2008-12-30 literature analysis

by Vasil Kolev

Something written by Eneya made me remember how much do I hate the literature analysis and the ones who write them …

(this incident I have put as a comment in her blog too :) )
In some long forgotten times, when I was 10-11 grade (we were until the 11th) because I liked a lot the girls from the linguistic high school (I was in the maths one, but the girls there were prettier and more interesting) I went with them to a lot of weird events. One of those was a poetry reading by a schoolgirl (e.g. you can probably guess how much I liked these girls if I even listened to poetry), after which some analysis followed by one of her classmates. I felt a bit sick because of this, and when they asked if there were any questions, I got to the front and asked the author “While listening to this analysis, didn’t you feel like she was dissecting a small kitten?” (the right word was vivisecting, but I didn’t know it at that time).
Rarely have I seen so astonished stares, including from my literature teacher (who was there for some reason). I wonder if anyone remembers what I got back as an answer, but I’m sure it had a lot of stuttering in it…

In the same way I’ve argued for a full hour with this same teacher if there’s any point in the literature analysis. The whole class had a lot of fun, and she didn’t manage to convince me (and I think nobody else).

From time to time at the entrance exams for the universities there’s talk on the topic and some analysis show, from some… grandeurs is not the right word, more like wretches who have taken the thesaurus and two bottles of low-quality brandy and wrote something about some work, which has to do as much with it as a scatological porn has to do with “Gone with the wind”…

Is it possible to start a campaign “get your limbs out of the Bulgarian literature”? And isn’t it about time the kids to be taught to think for themselves, and not to just copy someone’s analysis?:)

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