Everyday I hear many complain, "My life is difficult", "Money is a problem", "He/She won't give me the time of day", "I got rejected", "My parents got laid off" etc etc. Now, no one's life is perfect and life can suck. That is just life. One will always have there up and downs, day in and day out. One must appreciate what they have cause it can be worse. At least you are not living in a poverty filled city. Or you don't have to worry about food, water, and shelter. Or at least there is a hospital conveniently located a short distance away. The sooner one accepts this fact, the sooner they can get over their problems. Just look at things from a different perspective and your life will be better.
Recently I watched an episode of South Park that really caught my eye (as well as my funny bone). It was on the novel Catcher and the Rye. The boys decide to write a novel that would make it into the literary cannon. Their book's foundation laid on being vulgar and disgusting. In fact while reading the novel, one would vomit! The book became a hit. Why? Cause through the vulgarity the readers found literary merit in the novel, although the boys never intended in the reader finding anything! The point it made was that English enthusiast may look too deeply into a novel. How do we know if an author is actually writing a book for the plot to have a deep meaning? The study we are doing on literary merit made me think about this. I have never actually seen or heard of these "literary cannon" authors saying that their novels are meant to be researched and essay worthy. Maybe the authors are just trying to make a little dough or even just trying to write for fun? I'm not saying that ALL the books we read don't have a theme that is meant to be looked at and researched, but maybe we are scratching too deep at the surface of these novels; in fact so deep that we actually desolate the author's original purpose of having their book read- for the reader to enjoy themselves and jump into another world.
-just my 2 cents, Sasan.
I definitely agree with your comment about people complaining too much. I wish all Americans could take a trip to an underdeveloped country in order to appreciate what they have and realize what is truly important. If our society didn't put so much importance on materialism and shallow desires maybe we wouldn't be in such a mess. And I've also thought the same about over analyzing novels. Maybe we could also be analyzing something completely wrong and someone we regarded as a visionary was really a jerk.
ReplyDelete~Vanessa S.
Well you kinda hit on two completely differnt subjects which was a bit confusing but I still felt that you had some insightful reasoning in your blog. I always wonder like maybe the authors really werent that brilliant of people and we're juts interpreting their words in our own way. It really mixes the line between literary merit and entertaining merit.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Jany, I was unable to make a connection between your two topics. I think part of society's problem is people judge circumstances with out knowing the full story, similar to what you did in the first paragraph. I agree with what Vanessa said when she said our society is too materialistic, but in rancho alone there are more poverty stricken families then our city wants to recognize, I feel like your argument was one sided, and I think that it was narrow minded.
ReplyDeleteI wonder the same thing all the time about authors. I mean when they write a story, do they really intend for it to have the theme of good vs evil? theloss of innocence? the reoccuring imagery of birds? I wonder is authors just write for fun, but readers scrutinize and examine each sentence's structure or each chapter's occurences. Mybe the readers are creating falsified meaning behind a family that simply moves to the Congo, or a young girl lost in a fantasty world. I believe that a book does not have literary merit until a reader thinks so.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree with you. Sometimes pieces of writing are meant to be entertaining and light with nothing lying deeper than the surface plot. In my opinion, when a piece is ripped apart and someone has analyzed the pants off of it, the book looses its allure. There is nothing left to the imagination when you know everything there is about it. Agreeing with Jacy as well, sometimes i feel like some analyses may be false, just pulled together by someone who thinks they know what the author meant. But maybe the author just meant to tell a story about a specific topic with no underlying metaphors or allusions. Throughout our schooling, we have always been told to "read between the lines" and pick out every little piece that MAY have meaning; we never really got the chance to enjoy them.
ReplyDelete-meredith k