Quite a lot of students, in the UK at least, would have done exams on English Literature around this time. The questions usually focus on language analysis and how they present the author’s intentions. I don’t know about other schools, so please forgive me if I make any gross generalisations, but in my experience seldom are students allowed to express their original thoughts on the stories or poems they study.
We are fed the knowledge of critics to use to analyse texts, but what if we don’t agree with them? Unlike the rigour of Maths it is very hard to quantify right or wrong in literature as it appeals to the emotions instead of the cold steel of logic. In my view the story comes first, and their connotations second. Any social commentary and symbolism is a direct result of its plot and characters, and as such our view of the story will affect our understanding of the authorial intention. Instead of encouraging debate and the exploration of ideas, our education has forced us into regurgitating the opinions of others instead of developing our own fresh perspective on an author’s work. For example, I read a poem in a past paper which I didn’t quite understand. The question was “How does this poem evoke strong feelings in the reader?” I asked my English teacher to go through it with me, and he began picking out fine linguistic details that tried to accommodate the question. Even he found it hard. By no means am I saying my teacher is the definite person to pass judgement on all things literature, but if a seasoned teacher found it hard to grasp, surely 16 year old students would find it a real challenge.
What if the question was phrased differently? What if it asked “What are your views on the poem” instead of assuming that all students see it from an examiners view? Sure, we might not learn as much critical knowledge to analyse a piece, but isn’t the point of English to foster the enjoyment of the language and encourage the creation of new literature? From what I can see, for now, all our education has prepared us for is the boring deconstruction of the works of others.
“There isn’t any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks, no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.”
He continues: “I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things. The hardest thing is to make something really true and sometimes truer than true.”
Ernest Hemingway
Creating Quotes 