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"Analyzing fiction is a guessing game at best, and a completely naive, amateur attempt to perform psychoanalysis on dead authors at worst."

Actually, one of the cardinal rules of literary criticism is that you should not attempt to psychoanalyze the author of a work; rather, you should treat the work as a self-contained unit. If you're going to analyze the author, then it's an entirely different task. Blending the two bastardizes both efforts. So yes, I would agree that bad criticism tends to employ such efforts. But I would also argue that no literature professor worth his tenure should even be proposing such methods in a classroom.

I do agree that trying to discern intent is a "guessing game." But some ways of guessing are much more effective than others. And some guesses are more sound than others.

While I sympathize with much of what you're saying, I think you give short shrift to the field of literary criticism and analysis. There's some genuinely insightful, analytical, occasionally profound stuff out there.

"My method of analysis was to approach stories from a rational standpoint..."

What do you mean by this? "Rational" in what sense? Are you studying the rationality of the text? Are you proposing a set of logical guidelines to be used in evaluating a text? Are you focusing on the internal coherence and consistencies of the world within the story? Are you focused on the story's structural soundness? "Rational" is a pretty big and broad word that begs clarification. As you can see, I just generated a handful of different ways of interpreting your statement. This would seem to indicate that the statement needs further clarification.

Now, the real problem with this is that you're suggesting that your approach was "rational," and implying that other approaches are irrational. Such a claim demands explication.

"...the problem with fiction is that the stories exist in a realm without rules (or incomplete rules, in the best case scenario)."

Again, this is pretty vague. What do you mean by "rules?" And are the "rules" you're proposing in any way tainted by your own subjectivity? It's very, very, very tricky to define sets of rules for fiction. By and large, we're still pretty much working with the set that the Greeks came up with a couple thousand years ago.

I don't mean to knock you or your post, because I think I understand what you're saying. But if you're going to attack a system, you need to be very clear about a) what's wrong with the system, and b) what your alternatives entail.

Except that those cardinal rules of literary criticism are more or less pointless and arbitrary. It's like how the cardinal rules of certain types of astrology form a (mostly) internally consistent system, but so what? Neither astrology or literary criticism produce useful results, except by happenstance. No one system of either discipline is provably better than another, so it's ridiculous to draw a line at psychoanalyzing dead authors when everything else is built on a foundation of sand.

Teaching classical literary criticism techniques is probably as good a way as any to improve students' reading comprehension, critical thinking, and writing skills. But let's not pretend it has some deeper significance beyond being a pedagogical tool.

My problem with literary criticism is that it's essentially a disingenuous pseudoscience. Critics make authoritative pronouncements on human nature, culture, society, etc., when they're not actually qualified social scientists. They constantly misappropriate theories from other disciplines, yet they make no effort to support their claims with research or empirical evidence.

Literary criticism as a whole seems to suffer from a fundamental misunderstanding of epistemology (for which I'm sure we can thank postmodernism). It's the perfect platform for anti-intellectuals to espouse their unsubstantiated social and political theories while enjoying immunity from any rigorous scrutiny.

With all due respect, I think you're reading the wrong literary criticism.

That's quite a broad brush with which to paint the entire field, and I can assure you that most of it does not "deal in authoritative pronouncements on human nature, culture, society, etc." or "misappropriate theories from other disciplines." The best literary criticism analyzes and evaluates what's in the text, and does not attempt to conflate literature with philosophy or sociology (unless in an anthropological sense of those fields).

Perhaps some of you have had some bad English teachers or professors? I think we all have. There are vanishingly few good ones out there these days. But we should not confuse bad literary criticism with all literary criticism. Just as I wouldn't look at a horribly coded mess and conclude that the field of programming is bunk, I wouldn't look at a terrible example of criticism and condemn the entire field.

You sound like you missed the entire point of a college level literature class. You must have made your TA's life a pleasure arguing that your homegrown, self reinforcing, critiquing system was just as valid as those being taught in class.

Just so you know, you're exactly the same as the student arguing creationism in a biology class, the young earth model in geology, or the solipsistic freshman in Philosophy 101. Just another thick skulled, pompous, snowflake student who would rather pretend to know everything than learn how to think different (AKA in the manner being taught in the specific class). That's ok, you probably moved on in life calling the professor and TA idiots and never skipped a beat while whining about your C.

This comment was constructed using the rational system where I can't be wrong and you can't be right.

What's the standard for correctness in literature criticism? Biology has one (agreement with externally observable reality). I don't know what the objectives of lit crit actually are, nor what their research methodology is, but it seems that lit crit has more to do with conforming to the culture and tradition of lit crit than anything else.

1) Learn and understand the critical framework you will be applying to a work

2) Read the work with the framework in mind

3) Write a critique based on that framework

If you hand in a paper on a completely made up framework that is poorly defined, arbitrary and only exists in your head, then the paper deserves an F. This is called the "Make it up as you go along" critique.

The make it up as you go along technique is akin to writing up a lab without describing the procedures or recording the results. Then you draw conclusions from the procedure and results that exists only in your head. No one could reproduce it so no one can say you're wrong. You'd still get an F.

In writing, If you speak to the professor and say you have an idea for a new/unique style of literary critique and get permission to write up both a description of your technique, as well as a paper utilizing that technique, then you can get an A. Who knows, it depends on the class. The professor could very well say "This is an intro level class where you learn about existing techniques. Save inventing your own for a seminar or senior thesis."

But what the OP presented was not a scholarly approach to critique, but a snowflake "All ideas have equal value" approach.

Someone who has taken a literature class more recently feel free to correct me.

tl;dr Professors put a lot of thought into their academic work and pompous undergrads usually haven't learned enough to know what they don't know.

"Analyzing fiction is a guessing game at best"

You might be confusing the process of analyzing fiction and producing an analysis that demonstrates whatever a given English lit professor is looking for.

Though you might be also happy to know that such luminaries as C.S. Lewis think that analysis itself may be the wrong way to talk about stories -- that if you're doing it right, you you experience them more than you "analyze" them:

http://weston.canncentral.org/writing/index.php?2001/09/27/1...

It's certainly true that some professors (not just literature, but of any discipline in which there are subjective or aesthetic issues, which is arguably all of them) really don't have a sufficiently flexible view to accommodate thinking outside of the paths they've personally trodden.

But my experience is that a lot of literature people really just want to see that you've had some kind of experience with the work and are capable of articulating insights that you've connected from it.

"the problem with fiction is that the stories exist in a realm without rules (or incomplete rules, in the best case scenario)"

It's not clear to me that anybody lives in a realm with complete rules (unless some of them are inconsistent). And even if we are in fact located in such a place, I'd be willing to bet that nobody has anything resembling a complete model of the world in their heads.

"Analyzing fiction is a guessing game at best, and a completely naive, amateur attempt to perform psychoanalysis on dead authors at worst. Anyone who points this out will not fare well in such a class... take it from someone who learned firsthand."

I wasn't there, I have no way of telling whether or not you were as confrontational about the fundamental worthiness of an endeavor many people find deeply enriching and to which your prof had probably chosen to dedicate their life to as you seem to be here, or if you were simply unfortunate to take a course from someone who couldn't handle some any challenge let alone thoughtful deviation from accepted analysis is unfortunate, but I'd submit that in either case there was probably some opportunity for real education.

As for whether it's just a game: the universe may well be ultimately orderly, and the limited rationalism we're possessed of might even yield the tools to eventually encompass most of its secrets. But the universe most of us really inhabit -- the one made of the stories in our heads -- is a lot messier, and fiction and the tools of analyzing fiction can be as important in navigating it as logic is.