I know literary criticism is about as popular as Windows ME here, but reading good examples of it can be as enjoyable as the text itself(1). Of course there's always the question of how much authority the critic has -- but it's kind of like having someone with a lot of expertise explain the Linux kernal to you, even if it's not Linus.
To your last point -- I feel bad for you if those are the kind of books you had to read in high school. What were they?
(1) If you want to know what I'm talking about, try the Viking Critical Edition of Don Delillo's 'White Noise'. It has examples of criticism both of the kind I'm talking about and the kind that pg and others rightly mock.
I haven't read any especially good literary criticism, however (as I obviously failed to make clear) I do enjoy reading and discussing a book.
What I hated was attempting to mash meaning into every word in the story, even when there was obviously none intended by the author.
An example I remember was when, in The Great Gatsby, it was mentioned in passing that someone had blue eyes, and the teacher went on and on about how that represented sadness, how it showed the economic differences between the classes, etc, etc. No, it meant that the eyes were blue. stop putting words in the author's mouth.
As for the kind of books that I had to read -- I found the Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood) to be utterly horrid. Bad writing, large plot holes, poor continuity, etc.
To be fair, many of them (eg, A Streetcar Named Desire) I disliked simply because I found the characters distasteful and unappealing. ("meaningless people with meaningless lives")
I got so fed up with discussing Phineas and Gene in high school that even the mention of them makes me convulse in hatred. That story did not just die while we were dissecting it. Its corpse rotted away and its bones decomposed completely, leaving nothing but a faint stench.
I can still hear my English teacher saying their names over and over again...
Me too. I found it fascinating. I also didn't read it for school, but ironically 'borrowed' one of the copies from the English class that was currently studying it.
I know literary criticism is about as popular as Windows ME here, but reading good examples of it can be as enjoyable as the text itself(1). Of course there's always the question of how much authority the critic has -- but it's kind of like having someone with a lot of expertise explain the Linux kernal to you, even if it's not Linus.
To your last point -- I feel bad for you if those are the kind of books you had to read in high school. What were they?
(1) If you want to know what I'm talking about, try the Viking Critical Edition of Don Delillo's 'White Noise'. It has examples of criticism both of the kind I'm talking about and the kind that pg and others rightly mock.