Wackiest literary criticism idea you've come across

[Ruben Meijerink]

This should be fun. What interpretation or theory from scholars regarding a literary work is unlikely to be true and ridiculous?

[JBI]

To limit it to ones that have been popular, Hamlet having an Oedipus Complex, and therefore feeling a sort of mix of thanks and revulsion at the death of his father. Somehow I get the feeling such a reading has absolutely no clear intention in the dramatic culture of Shakespeare, and that as great as Shakespeare was, he would not have put a "subtle" hint like that in there so that 300 years later Freud could dig it up.

Then again, Orson Scott Card rewrote the thing as Hamlet's father being a child molester. That's just as silly.

[kelby_lake]

To limit it to ones that have been popular, Hamlet having an Oedipus Complex, and therefore feeling a sort of mix of thanks and revulsion at the death of his father. Somehow I get the feeling such a reading has absolutely no clear intention in the dramatic culture of Shakespeare, and that as great as Shakespeare was, he would not have put a "subtle" hint like that in there so that 300 years later Freud could dig it up.

To be fair Oedipus predates Shakespeare.

Every male character in the whole of literature has one time or another been supposed to be homosexual by some critic. Women who have a close friendship- clearly lesbians! Apparantly there's no difference between a close friendship and wanting to get your leg over!

[JBI]

To be fair Oedipus predates Shakespeare.

Every male character in the whole of literature has one time or another been supposed to be homosexual by some critic. Women who have a close friendship- clearly lesbians! Apparantly there's no difference between a close friendship and wanting to get your leg over!

My problem is this audacity to somehow read characters as if they were more complex than their narratives. So ultimately, treating Hamlet like a real person, or any other number of characters as real people.

[mal4mac]

The wackiest excursion into literary criticism has to be the older Tolstoy's negative interpretation of most great works of literature, including his own great novels, through the lens of his late adopted extreme Christianity. For instance, his criticism of Shakespeare:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/27726/27726-h/27726-h.htm

Particularly wacky are his ideas that Shakespeare's fame was due to propaganda by German professors, or a sort of mass hypnosis.

The exuberance with life that characterizes Shakespeare, his interest in everything, the poetic brilliance, the post-Christian humanism, are precisely the qualities that make him unendurable to Tolstoy in his later years, whose main aim was to narrow the range of human consciousness in the service of an extreme version of Christianity. The special hatred Tolstoy had for King Lear may well be due to the similarity of his own story to Lear's; he suffered similar disappointments after renouncing his estate, and his final, strange, train journey is reminiscent of Lear's excursion onto the blasted heath.

[kelby_lake]

My problem is this audacity to somehow read characters as if they were more complex than their narratives. So ultimately, treating Hamlet like a real person, or any other number of characters as real people.

I suppose this is true, which is why you get so many annoying readers complaining that the characters are not acting in the way they themselves would act.

[JBI]

I suppose this is true, which is why you get so many annoying readers complaining that the characters are not acting in the way they themselves would act.

Perhaps though Shakespeare has the benefit of genre behind him - we ultimately do not have his stage cues (I believe we have one, where during the play within a play of A Midsummer Night's dream the players are supposed to be unable to unsheeth their sword, and therefore fall on the scabbard, which traditionally has been regarded as an original cue) but even so, when you act, you have this ability to draw on virtually anything to personalize your character - the text also encourages a sort of larger than life performance of even minor roles.

With that in mind, the wide range of players creates a wider range of character, which ultimately balloons the possible range of the performance text. A novel is somewhat similar in that readers bring their own ideas to certain texts (unless it is one of those densely described texts that pin down every hair on every person) and therefore can also create a "larger" understanding of a character as a sort of "human". Meaning, what does x character think of women, what are his political motives, etc. - in some cases, these things are stated, but more often, they are inferred from plot developments, and therefore there runs a problem.

Generally the field of discussing character in fiction is one of talking about imaginary people, which is quite strange to begin with. The Romantic and post-romantic novel have always tried to center a sort of emotion within the text, so we can read these people as having "real feelings" and get a sort of pathos from them (unlike something like Medieval narrative which reads as an allegory more than as a character, and therefore sort of lacks the real connection and the idea of the character as somewhat "real" or based on a real person). The problem though, and one of the reasons I stopped reading fiction much in general is that these characters never leave the book - they cannot actually communicate, and when the book ends they too die. Poetry, particularly lyric poetry, seems to me far more direct and engaging, and also works with time much better.

So that I can read a poem that quotes another poem, which quotes another poem, and get the feeling that the sentiment and the poets are all echoing within the same experience of reading there together. Such a poetic magic is far more common in something like Japanese poetry, which in general is the reason people unversed in its history and major works (The way a school child who committed hundreds of poems to memory would be) fails to actually enjoy or grasp the subtle feeling of reading.

That being said, with this limitation in mind, readers will always try to draw a more round character. So some critics will look for real life equivalents, others will try to use the text to draw character sketches, and then make assumptions and inferences of the character's personality.

It's even more fun doing this with early authors, since basically when we write a biography of Shakespeare, we are making most of it up to fill our 300+ pages, given that we know virtually nothing. The same is said of certain poets who only exist from a few lyrics, or scant biographical traces.

Japanese people are perhaps the best at this, in that they are the most exhaustive researches I have come across. So half a dozen poems and a 3 page biography becomes a word by word biography that tells you exactly how the person felt, when they wrote the poems, and where they were. Occasionally one will then find a textual variant, and switch the whole story. So a famous poet like Pan Yue, who was known for writing poems to memorialize his dead wife has a text where he mentions 36 years instead of 20, which led to biographers now rewriting his life as if he married twice, and then rethinking which poems belong to the fist, and which to the second. The words two, and three, look like this in Chinese: 二，三，so it is quite possible that in the 1000-odd years of textual copying between the printed edition and the original text somebody added an extra line, or misread one line as two, or whatever. But now we have at least 10 new biographical interpretations of the poet based on this one little line, and it is causing people to reevaluate the sincerity of his emotions, given that he supposedly quickly remarried another woman.

[AuntShecky]

The wackiest and most outrageous bit of literary criticism I've read (so far) was Jane Smiley's contention that Uncle Tom's Cabin was a better novel than The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

[kelby_lake]

A lot of literary critics seem to be obsessed with sex. One critic objected to the end of My Fair Lady: "It is clear from this ending that they are going to make love". Really? Honestly, you could have a character saying hello to a postman and there'll be a critic saying "It is clear that these people will have sex". It normally comes under the context of mock-outrage.

[Lykren]

A lot of literary critics seem to be obsessed with sex. One critic objected to the end of My Fair Lady: "It is clear from this ending that they are going to make love". Really? Honestly, you could have a character saying hello to a postman and there'll be a critic saying "It is clear that these people will have sex". It normally comes under the context of mock-outrage.

Also why would characters having sex be a problem.

Also, all literary critics ARE obsessed with sex! It's their job.

[mona amon]

A lot of literary critics seem to be obsessed with sex. One critic objected to the end of My Fair Lady: "It is clear from this ending that they are going to make love". Really?

To be fair, the ending of My Fair Lady (at least the film version) strongly hints at the reconciliation of Henry Higgins and Eliza, and their ending up married, so it's not such a stretch. The ending of Pygmallion on the other hand is much more ambiguous, and even though it's bristling with stage cues, I could hardly understand what it implied. I had to depend on Shaw's sequel, firmly assuring us that Eliza married Freddy and opened a flower shop.

[kelby_lake]

To be fair, the ending of My Fair Lady (at least the film version) strongly hints at the reconciliation of Henry Higgins and Eliza, and their ending up married, so it's not such a stretch. The ending of Pygmallion on the other hand is much more ambiguous, and even though it's bristling with stage cues, I could hardly understand what it implied. I had to depend on Shaw's sequel, firmly assuring us that Eliza married Freddy and opened a flower shop.

Even if they did marry, it was clearly going to be a sexless marriage. Anyway, most viewers would watch it and guess, like you said, that they were going to marry, but I don't think they'd sit there in outrage exclaiming that they're going to have sexual intercourse! Probably right there on screen because you know Hollywood! Personally I saw it as a continuation of the friendship, except Eliza would be an assistant. Eliza overtly says that she doesn't want romance from Higgins- particularly as they cast him quite old in films! (though in the play, Higgins is only 40. Then again, Eliza is 20).

Pygmalion as a film ends the same as My Fair Lady. Pygmalion as a play...I like the ending and think it's funny, but Shaw tries to explain too much in the epilogue. Even there, he says that Eliza still sees Higgins because there can be no question of him not being in her life.

[kelby_lake]

Also why would characters having sex be a problem.

Also, all literary critics ARE obsessed with sex! It's their job.

Except if you get to the DH Lawrence ones, where they say it's all about industrialisation and religion and what not. The critical introduction I have in my copy of The Rainbow, apart from the academic making facetious comments, had said academic waffling on about Lawrence's lovely nature descriptions and religion...in a book whose primary theme is sexuality. Other things are explored such as the move from agriculture to industrialism but it is done through the characters' relationships. Poor persecuted Lawrence was basically right: you can waffle on about sexuality in Middlemarch or something because it's not really there but when it is actually there, the critics would rather talk about other things. I get that in the sense that Lawrence was seen as a smut-peddler by society and that he has never shaken that off, but it's more to do with other people's attitudes to sexuality than Lawrence's.

I understand that critics don't want to go on about the blatantly obvious themes, but those are the themes of the book!

[Nick Capozzoli]

Not sure if this is "literary theory," but there was someone who proposed that humans were not, until relatively recently (e.g. around 1000BC ), able to distinguish between their own thoughts (i.e. voices in their heads) from external voices.

[Lykren]

Not sure if this is "literary theory," but there was someone who proposed that humans were not, until relatively recently (e.g. around 1000BC ), able to distinguish between their own thoughts (i.e. voices in their heads) from external voices.

I got that book for Christmas. Jaynes is the name.

[mal4mac]

D.H. Lawrence does generate a lot of bad criticism, at the top of that heap must be F.R. Leavis' book on the writer. Leavis is infamous for naming Lawrence as the culmination of the great tradition of English novel writing; a tradition from which he excluded Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy! This is, of course, ridiculous. Actually, I think, along with T.S. Eliot, that Lawrence isn't much of a writer at all. Leavis quotes Eliot's dismissal of Lawrence in his book. "Lawrence is morbid and without moral sense, never succeeded in making a work of art, and is incapable of what we ordinarily call thinking". Having just finished re-reading "Women in Love" I think Eliot is spot on! I love the very dry, and very accurate, "incapable of what we ordinarily call thinking".

[Annamariah]

I remember once reading (most of) a paper stating that Jane Eyre must be autistic :D

edit: found it, if anyone's interested.
http://ncgsjournal.com/issue42/rodas.htm

[mona amon]

Even if they did marry, it was clearly going to be a sexless marriage. Anyway, most viewers would watch it and guess, like you said, that they were going to marry, but I don't think they'd sit there in outrage exclaiming that they're going to have sexual intercourse! Probably right there on screen because you know Hollywood! Personally I saw it as a continuation of the friendship, except Eliza would be an assistant. Eliza overtly says that she doesn't want romance from Higgins- particularly as they cast him quite old in films! (though in the play, Higgins is only 40. Then again, Eliza is 20).

Pygmalion as a film ends the same as My Fair Lady. Pygmalion as a play...I like the ending and think it's funny, but Shaw tries to explain too much in the epilogue. Even there, he says that Eliza still sees Higgins because there can be no question of him not being in her life.

Oh I wasn't thinking of sexual intercourse :D, especially since I saw the film when I was about 9 or 10. I guess it depends on what the critic meant by 'making love' - kissing? making declarations of love? Eliza does use the phrase in the play - "And don't you be too sure of yourself or of me. I could have been a bad girl if I'd liked. I've seen more of some things than you, for all your learning. Girls like me can drag gentlemen down to make love to them easy enough." - and Higgins doesn't really dispute it.

I think the epilogue is interesting in the context of this thread because it shows how annoyed an author can get when he feels his work is misinterpreted. There is no Death of the Author, at least as far as the author himself is concerned. He justifies the need for an epilogue thus - "The rest of the story need not be shown in action, and indeed, would hardly need telling if our imaginations were not so enfeebled by their lazy dependence on the ready-makes and reach-me-downs of the ragshop in which Romance keeps its stock of "happy endings" to misfit all stories." Originally the play did not have an epilogue, and it was added later. Quoting from Wikipedia -


Pygmalion was the most broadly appealing of all Shaw's plays. But popular audiences, looking for pleasant entertainment with big stars in a West End venue, wanted a "happy ending" for the characters they liked so well, as did some critics. During the 1914 run, to Shaw's exasperation but not to his surprise, Tree sought to sweeten Shaw's ending to please himself and his record houses. Shaw returned for the 100th performance and watched Higgins, standing at the window, toss a bouquet down to Eliza. "My ending makes money; you ought to be grateful," protested Tree. "Your ending is damnable; you ought to be shot." Shaw remained sufficiently irritated to add a postscript essay, "'What Happened Afterwards," to the 1916 print edition for inclusion with subsequent editions, in which he explained precisely why it was impossible for the story to end with Higgins and Eliza getting married.

He continued to protect the play's and Eliza's integrity by protecting the last scene. For at least some performances during the 1920 revival, Shaw adjusted the ending in a way that underscored the Shavian message. In an undated note to Mrs. Campbell he wrote,

When Eliza emancipates herself — when Galatea comes to life — she must not relapse. She must retain her pride and triumph to the end. When Higgins takes your arm on 'consort battleship' you must instantly throw him off with implacable pride; and this is the note until the final 'Buy them yourself.' He will go out on the balcony to watch your departure; come back triumphantly into the room; exclaim 'Galatea!' (meaning that the statue has come to life at last); and — curtain. Thus he gets the last word; and you get it too.

(This ending is not included in any print version of the play.)

[kelby_lake]

D.H. Lawrence does generate a lot of bad criticism, at the top of that heap must be F.R. Leavis' book on the writer. Leavis is infamous for naming Lawrence as the culmination of the great tradition of English novel writing; a tradition from which he excluded Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy! This is, of course, ridiculous. Actually, I think, along with T.S. Eliot, that Lawrence isn't much of a writer at all. Leavis quotes Eliot's dismissal of Lawrence in his book. "Lawrence is morbid and without moral sense, never succeeded in making a work of art, and is incapable of what we ordinarily call thinking". Having just finished re-reading "Women in Love" I think Eliot is spot on! I love the very dry, and very accurate, "incapable of what we ordinarily call thinking".

Oh, I hate Women in Love, bar the wrestling ;) Women in Love is Lawrence at his most Lawrencian.

Surprising that Leavis didn't include Hardy, seeing as Lawrence is quite similar to Hardy (though not as sophisticated).

As for Eliot's criticism, it's from the whole school of art needing to be moral and beautiful. 'Morbid'- well, this is ironic seeing as Eliot is hardly full of the joys of the world. Lawrence's work doesn't strike me as being morbid, any more than any other writer is morbid. 'Without moral sense'- I'm not sure if Eliot means that he disagrees with Lawrence's morals or that there aren't any morals at all. Either way, it's a little harsh. 'Never succeeded in making a work of art'- I suppose this might be true, that he never succeeded in making a perfect novel. But then again, who wants to make a work of art? And Eliot kind of threw his critic credentials out of the window when he said that Hamlet was 'an artistic failure'.

I don't think Lawrence is necessarily a great writer but he's an interesting writer because he genuinely tries to challenge a reader's morality and takes on the rather bizarre challenge of writing very intimately from female viewpoints. Eliot is challenging but it's an uninteresting challenge unless you're particularly interested in literature.

[kelby_lake]

Oh I wasn't thinking of sexual intercourse :D, especially since I saw the film when I was about 9 or 10. I guess it depends on what the critic meant by 'making love' - kissing? making declarations of love?

I think the critic wasn't actually as delicate as me; I'm pretty sure he said something like "they are going to have a sexual relationship". Either way, it struck me as odd that the critic would focus so heavily on that aspect when nothing in the musical indicates that this would be the case.

[oreoreal]

I find the medical approach to the "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" wacky. Where the river represents a bloodstream, and the raft as a womb which shelters two protagonists with different kinds of innocence where innocence here is just like a baby; growing like a bildungsroman kind of novel should do to their focused characters.

[kev67]

There was an article by Carlyle V. Thompson that argued that The Great Gatsby was black. (link (http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/153166.article)) I read the book looking out for signs.

If you have two hours to spare, you could watch this video documentary that argues the Wizard of Oz is a metaphor for the American money system.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swkq2E8mswI

[Emil Miller]

There was an article by Carlyle V. Thompson that argued that The Great Gatsby was black. (link (http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/153166.article)) I read the book looking out for signs.



There used to be a rumour that Edmundo Ross the band leader was really an Irishman called Edmund O'Ross.

Here's his picture.

[http://imgur.com/GMZzrTw

[Nick Capozzoli]

I got that book for Christmas. Jaynes is the name.

That's it! Thanks! What did you think about the idea?

[Lykren]

I haven't the book yet.

[kelby_lake]

I love the Volkswagen See Films Differently series. They really play on the idea of wacky film theories.

My favourites are http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMrzpPg7VSo and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F30PYWYdkZ4

The Toy Story one is pitch perfect; I can just imagine English lecturers giving lectures like that.

[hypatia_]

I suppose this is true, which is why you get so many annoying readers complaining that the characters are not acting in the way they themselves would act.

This is a pretty big debate on fiction in general, no? Do we take characters for what the author describes of them, or how they act compared to how we, or a real person in general, would act?

[kelby_lake]

This is a pretty big debate on fiction in general, no? Do we take characters for what the author describes of them, or how they act compared to how we, or a real person in general, would act?

Well, I think we accept the characters. There's no blanket statement that can be made about how 'real people' might act. As long as the writer can convince us that this is how the character acts, I have no problem with it.

[Whosis]

I have one. This was mentioned by a music professor of all people that there is a theory out there that in Tosca, the heroine is actually attracted to Scarpia, despite him trapping her and that she should love Mario. I find the theory hard to reconcile, but then what do I know about women?

[AuntShecky]

I have one. This was mentioned by a music professor of all people that there is a theory out there that in Tosca, the heroine is actually attracted to Scarpia, despite him trapping her and that she should love Mario. I find the theory hard to reconcile, but then what do I know about women?

Interesting, but sitting through an opera just for the plot seems like taking an airline flight for the food.