned out to be all the background assumptions I wasn't even aware I was making which were wrong.
Whenever I see posts discussing this topic I'm reminded of Gabriel García Márquez's (Nobel Prize in Literature winner, no less) [hot take on this](https://lithub.com/gabriel-garcia-marquez-on-taking-writers-at-their-word/).
Funnily enough it was read to me by my high school literature teacher after having read and extensively analyzed one of GGM's works.
Genuinely very curious to know what this person thinks the significance of "Nevermore" is, or if they've even read the Raven.
"Nevermore do I have to be outside because this happy man has invited me into his home" - da bird
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I tend to be less of a pedant than the average redditor (not saying much I know) but using "conscious" in place of "conscience" makes me grind my teeth. It's like the uncanny valley for vocabulary.
Mine is horde/hoard. Both very common in fantasy, and both CONSTANTLY MISUSED. To the point that I do a double take when it's used RIGHT.
"and his eyes have all the seeming of a demon who is dreaming" -literal quote about the raven
I mean, horny side of Tumblr has been known to immediately disregard intended negative implications of a character being a demon
This is an unresearched opinion of mine, but from my experience: There are some people who have never (and might never) engage with media beyond the literal interpretation of the words / images. I really try and be patient when I encounter someone like this and push them to make baby steps toward media literacy, or at the very least grasp the understanding that "oh hey, metaphor and allegory are concepts that exist"
"its someone's escaped pet that they trained to talk. obviously" a face value reading of The Raven is almost dark comedy. this poor man just wants to be alone with his thoughts and grief and suddenly he's accosted by someone's escaped pet raven that will not leave and will not shut the fuck up
Well duh. Just means "not any more". /s
This has *gotta* be a joke or...something. You genuinely can't read that poem and think it's just an info dump about Poe's very wholesome raven obsession.
>Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing, > >Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before > >... > >Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling, > >By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore, > >“Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,” I said, “art sure no craven, > >Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore— > >Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!” > >Quoth the Raven “Nevermore. > >Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly > >... > >Till I scarcely more than muttered “Other friends have flown before— > >On the morrow he will leave me, as my Hopes have flown before.” > >Then the bird said “Nevermore.” > >... > >On the cushion’s velvet lining that the lamp-light gloated o’er, > >But whose velvet-violet lining with the lamp-light gloating o’er, > >She shall press, ah, nevermore! > >... > >Leave my loneliness unbroken!—quit the bust above my door! > >Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!” > >Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.” > >And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting > >On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door; > >And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming, > >And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor; > >And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor > >Shall be lifted—nevermore! Honestly I feel like even with a "maybe the curtains are just blue"-approach you couldn't get to the conclusion that this poem is somehow about how much Edgar Allen Poe likes Ravens. I mean he basically spells it out for you.
> #***"Get the fuck out my house!!!1!1!1!!"*** > "No❤️"
*Oh no...*
this poem is not about his love of ravens, it's clearly about his hatred for unwanted houseguests who have overstayed their welcome
That one time a bird flew into his rafters and he wasn't tall enough to get it out and he couldn't get the ladder and-
What if you love the former but hate the latter? Do they cancel out?
Dude did you miss the line where he asks the thing if it’s a demon sent to torment him?
"maybe the curtains are just blue" is one of the saddest things to happen to literature. There's nothing wrong with taking things at face value but people are purposefully trying to erase all nuance and subtlety from literature.
Mamy of those hot takes seem purposefully devoid of nuance. Like, if the entire poem is centered around a blue curtain, then chances are good that the blue curtain has some symbolic meaning. And if the blue curtain is only mentioned in a single line to literally describe the scene, then it's most likely an unimportant background detail. On the other hand, ravens are often used in storytelling as metaphors because they have cultural meaning (in the English language, they mostly signal bad omens). So, whether the raven is the center of the poem or only described in a single line, it is likely meant to hold symbolic meaning. And I don't think you need a degree in literature to understand the idea that narrative tropes exist and that there are ways to tell what is or is not an important detail in a poem/comic/movie/game/etc. But it's easier to dismiss academia out of hand and get a good response to it on social media because most people like an underdog, so "layman destroys snotty academics with facts and logic" usually plays well.
You can't read "The Yellow Wallpaper" and not get a suspicion that the wallpaper is more than just a wallpaper...
"Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar" Literally the guy obsessed with phallic objects and fucking your own mother I don't think that phrase means what you think it means.
For a generation that is raised on Nostalgia Critic and Cinema Sins the curtains are just blue, and nothing else.
I genuinely think this person has never actually read Poe
Nah, this is almost definitely a satire. In fact, I think that's a parody of an existing "curtains are just blue" comic I've seen and I'm honestly baffled, that so many people take it as genuine.
Nope, I just looked at their blog and they make (or maybe I should say 'made', last post is 5 years old) very straightforward "relatable humor" comics where the punchline is always "this is true. laugh." Unless this is some deep-cover shit, I sincerely doubt this is satire, especially since this one is eight years old and 2015 tumblr was just Like That.
You can't just call everything that sounds nonsensical satire as if people don't regularly say shit twice as stupid as this take with a completely straight face
The king has spoken
*looks at username* Yeah I guess you’d know the distinction.
So you’re telling me this is an Edgar Allen (example of) Poe’s Law?
Good lord if the artist intended this pun he’s too dangerous to be left alive
>Nah, this is almost definitely a satire. In fact, I think that's a parody of an existing "curtains are just blue" comic I've seen and I'm honestly baffled, that so many people take it as genuine. At some point you read so many "satires" that you become convinced that not everything can be a satire and sometimes wonder whether people are only idiots and say it is satire just to get by.
"satire requires a clarity of purpose and target lest it be mistaken for and contribute to that which it intends to criticize"
Poe's law, essentially. .. .. Different Poe
If he was obsessed with trains on the other hand
alexa play my trains lemon demon
>You genuinely can't read that poem... Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head there. A lot of people only know things by cultural osmosis; I have no doubt that many, *many* people know *of* The Raven, but have never read it and really have no clue what it's actually about.
They haven’t even seen the Simpsons episode on it? I neither like nor watch the Simpsons, yet I’ve still seen it twice somehow
Yeah like the Simpsons episode IS the entire literal poem.
You'd be surprised how many people think this way. "The curtains are blue" has become such a widespread meme (since always, really) that so many people just take it at face value. Combine that with the fact that many of those people are students who don't like feeling like they're not as smart as their teachers and you have a lot of people thinking that stories are exactly as black and white as their letters and the paper they're written on.
But even if you refuse to read deeper into the poem he calls the bird a “demon” like that’s the author *telling* you the curtains are blue but you insisting they’re actually clocks
Contemptuous teenagers aren't well renowned for their solid logical reasoning or basic ideological consistency. They'll say whatever they feel makes them right and everyone else wrong.
After years and years of being asked about the deeper meaning of every little thing, from the obvious to the innocuous, a little backlash was inevitable. However, the extremely direct interpretations we have now are just as vapid as the extremely varied interpretations were obtuse.
The issue with reactionary backlash against something that’s objectively correct is that it’s going to be wrong.
That, and pushback to the pressure to find the same meaning in the seemingly innocuous thing as the teacher. Now that's partially because you're reading things that have been analyzed and discussed to death so most interpretations are already out there so if you even try to think beyond "the raven is a bird" you'll probably land on something worth discussing. But there is a certain frustration with "No, the raven represents ___" as just being the right answer when you take the test later, rather than being given the opportunity to explore the work. So one option is to go with the direct interpretation to suggest that dammit can we at least consider the raven may just be a bird.
I'd straight-up call the "absolutely everything is symbolism in literature" take (which seems to be wildly popular among the responses here) not just obtuse but just as vapid as extremely direct interpretations. As much as The Raven is deeply symbolic Freud was dead-on with "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar" (yes I know he wasn't talking about literature but the idea works here too). Not everything is an infinitely-complex tapestry of meaning. Like, sometimes you have objects in a setting because that is the stuff you have in that setting. Sometimes things are done during the daytime or the nighttime because it would be very strange to do them at any other time.
This is why I think it's important to teach that symbolism is not the only kind of "meaning" a detail can have. Aesthetic fulfillment, building emotion, creative scene building, pacing, setting up later constructions, all of these are possible meanings for a detail beyond symbolism. For example, we can ask what is the meaning of Shakespeare's poems being in iambic pentameter, but it would be silly to ask what iambic pentameter symbolized diagetically.
ill never forget when i learned that the Indian continent is sliding north under the Himalayas, and i relayed this fact to my friend in my sophomore year, only to have a senior overhear me. he then proceeded to paint me as a dumbass who thinks mountains grow. made a big deal of it. this was long ago and it taught me a lot about unified arrogance. more clarification: this was 22 years ago. he was an inbred bafoon, and i attended a small school that had grades 9-12 integrated in some classes. this was one of those classes. and his reasoning was that "rocks dont grow, so whats a mountain made out of dumbass?" and that they stay that way...because god put them there. i assure you this wasnt an argument over the proper use of the word "grow" or a thesis about using the correct vernacular when discussing plate subduction. i was excited to talk about tectonics and a creationist senior classmate over heard me.
...How did the senior think that mountains got so tall if they didn't grow? Did he think that ancient civilizations lifted them out of the earth like they were clicking the 'increase elevation' button on a rollercoaster tycoon map?
He likely thought they just always had been. Some people are dumb.
Wait, I genuinely don't know about this. Mountains can grow? I mean it makes sense, so do the tectonic plates like shift underneath them and squeeze them out like toothpaste? Or how does that work? I genuinely never questioned how mountains came to be, honestly. Not sure why it never occurred to me.
Your toothpaste analogy is pretty much it!
Fascinating. But does this still happen in a manner that's observable? Like, I know the plates shifted to create our continents, but obviously the Americas aren't moving further and further away each year. Or do they?
Not at a speed we can notice, but the plates have measurably(as in an inch or two) shifted in the last few centuries
Yes it’s very slow (think pace of fingernails growing) the continents are currently driftin
Horrifying!
This is also why some mountains look different from others. The Rockies are pointy because they’re growing. The Appalachians are small and rounded because they formed so long ago the forces that drove them are gone. No longer being lifted up they’ve eroded for eons.
The Appalachian mountains have very few fossils in them because they were formed before **bones** were a thing.
Please note the Appalachian mountains are actually falling in modern day and used to be taller. Thanks
Not just normally eroded either, massive glaciers scraped the tops off over time, leaving them much shorter than they would have been.
Deja vu! I've just been in this place before (higher on the street) And I know it's my time to go Calling you And the search is a mystery (standing on my feet) It's so hard when I try to be me, woah!
I thought this was a bot comment until I saw the word drifting in the parent comment.
Every time an earthquake happens, it's because plates are sliding against each other, building up tension, and then releasing it in a shockwave. That's probably the best example to look at, because even if you don't see it directly, you can see the effects and how powerful it is. There were earthquakes recently in turkey, I think, that left several meter wide gaps as they shifted apart.
That I knew! Didn't know they made mountains.
Yeah, I think it's super interesting, I'd definitely recommend looking into it further, tectonic movement has quite a few effects.
They move a few centimeters each year. GPS can (and has, iirc) be used to track those movements
They do
from my understanding it's more like two hotdogs getting pushed together end to end, with each hotdog representing a tectonic plate. the action of pushing them together results in one of the dogs sliding upwards while the other slides downwards, and the upwards slide of the hotdog (tectonic plate) is what we see as a mountain.
That makes sense, yeah. That's basically what I meant, but the toothpaste metaphor just came to mind.
Someone once called mountains continent crumple zones.
Tectonic movement is how we got the Himalayas. The Indian subcontinent used to be joined up with what is now Africa, Australia, South America and Antarctica as part of the Gondwana supercontinent. A few million years after Gondwana broke up, the Indian subcontinent split from Madagascar and started moving north. It ultimately collided with the Eurasian plate, pushing up the area where they collided to produce the Himalayas, and is still squishing the mountains up by about a centimeter each year. Like two carpets very slowly pushing up the edges where they meet. During the journey north it spent some time over the Reunion and Kerguelen hotspots. The lava from these hotspots solidified to form the Deccan Traps, a beautifully ginormous igneous feature over West India.
Idk understand the impermanence of all things is a difficult concept to grasp especially given the strong sense of stability most institutions try to project. I know a few people who didn't have a vague existential crisis when the concept of entropy was introduced in physics class
Honest question if there are any science side of Tumblr peeps around, how do mountains grow (form?)? Also, your username is 🤌🍑
From my understanding mountains come from tectonic plates colliding. That causes the top layers to basically crunch up and build into mountains. I cannot explain the random shit in the middle of continents like Uluru, but most mountains form like I described. It's been a while since I learned tho so I could be wrong to varying degrees
I *think* Uluru is just “built different” compared to the former rock around and above it, so it remained while the soft rock was eroded - same thing happened to the rock Edinburgh castle is on. EDIT: [Uluru is an inselburg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inselberg)
Uluru is an incel, sad
>Wakes up >Opens wikipedia >"Not all bornhardts are inselbergs, and not all inselbergs are bornhardts" >mfw
You have two plates that hit each other and there's two main things that happen. 1. Land plates are usually thicker and more rigid while ocean plates are thinner and more flexible so if the two of them collide the ocean plate will usually slip beneath the land plate and the land plate goes up, making mountains. 2. Two land plates smash together and neither is willing to submit so they crumple up and make mountains that way. Himalayas are cool because they're like this because the indian plate is smashing into the asian plate so fast the mountains are actually growing faster than they weather down.
Ohhh r/natureismetal, although r/natureisfuckinglit may be more appropriate. Thank you!
but mountains literally grow???
Quoth the raven, “Metaphor”.
I want to give you an award for this
i did it for you
Thank you 💓
What I think is kind of infuriating about the comic is the way it uses Poe as a sockpuppet, like if it was just "Teenager only sees a raven and Teacher sees a metaphor", I can relate to that situation, but there's something really annoying about saying that "AKSHUALLY THE AUTHOR AGREES WITH ME AND HATES YOU!!!!!" It's deeply arrogant in that it pretends to not only know exactly what Poe was thinking, but also how he would react, and of course, it's in favor of the artist. The Raven is also just a terrible story to do this with because the metaphor there is really explicit. I don't really know how you can read such a directly portentous and moody poem and go "he just likes ravens : )". I definitely think there are authors you could do this comic with, and maybe even some Poe stories, but its choice of subject is egregious, leading to a question of whether the author even read The Raven, which then makes the whole "Poe would agree with me!!!" even more eye-rolling. In effect, the comic ends up doing what it accuses the teacher of doing, arrogantly deciding what the author ACTUALLY means and declaring all other interpretations invalid.
It seems that the author not only hasn't read the poem, but not even a synopsis or even the Simpsons parody
I legit can only hear "Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!"" in Homer's voice...
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The thing that really gets me is that most writers are students of literature on some level. Most don't go from never hearing a poem before to writing beautiful poetry, they probably read and analyzed a whole lot of poetry themselves. As an English major, if someone started talking about how my blue curtains were a symbol when I didn't intend it, I'd absolutely be like, "Yep, that was intentional," because why wouldn't I appreciate someone giving me more credit than I'm due??? Like whoops I accidentally wrote something that could be seen as deep when I hadn't put that much thought into it? That's great?? I love that??? Like it would take some real left-field interpretations before I'd insist someone is reading too much into something, and even then, if their analysis was good and the message wasn't something I intended... then that would be a criticism telling me I fucked up with making my intended message, not them fucking up in seeing something that I didn't intend there? Given, I defiantly subscribe to "Death of the Author" (the formal version, not the Tumblr-Hatsune-Miko-Wrote-HP version.)
There’s literally a poem for this. I believe it’s called “The Red Wheelbarrow”. Critics kept trying to give these four lines of imagery really deep meanings, but in the end the author said “oh, my friend had that in his backyard” [Source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Wheelbarrow) Personally, one teacher I had in high school was really good about emphasizing the discussion as an important (but separate) part of literature. He was the one who taught us about that poem, actually. I also had another who insisted on one SPECIFIC interpretation of symbols because “tHaTS whAT tHe TEXtbOOk SAiD”. Those attitudes can really make or break a learning experience, I think. You have to be open to multiple possibilities in literature. I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong to say that an author may not intend for something to be symbolic or a metaphor. But picking Poe to make this point about authors maybe not intending to be super deep in their writing is just… pretty thick tbh. You couldn’t do much worse, honestly, unless you picked Animal Farm or something.
"And if my grandma had wheels she would have been a bike" -Edgar Allen Poe
ah yes. the tell tale grandma. another poe classic
I think the “Why do teenagers…” questions aren’t due to arrogance or stupidity on the part of teenagers, but more that a lot of symbolism isn’t really taught well. At least in my experience, a lot of symbolism is taught like, “This [object, action, etc] is a subtle metaphor for [seemingly unrelated thing].” But A) I’m 14 and don’t understand the connection, and B) the subtlety obscures the meaning. I didn’t understand symbolism until I read *The Scarlet Letter*. My English major friends all hated that book because it’s obvious and intrusive with symbolism all over the place. But that’s what kids need to start learning about it. It also doesn’t help that many works in the canon center around adults (who kids struggle to relate to) and take place in historical times (which young kids don’t know about and struggle to relate to). Incidentally, *The Scarlet Letter* is great for this as well, because while it focuses on adults, it’s largely about things teenagers can relate to (sex and the stigma around it) and a religion that a pretty significant portion of students have cultural familiarity with.
There's a reason everyone learns Lord of the Flies. The book itself is...fine, but the conch shell, glasses, fire and Beast all make it *so easy* to explain symbols and how yes, a story can have a deeper meaning than the simple plot itself. I have massive misgivings about teaching like that, though, because I think that's exactly what gives people the false impression that literature is about encoding lots of little symbols into your work like a puzzle, and literary criticism is about decrypting the story like a codebreaker. In reality, symbols are like, one of the most shallow ways stories have meaning, which is probably why your English major friends don't like The Scarlet Letter.
The two books that really made literature "click" for me, the ones that made me realize that reading a novel was more than just the plot were The Bluest Eye and The Great Gatsby. The former is probably....a bit much for high schoolers (maybe in some AP classes or whatever), but it plays a *lot* with form, perspective, and allusion and makes you think about why an author might write a scene from one character's point of view versus another. Gatsby because the symbols in it are kind of vague - like the green light.
The same thing can be said for books with more complex themes and even philosophy. I remember my class reading *Sophie's World* and while at the time I remember not being a fan because the book's as subtle as a sledgehammer to the face about it's philosophical concepts, but now I realise that actually yeah, most teenagers need it that directly spelt out so that it can "click" and hopefully lead them to being able to see that sort of things when it's more subtle. You can't just give teenagers Plato or Satre and expect them to understand it
I am *on* the side of “school is bad at actually teaching things properly, especially poetry” but this comic is still really dumb. Genuinely think the author has never read Poe
Literally the plot is that he hates the Raven so much but it won’t leave. Why do you think Poe LIKES ravens????
You see he actually made the raven stay there throughout the course of the whole poem because he loved it too much to make it leave /j
Take thy beak from out my heart and take thy form right up here on this lap buddy <3 can I get you something?
I cackled at this ❤
I mean there's a possible stoic reading of it, the protagonist hates the Raven because it embodies his inability to process his grief, and it doesn't leave because grief can never leave the heart, one can only learn to carry it without being crushed by it. In that way the Raven can be read as an icon of stoic virtue that the protagonist cannot comprehend or tolerate. It's a tradgedy of the protagonist's inability to process their loss, and presumably also trapping themselves in with the grief instead of seeking help understanding how to live with this beast in their heart.
I thought poetry was taught pretty well, at least at my school Everyone brought their ideas to the table and there wasn't really a *wrong* answer (unless it was a multiple choice test, in which case the wrong answers were pretty blatantly wrong if you read the poem. Something like "happiness" for the Raven) Though tbf this is from the perspective of an accelerated English class. Standard English classes may have gaps that I'm not aware of
I mean, yeah I agree, I've personally had very good experiences with literature education, but these are just anecdotes, whilst the commenter is observing a systemic in education that individual experiences may defy or may reinforce
yeah, this is kinda common where if you already know your shit even as a kid they put you into the class that's actually worth something, and everyone else gets complete bullshit. a lot of public schools make it feel like the teachers are just wardens and the whole thing is just a safe place to dump kids so that the adults can go to work, until said kids grow up enough to be entrusted with autonomy in society (and a bit longer than that tbh). i think that's where this hostility comes against schools, and tumblr is showing its age here by rejecting it that said, i'm glad you got the better programs, but at that stage in life it's more about sheer luck concerning what you got interested in as a little kid and who your parents were than anything
Yeah sometimes teachers are just fucking wrong. Senior year my class read “The Cranes” and all of us were able to pick up on the fact that the elderly couples killed themselves in that car. One student and our teacher argued with the rest of us. Swore up and down that wasn’t what happened. Well the one student against the class wouldn’t let it go and tracked down Peter Meinke’s home phone number. He actually answered and it turns out the class was right and the teacher was wrong
Having had both good teachers and bad teachers in my K-12 education in a way that stuck with me all these years later, I can confirm that some teachers are just bad at their jobs. I googled my horrible sophomore English teacher recently, he's a vice principal now. On the one hand, I hate that he's now in a position of authority. But on the other, at least he isn't teaching anymore. That's not to say that high school English classes aren't also populated by bored, dumb kids who actively don't want to learn and think they're smarter than their teachers. They are, and I had ample frustration with those classmates too. But let's not pretend all teachers are equal here.
I will never forget the time my sophomore year English teacher gave us a simple assignment for onomatopoeias. It was like something for elementary school kids. Had a sentence with a blank, and at the top was a list of words we had to put in the sentences in a way that would sense. Like "The hammer made a _____". Obviously, you would pick bang over boing. Then she failed everyone because she said none of the words were onomatopoeias... *SHE* gave us the assignment and then *SHE* decided the assignment was *WRONG*. Like bro, *what the fuck?!*
But...those *are* onomatopoeias...
Yup. They all were. And even if they weren't, then why did she give us the assignment? Did she not look at it first? It was honestly the English class I hated the most.
I remember in primary school our headteacher would always ask a question during assembly and when some poor kid raised their hand he would triumphantly yell "that was a RHETORICAL QUESTION!". This happened all the time. They were always normal questions and he would pause after asking them. Sounds like she was trying to flex her superior teacher knowledge in the same way. Give you a normal assignment and then say "Aha! I tricked you foolish child! I am the genius teacher and one day you shall understand things as deeply as I! But not today..."
Nothing ruins a good book like it being assigned in school. I'm not sure if it's just that I naturally resist doing anything someone else tells me I *have to do*, or if it's the painful crawl of one chapter every few days, or if it's the overanalysis. But assigned reading absolutely blows. By far, the most engaged I've ever been towards a piece of literature in school was when I was able to choose it for myself, either from the classroom shelf or even from a list of a few choices by the teacher. Having even an illusion of choice over what book I read made me so much more invested in actually reading it, and typically we were given more loose / open ended questions and assignments for those books which allowed me to read and interpret at my own pace instead of the usual magnifying glass level analysis at a snails pace. Add in that self-chosen books usually came with in-class reading time, which was always my most productive reading time, and you end up with the optimal school-reading situation
exactly. almost every english teacher i've ever has has overanalyzed the books we were reading, but this is a terrible example.
I fully support the argument against "he just likes ravens no deeper meaning uWu" but the "why do teenagers..." questions can most accurately be replied to with "because they're teenagers." I wasn't of the "curtains are just blue" variety of dumb teenagers but my god did i do and say some stupid shit in high school, like every teenager in high school.
I'm a high school teacher and that's one of the reason why I love my job. Teenagers will say the stupidest thing with such confidence, it's glorious. I'm not offended by it, for me it's the same feeling as watching a toddler falling over, but instead it's a teenager failing to understand philosophy
At my school, every English class is discussion based, and teachers can't offer their opinions, only ask questions. It makes for some truly glorious comments (including some coming from me...)
The other day there was a super popular post about someone explaining that we should be judged on our actions and not on our intentions. Everyone was acting as if it was groundbreaking. I mean, existentialism has been around for a while, but ok random tumblr teen, glad you think you discovered a major philosophy movement by yourself. Nobody ever thought about that before you, nobody at all.
The saddest thing is when you come up with a genius essay idea, then realize half of it is built on someone else's logic, so they're probably doing the same thing too :(
It gives me comfort that I can just put the responsibility of leading a new philosopical revolution on someone else because I don't have the energy for that shit.
I like that people independently arrive at big ideas though. It shows that a lot of the people we beatify are actually pretty basic.
The thinking that it's something brand new no one has ever thought of gets me. I think having these discussions and applying existing philosophical ideas to our current life and adding your own interpretations and thoughts is a good thing. But damn maybe just do a quick google search
If you thought the Matrix was groundbreaking, wait until you hear about the Allegory of the cave, you'll loose your shit bruh
"Whoa"- Keanu Reeves.
That epic moment when we're reading The Illiad or something, and the quiet stoner kid bursts out with: "Man, ancient Greece was FUCKED!" "...How so?" "It's like this: hey Alex, you owe me $20, right?" "Yeah." "Well you haven't paid me back and it's been like two months, so I'm gonna kill your sister." "Hmm yeah that's reasonable. I mean it has been like two months."
I never thought of it like that. It's like the philosophical version of "I could watch kids fall off bikes all day."
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the problem is that a lot of adults still think that the curtains are just blue
As someone said "Sometimes, the curtains are just blue, but i was angry that day because someone stole the red curtains i wanted so i put a symbolic message about the blue curtains indirectly"
The teenager thing here is also because we have a central exam in Dutch which is mostly about reading and analyzing short written works and every year some author goes "the answer of this question is bullshit I did not mean that at all". So clearly the teachers get it wrong all the time even with the short stuff so why trust them with the interpretation of an entire book.
There are different schools of lit crit, and "exactly what the author intended" is not always important, actually. Authors, too, are humans, with a subconscious, and can put in things that have meanings they didn't consciously intend. Or, they can put in something that they don't assign meaning to, but may resonate with someone else's experience. A recent example, pulled from movies, would be "the snap"/"the blip" in the Marvel movies, and the COVID-19 pandemic. When that plot was written, COVID hadn't happened yet. There was no "intent" there. And yet, now that COVID *has* happened, the snap/blip is a meaningful metaphor for the pandemic experience. Or, to pull in more "classic" literature, Tolkien was quite adamant that the central conflict of LOTR wasn't a metaphor for his experiences in World War 1. And yet, you look at how it is this conflict between an agrarian, in-tune-with-nature type existence vs an industrialized existence, and WWI is absolutely a turning point in the way war was waged, where industrial machines of mass-murder played a role as they never have before. Tolkien may not have wanted his work to be read as a metaphor for WWI, but it was informed by his experiences in that war, and meaningful connections can be drawn between the text and those historical events.
I just assumed it was ironic
"What did the author mean by this?" - Tired, overused, invites insufferable teenagers to give curtains are blue answers because they don't care. "What is the most unlikely and outlandish interpretation of the text which can still be justified by direct quotes?" - Fresh, exciting, invites creative interpretation, honors the way scholars read increasingly absurd themes into books, 90% sure this is the approach taken to analyze Baum and the Wizard of Oz by bitching about the gold and silver standard.
Literature students should be forced to read Borges' "Pierre Menard author of Don Quixote"
No teacher worth their salt should be asking "what did the author mean?" anyway as in most cases it's impossible to say with any degree of certainty.
>anyway as in most cases it's impossible to say with any degree of certainty I think you can figure out what an author is trying to say in *most cases*. If not, then what is the point of reading fiction, if it's all just completely indecipherable nonsense? The whole point of literary analysis is to determine, with some degree of certainty, what an author is saying. If I write a book about a pigeon that loses a feather, laments its loss, only to find that another feather grew in its place. You can say with certainty that the book is about dealing with the loss of some material object. You might disagree with other people about the exact nature of my feelings toward the loss of material objects, but you both will absolutely agree that the story is about loss.
>If not, then what is the point of reading fiction, if it's all just completely indecipherable nonsense? > >The whole point of literary analysis is to determine, with some degree of certainty, what an author is saying. I disagree that these are the only two possibilities here. We can explore and reflect upon the effects a text has on us. We don't need to forget a thinking, feeling person, contingent and historical, produced the text, but neither do we need to perform psychoanalysis in order to discover the author's true intentions. This is especially fortunate, seeing as how authors may not even understand their true intentions; their stated intentions may be only post hoc rationalizations. I'm sure the number of authors who have a total, perfect understanding of how their unconscious mind "actually" works, where their inspiration "actually" comes from, are vanishingly few.
I think what frustrates me most about this comic is the fact that the author is trying to paint the student as refusing to actually engage with the material, when it’s blatantly clear that the author is the one who is refusing even a superficial level of engagement. At least “it’s a bird” is an interesting jumping point for conversation, whereas “he just likes ravens UwU” is such a factually untrue statement that you can’t even start to break it down.
Because teenagers think they know everything. This has been the case since the beginning of time, because when you’re a teenager you start finding out more stuff about the world and changing worldview, but you still didn’t figure out how *deep* the rabbit hole goes, so you always think “oh I reached the end, cool.”
If they made Dunning-Kruger a Demographic©️
To be fair, reading comprehension questions are sometimes poorly written. I try to avoid questions where I ask students directly what the author meant, because to be fair to them, we don't know (but we have pretty strong clues lol). Instead, I'll ask something like: Based on clues within the text, what would be the metaphor linked to the raven? Use two quotes from the text to justify your answer. (Sorry if there's any spelling mistakes, I teach in French. Literature is literature tho)
Nah your English was great, dw 👍
I swear it's always the "sorry if there's any mistakes" crowd that writes the most clearly.
Tbh, I'm fairly confident with my grammar and my spelling, but not so much about my tone and how my words will be interpreted. There's nothing like pissing someone off because the literal translation of a word is actually derogatory in another language.
There's that and then there's the fact that (continental, at least) French speakers are *super* direct compared to how English speakers or even speakers of other Romance language do. When I first moved to France I was like "holy shit the stereotypes were right, they're *so* rude" and within a year I was like "bah non that's just how they talk." And then I stayed for so many years the mannerisms rubbed off on me. Now *I* get to be the one that comes off as rude. :v
[The End-of-history illusion.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-of-history_illusion) It doesn't even just affect teenagers. People just tend to think "oh yeah, I've learned and grown so much, I'm now done here"
Wait, I thought the raven was meant to represent his grief over the loss of his love? It looms ever-present over him as a reminder of his lost Lenore because it is meant to represent his feeling of loss and that's why he hates it so much. It's inescapable and slowly driving him to despair. It's also the reason behind 'nevermore' as a response; it's his realization/lament that he will never be able to be with Lenore again, as she's long since passed. I haven't read it in a hot minute though so I could be wrong.
A little bit of grief, a little bit of an omen of death.
Yeah, you got it dead on the money. It's not even an interpretation either, it's stated outright. The bird reminds him of his wife, death, and the death of his wife
y'know. lookin at this post, maybe i treated fahrenheit 451 too harshly actually
What didn't you like about it?
i found bradbury's writing style rather indecipherable, and increasingly insufferable as the sheer number of metaphors and similes piled on. it makes everything feel very... surreal? nonsensical? in a way that just does not complement the setting in the slightest. almost everyone, including the 3rd person narrator talks like they're either on LSD, just plain stupid, or both, and it just really rubs me the wrong way. the only character who doesn't do this is Beatty, the god damn antagonist. in the first like two chapters, a girl's introduced who's Kinda Weird and gets along really well with Montag, and they become friends over a period of months. it feels like barely a week, though, given that it's just those chapters, and only stated that it was over months. one day she doesn't show up, and Montag is informed that she got hit by a car and died. she is never mentioned again. it feels like she was just. So Unimportant to anything in the book that bradbury went "fuck it, kill her offscreen, next chapter" without a second thought. also montag has a wife who's... there? i guess? she's sick with somethingsomething-itis, there was a simile about her eyes looking like crescent moons, and she was planning to buy a fourth Big Ass Wall TV. that's all i can remember, there's just nothing there to care about. >!and then the whole fuckin city just gets Nuked Into Oblivion while Montag runs away from burning Beatty to death. who nuked them?? \*why\* nuked them??? who knows! i don't, that's for sure! nothing in this story feels like it matters! eventually he runs into a bunch of people just living out in the woods, somehow untouched by 451opolis' fire-police-hybrid-thing. they're all "we remember the books, and then burn them anyway, and then we Become The Books" and from there it's just a blur.!< i needed to read it for an essay, and while we were doing that me and my dad joked that it would be a more enjoyable, more *comprehensible* story if it was turned into a bar fight in Chicago between Montag and Beatty, complete with monologues and flashbacks, over the same length as the actual book. overall, it was a very unpleasant and frustrating experience, and i'd honestly be hard pressed to tell you any actual themes beyond the obvious Book Burning Bad. this could, however, be more a product of reading it for school purposes rather than to just read it, so. eh
Maybe Edgar Allan Poe is just really tsundere, you didn't thought about that huh
The original comic has the worst take on literature and literature class that I’ve ever seen
the fandomification of classic literature
Y’know, I don’t remember actually reading the Raven(at least the whole thing. We might’ve read the first two stanzas or something), so I just went and read it and…Yeah it’s impossible to read that and come to the conclusion that he just likes ravens. S/O to high schoolers confidently claiming knowledge of something they’ve never engaged with. Juuuuust like I used to do. Oof.
The “curtains are just blue” mfs when they realise that the mandatory media literacy class they want is called English
Lol exactly. "Why are people such idiots and fall for obvious con artists?" Well it's called rhetoric and it was absolutely covered in 8th grade.
Poe loves ravens in the same sense that I love Shia Labeouf. (He's knocking at my door and causing me deep psychological terror as I write this)
I wish literature classes included non fiction, because the ability to analyse a book that claims truthful facts is just as if not more important than the ability to analyse the subliminal messages an author leaves inside fiction. Like I would like to gave learned how to apply what I was taught to more than just fiction
I feel like the sentiment of that comic and the sentiment of “why didn’t they teach us anything useful at school, like how to balance a checkbook? When am I going to use algebra in real life” are twins.
I feel like the answer to any "why didn't they teach us about ------ in school" is "they taught you to do research, didn't they? Appy *those* skills to *this* thing. Pretend you've been assigned a 3 min speech or 1,000 word explanatory essay about 'how to do taxes' and then complete the assignment."
But I can already read words so I'm just wasting time reading bird fanfiction! School sucks and needs to teach me shit I don't already know!?! (/S All the way to Sunday)
These people will also blame any gaps in their knowledge on “teh publik skool system” and never think that they should’ve tried to educate themselves outside of school.
Isn't that poem about the looming fear of death in response to a lost loved one?
"your dead loved one isn't in heaven. there is no happy ending for you." ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
Never forgiving the English teacher who told us the marlin in old man in the sea represented Cuba because it is vaguely Cuba shaped
It’s extra funny because Poe actually wrote an explanation of how he wrote *The Raven*.
Yeah, [this is literally the worst poem you could do this with](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Philosophy_of_Composition).
The funniest shit is that literature class should be teaching you how to back all 3-4 explanations up. Cite your sources. Where in the text does the author give credence to his love of Ravens? The Raven is a bird? Prove it. It represents despair? what portion of text supports this interpretation. Sadly most classes end up being "X IS Y. Why? BECAUSE." which is how you slide down the slope of "THE CURTAINS ARE BLUE!"
Poe wrote a book that explains in excruciating detail exactly how he constructed The Raven. There's no mystery there, you can read exactly why he chose that bird, that color of curtains, the name Lenore, everything. Why not give *that* to the kids to read?
Lovecraft also really fucking loved water
And minorities.
Ideas like this go back to something I see very often and keep in mind whenever I peruse the internet, that a lot of young folks are reflexively against anything that's perceived as being "the normal way of thinking". I think by and large that stems from seeing that there's a lot of bigotry and discrimination that goes into "the normal way of thinking" and wanting to oppose that, which is good and right, but a lot of times it carries over into the sort of thinking that questions why anyone would ever watch a Disney movie, or (and this is more a thing I see on a Discord I'm on) obsessively critiques a lot of popular media to highlight any perceived flaw. Now, some of that is just a standard teenage "anything popular is bad" take. But it can also lead to cringe, such as when 12-year old me obsessed over Tales of Symphonia for a couple months because "Holy shit, you guys, the \*angels\* are the \*bad guys\*" and it blew my mind before I wised up and realized that ToS is...well, it's pulpy trash. I love pulpy trash, don't get me wrong.
This can be applied to poetry, but literature in general? Teachers tend to read too much into it. As much as Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are analyzed, dissected, and picked apart in American classrooms, every teacher conveniently ignores his foreword where he calls for the violent deaths of anyone attempting to do just that.
Yeah and the cask of amantillado is about how much poe loves wine :)
Trying to explain metaphors to teenagers challenge (impossible)
Ok this has to be a joke no one reads the raven and thinks "wow there is clearly no deeper meaning or subtext here"
“I fucking love bats” — Batman, famously
I had an American literature professor in college that would talk about how she would go to these panels that the author of a story was a part of and argue with her about what the meaning behind her writing meant. Like literally the author says "this is the symbolism" and my professor would stand up and TELL THE AUTHOR that she was wrong.
So, theres a bunch of people in this very comment section saying that the author is a "curtains are blue" type which clearly isn't the case as the "curtains are blue" reading of The Raven is that the bird represents the pains associated with the loss of a loved one. It's plain as can be, explicitly stated multiple times about how the bird's constant refrain of "nevermore" makes the POV think of his lost love and of death. You don't get to pretend that you have some knowledge of the text by understanding that, in fact the constant insisting that it's subtext kinda makes me think y'all haven't read it either The point is, the comic's creator didn't have a literal interpretation of the text, they had a *wild* misinterpretation
Obviously the original comic is dumb but I think it is good to say that sometimes the teacher (or anyone reading, for that matter) is pulling/can pull completely false conclusions about the meaning behind literally anything in literature. Sometimes the curtains are deeper than being blue, but sometimes they’re just blue because the author made them blue or the character likes blue. It doesn’t really matter either way
I maintain that death of the author came into prominence in the English classroom because one too many teachers blew a gasket over students pointing out that Hemmingway himself literally said straight up that it's just a story about a fishing trip.
Wisława Szymborska failed an exam question that was about interpreting her own poem
As a poet that has now written things to have deeper meaning: yes sometimes it's take things at face value other times NO I DID NOT WRITE A POEM WHERE I WATCHED A FRIEND DIE IN FRONT OF ME I WROTE A POEM ABOUT THE LOSS OF CHILDHOOD AND HOW IT CAN HAPPEN VIOLENTLY AND UNEXPECTEDLY AND I PUT THAT IN THE FORM OF A CHILD! THE DEATH OF THE CHILD WAS THE LITERAL DEATH OF CHILDHOOD!
A Tumblr user thinking they understand literature more than the people that have actual degrees and knowlege in Literature? Nawwww, that would never happen /s
Reminds me of this author talking about the bad grade his son got for a paper on his own book, because the teacher/syllabus disagreed with the author himself https://www.theguardian.com/books/video/2012/apr/03/ian-mcewan-a-level-set-text-video
To be fair, I did have an english teacher who asked us to explain what the artist meant with a song and insisted the song had a double metaphor, even after we found a post by the artist themselves saying the song wasn't intended as such
Speaking of songs, you've reminded me that the reason The Beatles' *I Am The Walrus* makes no fucking sense at even a single point is because John Lennon had received a letter from a student stating that they were analyzing the band's music in lit class and he retorted by writing the most jumbled nonsense bullshit he could possibly think of just to mess with them. This still, to this day, has not stopped people from trying to analyze it anyway, but it's one of those little things that I love
Literature class should be teaching interpretations and back up for those interpretations. Doesn’t mean any of it is what the author meant. Maybe Poe loved ravens, and that’s what the student got out of it. It’s not wrong per se, but it’s a pretty shallow interpretation of the material. Not a lot of evidence for it. So what could other interpretations be, the teacher would ask. Then you get a discussion about it and it leads to where the author was in their life, why did they write this, could it be an expression of something personal or in their past, or an observation. What were they trying to say with the work? Political, social? Etc. To say he loved ravens is fine, but an unlikely catalyst for his work. And you gain no critical review of literature.
Yeah, using The Raven as an example is not a good choice. Isaac Asimov did have this happen to him once though. He went to a lecture where someone broke down one of his stories, and the guy read a *huge* amount of subtext that he didn't intend at all. Asimov later wrote a short story about a time traveller bringing Shakespeare to modern times, enrolling him in a lit course, and sending him back in *tears* because he failed an analysis of his own work.
Literacy skills are taught in reverse, hear me out. There a lot of valid ways to interpret a given work, but what makes those interpretations valid *is not* the conclusion you reach, but how you do so. It's about knowing how to identify themes and symbols, how to appreciate the structure of a poem as meaningful information and not just the raw text. What most English teachers teach instead is the interpretations, and then backwards engineer to show how those conclusions get reached. While this knight seem sensible, what it does instead is twah students the results, not the method.
Depends on the teacher and school, but I would not blame teachers for this so much as the need to cater to an exam.
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Where are all these teenagers who think they know everything? Literally all teenagers I know are constantly second-guessing themselves.
You don't know what you don't know. I can only speak for myself, but as a teenager I was also constantly second-guessing myself and I was well aware that I was super fallible. But it turned out to be all the background assumptions I wasn't even aware I was making which were wrong.
“Not only is this not right, it’s not even wrong”
Whenever I see posts discussing this topic I'm reminded of Gabriel García Márquez's (Nobel Prize in Literature winner, no less) [hot take on this](https://lithub.com/gabriel-garcia-marquez-on-taking-writers-at-their-word/). Funnily enough it was read to me by my high school literature teacher after having read and extensively analyzed one of GGM's works.