Is it bad to overthink?
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Is it bad to overthink?
Is it bad to overthink?
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These lessons weren't trying to get you to understand whatever bullshit the author was thinking when writing a sentence, they were trying to get you to think between the lines in literature. You will never fully understand why an author picked so and so word because not even they understood how their subconscious mind steered them that way.
I just project my own meaning onto whatever I read. No one can stop me.
You can call yourself a woman even if you will never be one.
The dishonesty of the arguments made in the Death of the Author makes this example both an argument for and against Death of the Author even when coming to the same conclusion.
It depends on where you draw the line of "overthinking" but as long as you are recognizing the most important details first you can be imaginative with subtler details without wasting your attention/missing the point.
>blue curtains
oh shid izat pooh shiesty
nah, this is dumb. a book with accidental details is wasting your time. if the curtains being blue has no significance then they should never have been mentioned and this book isnt worth reading
Describing a scene is significant. Leaving every detail for the reader to interpret is lazy.
saying "describing a scene is significant" is silly because you are ignoring all the gradations of description. a description can be one sentence or ten pages, it can be symbolically important to plot, theme, or characterization or it can be completely irrelevant. here's the bottom line: a book shouldnt have any meaningless sentences in it, and therefore you're allowed to analyze whatever the frick the idiot author decided to publish; you dont get to say "it doesnt mean anything" unless you also want to admit at the same time that the book wastes the reader's time with meaningless shit
>In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.
from A Farewell to Arms
Is the description of the pebbles and boulders in the riverbed not just there to describe what the area looks like? The person you're replying to takes that to mean it's meaningless, for the purposes of this discussion. You disagree with this?
it's not meaningless, it's establishing the location through use of geographically and temporally accurate detail. it further implies the narrator spending time looking into the river, which is characterization (typically oblique for hemingway); and the intermixture of the dust from the marching troops with the idyllic scene is obviously symbolic. isnt this a literature board? i have to actually say this?
The dust is not from the soldiers, unfortunately. Hemingway confirmed that in an interview. I like your idea though.
it quite literally says "the dust they raised"
Okay, that example is actually quite rich thematically (to be brief but not wholly accurate). But what if there's a story and characters are in a restaurant at a bar, and it mentions that the countertop is a "smooth mint green" color. Sure, it gives you a sense of what kind of place it is, but isn't that basically just "the counter was fricking green"
i do get what you're saying, that sometimes the author is just trying to set a scene for you to imagine, right? but i have to insist that novels have an economy of words. the author is constantly confronted by choices: how much description does the scene get? what parts of the scene do i describe? what is the character of those parts? how does it contribute to the work? how does it relate to the story? taken this way nothing in a novel should be meaningless; if it does the novel is wasting the reader's time. there are books that spend 100 pages with one character getting out of bed in one room, there are books where characters move through entire states of countries within the space of a paragraph. these two modes can exist within a single book. but in either case there must be some kind of justification for every sentence, or else why write it? why edit it? why burn ink on it? it's just unfathomable to me why someone would defend truly "accidental" detail
You must be very moronic if you can't see there is a comparison being made between the riverbed and the water with the road and the troops. I'm sorry but you are terminally moronic.
I don't. What's the comparison?
It's all open to interpretation so every word ever written by every author who ever lived is jam packed with the deepest esoteric philosophy known to mankind.
What, you didn't know BUSTY BEACH BIMBOS VOLUME 3: ATTACK OF THE COOTERSNATCHERS was actually about the plight of rural farmers in 1740's Ireland? Pshh. It says it all right here:
>Her busty bootalicious booba bounced brilliantly before Barbara's bangin' body.
How better might one express the times?
its funny because you obviously dont even believe the point youre trying to make here
>t. publisher
Frick you, you israelite b***h. You're going to 3 pages on how blue the curtains really were and you're gonna like it
If the details of the scene have no bearing, what's the point? As soon as a writer starts explaining to me how each room looks and the details of characters I simply lose interest. What bearing does eye colour have, especially if it's only stated outright? If the pin stripes on a lampshade eventually juxtapose the suit a character wears it's bad writing.
You don’t actually like fiction as it usually and naturally exists, then, because part of fiction is verisimilitude and immersion. The details are there because such details exist in reality and the author is attempting to make the reader feel as if the situation being described is real.
>part of fiction is verisimilitude and immersion
Fictional verisimilitude is constructed in various ways, and mechanically describing the scenery with no meaning behind it is the worst way to do it.
Immersion is an irrelevant concept for everyone except escapist genmorons. There's a parable, perhaps from an Aristotle text, about a painter who was so skilled he could paint fruit so lifelike that birds would flock to the canvases thinking they could eat them. So everyone thought very highly of the painter. Yet, the paintings of fruit offered no moral quality to the viewers, it was just a decoration and a technical show-off, and at the end of the day it only fooled the brains of dumb birds.
Not him, but here's my take. Note the combination - "pebbles and boulders", small and big. The stones are of various shapes and sizes and colours ("white in the sun"), irregular, as nature made them, placed in an idyllic context. The army marching past the pebbles is the exact opposite, a negation of individuality, men walking in lockstep like one. The whole picture is very deliberately put together. The style of the descriptions of nature is functional too, full of syntactic variety, set against the repetitive description of the soldiers - "troops went by", "the troops marching", "soldiers marching", 3x "dust", 3x "leaves".
The anon also probably suggests the parallel-contrast: stones of various shapes in the river vs. monotone soldiers on the road. Nature's course vs. man's active creation of his own (in this situation, clearly negative).
yes. that's the implication of "over"
i got one book that i re-read for 4 years straight because it doesn't matter what i read. all that matters is my interpretation and that is dependent on my mood in that moment, try reading the same book in the winter and the summer. or in a park in broad daylight vs a candle-lit room at night.
The people on the right are the same people who will never ever, not once in their fricking life, explain what they think the author meant by describing where the hills are in the English countryside the story resides in.
Therefor, they're pseuds and the curtains are blue because the author was thinking of a pretty room and wanted you to see the pretty room.
>literal vs. figurative language
Not sure how you're getting filtered by this OP
Try thinking next time
How does one know what sentence is what?
I teach, and students often overthink what I say.
>students read a story about guilt and murder from 1947
>I mention that writing about guilt was common in the years after WW2
>kids interpret that as the story being an allegory for the Holocaust
>it's not and I never claimed it was
>>kids interpret that as the story being an allegory for the Holocaust
Just their doctrination kicking in. Once the state deemed I was old enough to be told what the Holocaust was, I was continuously enrolled in a history course which would cover World War II.
I don't think I ever had a lesson past primary school where this sort of inference was made.
As a heavy alcoholic, I can honestly say I miss being able to overthink. Or at least think.
ultimate midwit pic
More like 14 year old mid pic
if I were a janny, I would have hunted you down for this
This meme was the worst thing to happen to literary criticism since Barthes.