Am I the only one not loving Deconstructing Penguins?

[JustEm]

When I read that book I had never read The Giver. It made me interested in The Giver so I stopped reading their analysis of it and listened to it on CD. After listening to it I finished reading their analysis and that is when the book lost whatever redeeming qualities it may have had. Their analysis was the opposite of what got from the book that I was done. I might not be right but just their insistence that their analysis is the right one and their is a path to that correct analysis just irked me.

[Mergath]

When I read that book I had never read The Giver. It made me interested in The Giver so I stopped reading their analysis of it and listened to it on CD. After listening to it I finished reading their analysis and that is when the book lost whatever redeeming qualities it may have had. Their analysis was the opposite of what got from the book that I was done. I might not be right but just their insistence that their analysis is the right one and their is a path to that correct analysis just irked me.

I thought their analysis of The Giver was dead wrong, too. Relative to my own, at least. Which further proves that there is never one "correct" interpretation.

[Mergath]

Interesting thread. I just borrowed it from the library this week, and am only through the first 30 pages or so. I am motivated to read more of it.

 

I see the point that hashing everything to death isn't good. At the same time, I was thinking about using light discussion to replace answering tedious worksheets and answering comprehension questions. Comparatively, discussing things for a minute or two seems a lot less onerous. I was hoping DP would help teach me how to have more meaningful discussions about it.

 

On the close reading thing, it is like they tried to figure out how to explain "reading comprehension" to kids who weren't getting it, and this is what they came up with. It seems arduous, torturous, etc. But it may be that it is useful for those who really aren't getting it. And if they aren't getting it, they probably wouldn't be enjoying it for fun, either, I suppose.

 

But I do agree with you about not everything having a deep meaning, insane amounts of symbolism and references, etc. That's something I thought about and struggled with in HS and University literature classes. Am I a failure of a reader if I would never have gotten all this symbolism by myself? Is the role of the teacher to simply point out the symbolism and references that the students wouldn't have seen? I wrote this insanely long paper on Macbeth in like 10th or 11th grade and it felt like in finding all these examples of symbolism I was just making crap up. Half the time, that is what I think the academic papers are doing too. As a teacher, do you view things as having only one "right" interpretation, or with evidence can you believe an alternate explanation (or no explanation). How does your position change depending on if the author is alive and actually comments, etc. I am rambling I know. Once I get going in this vein, I am just troubled by the purpose of the classics.

It helps to let go of any notion of the author's intent. What you take away from a book beyond just basic plot teaches you more about you, not necessarily about what the author supposedly wanted you to know. While there are definitely wrong answers, like if someone said that Charlotte's Web was about man-eating martians, there are no correct answers.

 

It took me five years and several tens of thousands of student loans to figure that out, too. ;) Along with some "brilliant" award-winning analyses that I pulled straight out of my ass.

[Bluegoat]

It's interesting to me that there is so much emphasis on author's intent.  I did quite a lot of close reading in university, but there were only some books where I would have said that what the book was about was very specifically about author's intent. (And - that seems to be more true of certain authors.)  More often what was of interest might not be the author's intent, but what is in there that the author didn't intent, the extent that it reveals something about the time and place more generally.

 

But I can't really picture doing that kind of close reading with kids before high school, and even then only introducing it.  I'm not inclined to think that younger kids have the maturity or experience to think that way about literature - experience of a lot of books goes a long way to making good close readings possible.

[Meriwether]

This thread has been interesting to me. I bought Deconstructing Penguins years ago, started it, and never finished it. One thing that I appreciate about Teaching the Classics is that it seems to encourage looking at the story in different ways. For example, when he talks about conflict on the DVD, he points out that there are often several conflicts in a story and you can focus on the one that speaks to you. That is a very rough paraphrase. Don't hold him to my words. 

[Mrs Twain]

I read DP (the whole thing) some time ago, and ever since then I have tried to figure out who the protagonist and antagonist are in the books I read. What happens is I come up with different ideas than the "right" ones according to people such as these authors, or else I can't figure them out at all. I just assumed it is because I am a dense science-type that doesn't get literature...