AWKWARD ZOMBIE

Analyzing symbolism is fun, yo

Holden Caulfield's red hunting cap all up in dis bitch and I got my bruthah the green light at the end of the muthahfucking dock

The green light was just Daisy's estate across the Sound and means nothing else.

Fucking college English classes ruining one of my favorite subjects.

Been reading some Neil Gaiman books latly.

I really like his writing style, and he makes a lot of funny reffrences that I get and they make me feel special and laugh out loud.

It ain't art until you can find some deep symbolic meaning in it that the artist never intended

I've been reading a book by Gaiman as well, Neverwhere.
It was....bizarre.

I've also been reading the hunger games series.
It's a tad more poetic in the imagery than I would have thought.

I've started reading Charles Baudelaire's Les fleurs du mal. We studied it in my 19th century French literature class last year, but only read a few poems, so I wanted to give the others a try. I don't know if he's known in non-French-speaking places, but he's a major figure of French poetry. He wrote Les fleurs du mal ("Flowers of Evil") because he thought contemporary literature was boring and wanted to create something new. Basically his poems are about the beauty he found in evil. One of his most famous (an best) poems is a gross description of a rotting dead deer he saw on the side of the road while taking a walk with his girlfriend, and it is in fact a love declaration. The last part of the book (which we never read in class) is lesbian erotica.

Honestly speaking though, I would encourage analyzing symbolism regardless of what the artist intended, because I think art's all in the interpretation and the ability of the human mind to see patterns and connections to deeper themes.

That being said, there is such a thing as going too far and forcing an interpretation on others, and people should be free to interpret things how they want, which includes appreciating a work for its face value. This applied to literature, poetry and just about everything artsy

Reading through Hunger Games because my friends invited me to see the film with them on Saturday. I have a thing for reading books before watching movies in order to not get a biased opinion against them, so that explains why.
About 1.5 chapters in; seems pretty interesting. It has me hooked, at least.

i read the first book
what i've heard was the second and third ones were not as great

Agreed. I think some stuff doesn't need to be interpreted though.

That reminds me the time we read Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening in my english class. We had to analyze it and accept our teacher's interpretation of it. Just for fun, I read about it on Wikipedia, and it appears that the author explicitly stated that this interpretation was incorrect. Yet we had to agree with the teacher.

This is a factual statement

I've been reading Catch-22. I think I'll have to read this one again before I can give a good review on it.

I just looked and I didn't see any explicit statement. Was your teacher's interpretation that it was about death? Because that's what my teacher said as well.

About suicide, yeah. Maybe it was not from Wikipedia after all. If I remember correctly, Robert Frost wrote a letter to a friend in which he complained that everybody got his poem wrong and that it was not about suicide.

Literary criticism is well enough on its own, but forcing your interpretation on someone else is just messed up. I was lucky enough to have English professors who went for the shotgun approach, piling theories on theories without ever saying any of them were correct or incorrect.