John Green

[beth_shulman]

The fundamental thing that all critical reading does is reveal to us that there are not easy definitions that distinguish Us from Them. Reading with an eye toward metaphor allows us to become the person we're reading about while reading about them. That's why there are symbols in books and why your English teacher deserves your attention. Ultimately, it doesn't matter if the author intended a symbol to be there because the job of reading is not to understand the author's intent. The job of reading is to use stories as a way into seeing other people as we see ourselves.



Life is like pizza, Jade, life is like pizza :)

Previously from John Green: "There is no Them. There are only facets of Us." I have discovered that I need an LJ feed of John Green's YouTube channel (anyone have one? Off I go to search).

Also: I am vindicated!

Comments

[jade-sabre-301.livejournal.com]

Life is pizza! I have not seen that one! That is not the one I was thinking about! However, it was beautiful too.

/rewatches all the baby Henry videos like a dork

[shutterbug-12.livejournal.com]

That bold sentence...I don't fully agree with that. The job of reading need not be understanding the author's intent, but there can also be great merit to discovering that intent, especially from a historical perspective. If a particular work is a comment on a certain event in history, then it's very useful to consider the author's intent.

However, I read that other post you wrote, which was interesting, and this stuck out to me: How I receive them, though, is a reaction based on my life and my thoughts and experiences. When it comes to "how to read literature" or the "purpose of literature" or the usefulness of it, there isn't just one answer. There's not even one answer for any one person. It's certainly possible to separate your own experiences from a work in order to study it in order to consider, say, the author's intent to discover how it compared with the intents of the author's contemporaries in a certain time period, etc, etc. But, generally, I think what you said can also be true, as art is most commonly viewed through our personal filters. I'd agree that a possible job of reading is to view the world and life from another person's perspective and essentially become that person, for a while (as the quote above suggests). But I couldn't for a second agree that it was the only job of reading.

Mmm, this is such interesting stuff, though. Thanks for posting this.