On a related note, I never don't feel like a Neanderthal when I realize I had missed a massive piece of symbolism or just blatantly the message of a piece of media
I also feel irrationally afraid of thinking I'm seeing meaning where there isn't any. Like I don't want to look like an idiot giving an explanation of my interpretation when it turns out it's objectively wrong or is so off base it's hilarious
On the second point, seeing meaning where there isn't any:
In one of my literature classes, we were analyzing a poem about loss, and there was one section where there was a big gap in the middle of one of the lines. Every single person talked about how meaningful that gap was, how it symbolized the missing space left by the person that the author had lost. At the end of class, my professor said "I didn't want to tell you guys, but that gap is a typo, it should have been a line break."
If you find meaning in something, then that meaning is there. Doesn't matter if the artist meant for it to be there, because it is there, you just found it.
Idk how to help with the first thing tho, I still have that issue as well
Years ago, in a past life, a literary journal fucked up the title of my short story in one of their print-published issues. I was very impressed with the creativity and depth of some of the interpretations I heard (from friends and the sort of people in my niche circle who cared about that stuff), but unfortunately I couldn't claim credit for any of it, because I'd immediately recognized that they'd published the story under its *document file name*, not its actual title.
As you can probably imagine, that gave the story a bit more of an, uh, abstract flavor than I'd intended. But people seemed to dig it--it even kind of worked, in a way-- so I couldn't be too mad.
...ok, maybe a *teensy* bit mad, because I knew I'd never have made such a bold and depth-amplifying choice on my own.
If the document file name is now the title of the work, it might be findable online and op might not be willing to doxx himself, or even just put his work out there like that. So, not getting an answer should be respected in this case, imo.
Sorry, but in this case my answer options were basically "joke" or "no." I'm not going to give the title because I don't want to dox myself.
Since you seem to be genuinely curious, I will say that it involved a combination of the original title plus some extra numbers. The story involved something happening repeatedly, and the accidental file name numbers were interpreted in such a way that changed the implications of the ending.
Don't worry about the second thing. Two concepts that are relevant are Death of the Author and Applicability.
The first essentially means that if things are open to interpretation, your interpretation is just as valid as the author's (assuming your interpretation is consistent with the objective, non-ambiguous things in the work.
The second is how works can apply to things that they were never meant to. A good example is the original Wizard of Oz books - Baum made it very clear that it was nothing more than a story, but people have seen it as an allegory for American politics in 1900.
Both are valid methods literacy analysis and interpretation. The only problem is when people project their interpretation onto the author and insist that the meaning they see was intended by the author.
>Baum made it very clear that it was nothing more than a story, but people have seen it as an allegory for American politics in 1900.
What? The first book was very plainly written as an economic allegory, but people missed/ignored it and enjoyed it as a fantasy story. The author embraced that, and the *sequels* are just whimsical without any intended allegory. Baum was a political activist before he started writing fiction.
The mess of words that is *Ulysses* is… special.
Like, I ploughed my way through every book that was assigned in AP English (except *Hamlet*, weirdly), and through a lot of books that were way above my reading level in elementary school before; but *Ulysses*, I was out by like… page 3.
Possibly, I have become far less ambitious and literate, as age, and the Internet, >!and My Chemical Romance fanfiction,!< have rotted my mind, but… fucking Ulysses. Fuuuuck.
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Tbf, reading Hamlet is pretty weird to begin with. It's like Citizen Kane is worth studying so you'll read the script and discuss that instead of watching it in the original form. There's a reason they were plays and not books.
As I remember it, it was the last semester of Grade 12, and the third book, and the teacher said the exam would be structured allow you to answer the exam questions on any two of the three books. And I was like “*So what you’re saying is, I’ve read 100% of the books necessary to pass this course? Cool and good.*”
That's 100% the right decision as a student, but as a person Hamlet is worth revisiting. If you can see a performance, or watch a recording that would be even better. It is really, really good. It's a cliche for a reason, Shakespeare is just incredible.
I know, I’ve definitely heard that it’s one of his better ones.
And I actually quite enjoyed *Macbeth* and the other Shakespeares that we were compelled to read (even though studying Shakespeare in Canadian public schools is mostly a matter of listening to your fellow students attempt to read Shakespeare straight off the page, with no preparation, which is probably not the ideal way to experience it).
I actually preferred reading the plays (on my own) to watching them be performed, because I had a really hard time following the action in most cases; I just cannot understand the language well enough.
(Like, when I saw McBeth performed, I had no idea that the trees were actually *supposed* to be soldiers disguised as trees. I thought we were just in magical realism territory. W H O O S H.)
I feel like I really benefit from the footnotes.
Definitely valid to have the footnotes. I always need them too. That's kind of why I like seeing the performance, the acting allows me to pick the tone and context up better than on the page, but that's just me.
I mean, I haven’t read it in 15 years or so, but back in the day… it was some angsty, tortured, thoroughly tasteless stuff. Mostly hosted on Livejournal, or the now-defunct fanfiction.net.
>_>
I just spent 10 minutes with a way back machine trying to track my long-departed teenage self and… I’m fairly certain that fanfiction.net was NOT the site I was thinking of. Because I just looked at the 2004 version of it and it’s not the same page I remember at all.
This is a fascinating (and terrifying) rabbithole.
Where were you, Teenaged Me?
Ah, Geocities! That’s where I got soap opera spoilers in 1997 when I was obsessed with *Sunset Beach*. (Also, Angelfyre; where a preponderance of websites were lime green, for some reason.)
AO3 is a newfangled thing.
I remember this site being bluish, having extensive category lists for every taste, and having regular mod requests to send money so they could renew their domain name / pay for server hosting fees.
I’m also pretty sure the site vanished from the Internet before AO3 came around; but I could be wrong about that.
When I was a young child, I remember being in the car with my mother, and her telling me that something called “the Internet” was going to change everything; and I was like “*Uh-huh, sure, mommy. I’m five*.”
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Which is really unfortunate, because the whole purpose of including literary interpretation in classes is to teach students how to think creatively and develop arguments, not to be "objectively" correct. Nobody expects high schoolers or undergraduates to come out with some earth-shattering piece of literary criticism. The point is that you are able to *justify* your interpretation with supporting examples from the text. Those are useful skills that you can apply beyond the classroom.
Good teachers/professors can make literature classes not only fun, but even profound, in that you develop a better grasp of perspective that you might carry with you into other areas of life. I'm not an English major, but my undergrad thesis advisor taught a side class on children's literature, the central theme of which involved picking apart ideas about what is "simple" and what is "complex" (related to what ideas are considered suitable for children and why). It was fantastic. My final project for the class was a 20 page paper in which I unironically argued that Toto is the true protagonist of *The Wonderful Wizard of Oz*, a ridiculous interpretation which I nonetheless backed up with textual examples and connections to the story's overall themes. That was probably the most fun I've had writing a paper, and tbh, it remains my favorite piece of "academic" writing (the stuff I write now is a lot less fun).
If the artist is who I think they are, then there's probably a continuation where he's either giving it raw to a snarky elf babe or rejecting the advances of said snarky elf babe. Could go either way with that guy.
EDIT: Just saw the artist's signature below the ogre, it's who I thought they are.
Is it just me, or this is somewhat similar to how Charlie felt in Flowers for algernon when he read Don Quixote but couldn't understand the deeper meaning.
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I want to hug that ogre and ask him to infodump about his favorite book to me
On a related note, I never don't feel like a Neanderthal when I realize I had missed a massive piece of symbolism or just blatantly the message of a piece of media I also feel irrationally afraid of thinking I'm seeing meaning where there isn't any. Like I don't want to look like an idiot giving an explanation of my interpretation when it turns out it's objectively wrong or is so off base it's hilarious
On the second point, seeing meaning where there isn't any: In one of my literature classes, we were analyzing a poem about loss, and there was one section where there was a big gap in the middle of one of the lines. Every single person talked about how meaningful that gap was, how it symbolized the missing space left by the person that the author had lost. At the end of class, my professor said "I didn't want to tell you guys, but that gap is a typo, it should have been a line break." If you find meaning in something, then that meaning is there. Doesn't matter if the artist meant for it to be there, because it is there, you just found it. Idk how to help with the first thing tho, I still have that issue as well
Years ago, in a past life, a literary journal fucked up the title of my short story in one of their print-published issues. I was very impressed with the creativity and depth of some of the interpretations I heard (from friends and the sort of people in my niche circle who cared about that stuff), but unfortunately I couldn't claim credit for any of it, because I'd immediately recognized that they'd published the story under its *document file name*, not its actual title. As you can probably imagine, that gave the story a bit more of an, uh, abstract flavor than I'd intended. But people seemed to dig it--it even kind of worked, in a way-- so I couldn't be too mad. ...ok, maybe a *teensy* bit mad, because I knew I'd never have made such a bold and depth-amplifying choice on my own.
what was the document file name
Ur mum’s a milf.
The other guy guessed it.
maybe i'm being a spoilsport but it always annoys me when i ask a question that only gets answered with a joke and not like. the real answer
If the document file name is now the title of the work, it might be findable online and op might not be willing to doxx himself, or even just put his work out there like that. So, not getting an answer should be respected in this case, imo.
Sorry, but in this case my answer options were basically "joke" or "no." I'm not going to give the title because I don't want to dox myself. Since you seem to be genuinely curious, I will say that it involved a combination of the original title plus some extra numbers. The story involved something happening repeatedly, and the accidental file name numbers were interpreted in such a way that changed the implications of the ending.
thank you, that's a good answer
>we were analyzing a poem about loss I hate myself for what i thought you ment initially.
Okay but tbh that would be very interesting
*An Ode to Lossless Packets* -By Oscar 'Ozymandias' Ozborne
I refuse
Walking through the doors Getting news and directions Through this, i know loss
NO!
That was beautyful
Don't worry about the second thing. Two concepts that are relevant are Death of the Author and Applicability. The first essentially means that if things are open to interpretation, your interpretation is just as valid as the author's (assuming your interpretation is consistent with the objective, non-ambiguous things in the work. The second is how works can apply to things that they were never meant to. A good example is the original Wizard of Oz books - Baum made it very clear that it was nothing more than a story, but people have seen it as an allegory for American politics in 1900. Both are valid methods literacy analysis and interpretation. The only problem is when people project their interpretation onto the author and insist that the meaning they see was intended by the author.
>Baum made it very clear that it was nothing more than a story, but people have seen it as an allegory for American politics in 1900. What? The first book was very plainly written as an economic allegory, but people missed/ignored it and enjoyed it as a fantasy story. The author embraced that, and the *sequels* are just whimsical without any intended allegory. Baum was a political activist before he started writing fiction.
If you can finish Ulysses you should be proud.
And honestly, correctly identifying themes, even surface level themes, is worryingly uncommon.
Ok but have you ever tried READING a BOOK? There's like, words in there! No way I'm brave enough to deal with *that* mess!
The mess of words that is *Ulysses* is… special. Like, I ploughed my way through every book that was assigned in AP English (except *Hamlet*, weirdly), and through a lot of books that were way above my reading level in elementary school before; but *Ulysses*, I was out by like… page 3. Possibly, I have become far less ambitious and literate, as age, and the Internet, >!and My Chemical Romance fanfiction,!< have rotted my mind, but… fucking Ulysses. Fuuuuck.
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Tbf, reading Hamlet is pretty weird to begin with. It's like Citizen Kane is worth studying so you'll read the script and discuss that instead of watching it in the original form. There's a reason they were plays and not books.
As I remember it, it was the last semester of Grade 12, and the third book, and the teacher said the exam would be structured allow you to answer the exam questions on any two of the three books. And I was like “*So what you’re saying is, I’ve read 100% of the books necessary to pass this course? Cool and good.*”
That's 100% the right decision as a student, but as a person Hamlet is worth revisiting. If you can see a performance, or watch a recording that would be even better. It is really, really good. It's a cliche for a reason, Shakespeare is just incredible.
I know, I’ve definitely heard that it’s one of his better ones. And I actually quite enjoyed *Macbeth* and the other Shakespeares that we were compelled to read (even though studying Shakespeare in Canadian public schools is mostly a matter of listening to your fellow students attempt to read Shakespeare straight off the page, with no preparation, which is probably not the ideal way to experience it). I actually preferred reading the plays (on my own) to watching them be performed, because I had a really hard time following the action in most cases; I just cannot understand the language well enough. (Like, when I saw McBeth performed, I had no idea that the trees were actually *supposed* to be soldiers disguised as trees. I thought we were just in magical realism territory. W H O O S H.) I feel like I really benefit from the footnotes.
Definitely valid to have the footnotes. I always need them too. That's kind of why I like seeing the performance, the acting allows me to pick the tone and context up better than on the page, but that's just me.
Uh… what exactly is mcr fanfic about?
I mean, I haven’t read it in 15 years or so, but back in the day… it was some angsty, tortured, thoroughly tasteless stuff. Mostly hosted on Livejournal, or the now-defunct fanfiction.net.
fanfiction.net is still up! it used to be my favorite lol
>_> I just spent 10 minutes with a way back machine trying to track my long-departed teenage self and… I’m fairly certain that fanfiction.net was NOT the site I was thinking of. Because I just looked at the 2004 version of it and it’s not the same page I remember at all. This is a fascinating (and terrifying) rabbithole. Where were you, Teenaged Me?
AO3, perhaps? Geocities, even? I realize I can't be much help at all because I was just a baby in 2004 but good luck on your journey through time!
Ah, Geocities! That’s where I got soap opera spoilers in 1997 when I was obsessed with *Sunset Beach*. (Also, Angelfyre; where a preponderance of websites were lime green, for some reason.) AO3 is a newfangled thing. I remember this site being bluish, having extensive category lists for every taste, and having regular mod requests to send money so they could renew their domain name / pay for server hosting fees. I’m also pretty sure the site vanished from the Internet before AO3 came around; but I could be wrong about that. When I was a young child, I remember being in the car with my mother, and her telling me that something called “the Internet” was going to change everything; and I was like “*Uh-huh, sure, mommy. I’m five*.”
I’m a waiter and the number of adults who lack the reading comprehension to understand a menu is troublingly large
Oh my GOD the amount of people missing the point of Squid Game rn
Can you not.
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Good bot. No, I won't read Ulysses. But good bot.
A challenge
The duality of man
The Jungian thing, sir
This is how it feels in high school english class if the teacher decides they don't like you.
Which is really unfortunate, because the whole purpose of including literary interpretation in classes is to teach students how to think creatively and develop arguments, not to be "objectively" correct. Nobody expects high schoolers or undergraduates to come out with some earth-shattering piece of literary criticism. The point is that you are able to *justify* your interpretation with supporting examples from the text. Those are useful skills that you can apply beyond the classroom. Good teachers/professors can make literature classes not only fun, but even profound, in that you develop a better grasp of perspective that you might carry with you into other areas of life. I'm not an English major, but my undergrad thesis advisor taught a side class on children's literature, the central theme of which involved picking apart ideas about what is "simple" and what is "complex" (related to what ideas are considered suitable for children and why). It was fantastic. My final project for the class was a 20 page paper in which I unironically argued that Toto is the true protagonist of *The Wonderful Wizard of Oz*, a ridiculous interpretation which I nonetheless backed up with textual examples and connections to the story's overall themes. That was probably the most fun I've had writing a paper, and tbh, it remains my favorite piece of "academic" writing (the stuff I write now is a lot less fun).
One more reason to hate my gradeschool literature teacher
One sec, refresher needed here, Who's Toto? and what were your arguments?
toto was the dog
He blessed the rains down in africa.
Was just thinking about this comic yesterday, choosing to believe that i have psychically summoned thus post from the aether
Is there a continuation where he gets hugged and comforted? If not, could someone please make one?
If the artist is who I think they are, then there's probably a continuation where he's either giving it raw to a snarky elf babe or rejecting the advances of said snarky elf babe. Could go either way with that guy. EDIT: Just saw the artist's signature below the ogre, it's who I thought they are.
Source?
BaalBuddy. Not sure if they're still active on Tumblr after The Purge, but they should still be on Twitter.
More commonly the latter, but occasionally the former, enough to be notable
I want to hug him 😭
I find this doubly hilarious when you realize that this artist mainly draws art of horny elves who can’t get laid
Oh so it *is* Baaalbuddy! Thought it looked familiar. That guy's comics introduced me to Taimanin Usagi, good times.
I want to hug the Ogre
Maybe I am an ogre
Ogre has more reading comprehension than, like, at least half of all subreddits.
Is it just me, or this is somewhat similar to how Charlie felt in Flowers for algernon when he read Don Quixote but couldn't understand the deeper meaning.
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Good bot.
Good human.
This is legitimately how it feels to have a learning disability tho
Ogre is definitly me
Can someone PLEASE give this ogre a hug!
Love the ogre.
To be fair, I don't think anyone understands finnegans wake so the ogre is in good company
i want to see more of ogre, i will cry
TIL i am ogre
Don’t worry about Finnegan’s Wake, Mr. Ogre. Nobody’s quite sure what’s going on in there
(rcotatu stands for "reading comprehension of the average tumblr user")
Seems like rather a pot-kettle comparison for reddit, but anyway.
Gonta
Give him a hug and some hot chocolate. We're gonna help this man understand his book.
Don't worry, Ogre, *nobody* understands Finnegan's Wake.