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I'm pumped as hell about this book. I started it once in college and loved it, but then got busy and had to drop it, I've never gotten around to actually picking it up again. Probably overdue!
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Dec 6, 2019 03:51
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| # ¿ Apr 19, 2024 21:10 |
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At least when I was in school, it was one of the worst casualties of the dumb way a lot of American schools teach literature. There's a weird trend of treating great books like they're a puzzle to be unlocked, and that no symbol should be left un-dissected, and that (worst of all) there's probably an objectively correct interpretation of any given symbol or metaphor. A lot of lit teachers, either implicitly or explicitly, teach their students that in order to "appreciate" a work of fiction, you have to go through this laborious deconstruction of every literary device to determine its purpose in the novel as a whole, or you didn't really understand the book. Honestly I think my lit classes had way too much focus on "understanding" literature to begin with, like that was given as the primary goal. If you didn't understand it, you were too dumb for the book. It wasn't an acceptable outcome for a student to say "I didn't really understand the book but it made me feel x/y/z". Having an emotional or intellectual reaction to a book was never the goal, you had to roast it over the open fire of historical context and deconstructive symbology instead. So taken in that context, yeah, Moby Dick would be pretty impenetrable/insufferable. edit: also yes, very long.
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Dec 12, 2019 18:34
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