> To me, all the lit stuff seemed completely arbitrary and made up. There were no testable hypothesis, no experiments to run. "The author was trying to tell us that ..." - well unless the author actually documented that later, how do you know that with any degree of certainty?
This seems like a pretty common complaint. You seem to assume that literature should work like science. But the purpose of literature is not to rigorously refine a certain predictive model of the world. I don't want to claim exactly what it is, but maybe the telling of human experiences (and the analysis thereof) provides insights that help people better understand the muddier, less quantitative dimensions of the human world? And to that end, it doesn't matter at all whether a claim is based on what the author intended, as long as it provides some useful insight. (Yes, you _could_ use this to justify any claim at all about any piece of literature, and that's part of what this article is about. A lot of people may be "wrong" about what Frost intended, but it's insightful for them anyway, and that's just fine. Typically, academics expect that claims are based on evidence in the text, but that's still subjective and open to many interpretations.)
Similarly, the most effective way to communicate an idea is not always to present it logically and directly. There's the proverb: "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." IME, it's almost always more effective to communicate an idea by causing the reader to come to it themselves. That's why narratives can be much more effective at communicating truths about human experiences than simply stating it outright. That's (one reason) why the story of Macbeth is more compelling than just telling someone "your obsession with power may make you miserable".
I agree entirely, but I think it would go a lot easier for everybody if literary interpretation were presented as personal, possibly-rewarding approaches to a text rather than authoritative assertion of fact.
My humanities-professor friends today are very good at taking the former approach, at least when talking with me. But the latter was definitely how literature was taught in all of the schools I went to. The green light on the dock was X. Or in another class, it was clearly Y. Or, in a third, it was X, and Y, and Z, and Ƶ and Ź and Ž and ζ, at which point the explanation seemed to be more akin to improvisational poetry about a Rorschach blot than any serious attempt at unpacking a metaphor or understanding an author. But it was still framed as authoritative analysis, which mainly made me think that the teachers were not so clear on what actual facts were.
In the same HS, I had an art teacher who was great. I gained an appreciation for abstract, 'modern' art, even if I didn't necessarily like everything I saw. She focused on how things made us feel, and if, for instance, they evoked images of other things. Stuff like that, which was all about suggestion and how elements in the image worked together, but without wrong answers or D's if we disagreed with her.
The problem with literary studies (as generally found in universities anyway) is that it's less about the author or the work and more about the critic. It's basically a pissing match to see who can construct the most impressive interpretation based on an arbitrary piece of literature.
I can accept that Literature is not about science as much as it is about defining the (intentional or non) meaning a literary work carries for its audience, but at university levels it certainly likes to present itself as if it were a science (rather than an art in itself) and embraces an obscene cargo cult effigy of what real science sounds like -- exactly like new age pseudo-science.
Furthermore, by presenting itself as a science, it gives undue authority to other social "sciences" that seem to get away with asserting falsifiable claims with no attempt to provide empirical evidence, which in turn transfers that false authority to political interest groups.
The world could do with a good amount less woo than it has now.
Agreed. Although I try to remember that technology isn't inherently less pissing-match oriented than, say, literary studies. I think the only advantage we have is that we work in a context where "prove it with numbers" is a stick that we can use to beat each other with. I think that happens to result in a modestly higher level of ambient truth, plus a modest disincentive to the more grandiose flights of bullshit.
This seems like a pretty common complaint. You seem to assume that literature should work like science. But the purpose of literature is not to rigorously refine a certain predictive model of the world. I don't want to claim exactly what it is, but maybe the telling of human experiences (and the analysis thereof) provides insights that help people better understand the muddier, less quantitative dimensions of the human world? And to that end, it doesn't matter at all whether a claim is based on what the author intended, as long as it provides some useful insight. (Yes, you _could_ use this to justify any claim at all about any piece of literature, and that's part of what this article is about. A lot of people may be "wrong" about what Frost intended, but it's insightful for them anyway, and that's just fine. Typically, academics expect that claims are based on evidence in the text, but that's still subjective and open to many interpretations.)
Similarly, the most effective way to communicate an idea is not always to present it logically and directly. There's the proverb: "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." IME, it's almost always more effective to communicate an idea by causing the reader to come to it themselves. That's why narratives can be much more effective at communicating truths about human experiences than simply stating it outright. That's (one reason) why the story of Macbeth is more compelling than just telling someone "your obsession with power may make you miserable".