(on literary analysis)

p.s. i can sleep good in a lot of places. but i dont always like to be woken up. not that its unavoidable all the time, im just saying
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in this literature class, we rush [if you can say 'rush'...we're sooo behind.] right through and mess it all up. we dont even stop to read things out loud, not even the loveliest alliteration and rhythm and consonnance do we take the time for, let alone the mediocre poetry that we [sometimes] come across. we analyze it so much that it hardly resembles a poem when we are finished. what good is poetry if not for letting it be inside you and taking the time to feel it and breathe with it and learn from it?
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and speaking of, wouldnt it be weird to have your own stuff analyzed as awfully as we do some of this other stuff? i mean, what if someone tried to analyze mortimer? [i certainly hope not]. take this section:

" They went inside.As they began to look around, Olivia found a hat that she simply had to own. It was pink with orange flowers and blue polka dots. Mortimer thought that it was the ugliest hat that he had ever seen."

this is what they would do to analyze: pink--innocence and purity. orange--wildand crazy. blue--life, birth, purity. this obviously means that olivia is currently innocent and pure but she seeks to find a new life by living a wild life and doing crazy things. she is embracing her self and all that she can be, and shes doing it without the army. mortimers aversion to the hat means one of two things, depending on your interpretation: 1) mortimer is a traditionalist. he is resistant to change. also, beauty plays a key role in how he views the world. he seeks to make beauty a part of that tradition, despite his narrow defination of true beauty. 2) Mortimer is against the whole femenist movement and is therefore a social outcast and he later actually rejects more hats, which further proves his chauvinistic, prejudiced, and male-dominant characteristics.

that is not a correct interpretation. and i know, cause i wrote it. but thats exactly what we do to poor authors all the time. i mean really. its so...wrong...in so many ways. those poor authors--so mistreated and misanalyzed [!] someone remind me why i do this again?

Currently Reading:
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 2 A: The Romantic Period

(4/12/2004 4:00 PM)