This is why I hate the humanities

[Vulpes bicaudata]

I hated Humanities in my freshman year, and I am never going to take another class on literary criticism again if I can help it. Why is this? Close reading.

Close reading describes, in literary criticism, the careful, sustained interpretation of a brief passage of text. Such a reading places great emphasis on the particular over the general, paying close attention to individual words, syntax, and the order in which sentences and ideas unfold as they are read.

In Humanities I had to read stuff by Willa Cather and write essays where I say things I don't believe and/or I thought were stupid. I find the implication that individual words matter more than the text as a whole to be appalling—a spectacular example of missing the forest for the trees. Same with the whole "Death of the Author" malarkey, which says the author doesn't know anything about what he wrote. His opinions and intent don't matter. Again, that's ridiculous.

Apparently, Jacques Derrida—one of my least favorite philosophers—decided to spend 80 pages analyzing the word "yes" as used in James Joyce's Ulysses. Of course, Derrida always had a tendency to vomit nonsense, but close reading seems severely flawed to me.

(The particular instance of close reading that drove me to this post is the book Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong, in which author Pierre Bayard contends that in The Hound of the Baskervilles, Sherlock Holmes was, well, wrong. Oy.)

[Paycheck]

I don't really find searching for a deeper meaning within a sentence to be that appealing, but I do really love a beautifully crafted sentence. When a sentence is carefully adjusted to be beautiful, you know it's perfect because you can easily remember- most likely. That's why I love F. Scott Fitzgerald. His strings of words were like golden threads in The Great Gatsby.

Of course, I like to put small things in my writing that are actually part of a deeper meaning- a small notion of something much bigger going on within the story and text itself- but that's more for myself. It's fun!