okay, in fairness, i think the average high school English teacher does a fantastically stupid job explaining canon, symbolism, etc, and why anyone should give a shit, so it's pretty unsurprising that the average high schooler has only a hazy grasp of, well, any of this.
when a kid asks the teacher, "how do we know that 'red' symbolizes 'life' in Heart of Darkness," they're asking a perfectly legitimate question. this isn't fuckin Biblical allegoryville, or at least not obviously so; yeah they're referencing red blood a lot but that's because blood is fucking red, so where exactly are you going with this?
ideally, the teacher would be pointing out this symbolism in service of some greater argument—say, perhaps the author abruptly drops all mentions of color partway through the book, and we can infer the author was suggesting that Things Strongly Suggested By Those Colors disappear partway through the book as well, transforming a subtle event into one that has devastating impact and magnitude, and blah blah blah—basically, the teacher could point out that all literary criticism is kind of a meta-artform, and paying attention to possible symbols can make your meta-art more rich, lend itself to more deep and interesting readings, and so on.
but generally the teacher says some equivalent of "just because, i mean, did you even read it," and if you're me you roll your eyes and answer "blood = life" on the dumbass multiple-choice test you're given after reading the book. but if you're the kind who actually tries to push back against dumbassery, of course you scrawl "this is bullshit" on the multiple choice exam and fume about how all this symbolism stuff seems pretty made-up.
the root cause of a lot of these particular issues, i think, is that the average high school teacher has only been trained in one school of literary criticism, and it's a school that places outsized importance on Art As A Wholly Autonomous Unit, The Author Is Dead, Don't Consider Any Outside Context, and also Symbols Are Extremely Cool. if that's the only framework a teacher has to think about literature with, then their only answer to Did The Author Really Mean That is The Author Is Dead, whereas a more dynamic background may allow a teacher to pivot and say: okay, let's really think about what the author meant, then. let's go read a biography of his life, and the historic events of his time, and think about how those things might've influenced their making of this particular art... which is a perfectly valid way to approach literature, just tremendously unfashionable, but i'd rather a kid learn an unfashionable mode of criticism while actually being engaged, instead of just deciding this whole criticism thing is bunk.
outsiders to a discipline are often way better at sniffing out bullshit than insiders. i think kids are rightly detecting some bullshit and just drawing the wrong conclusions. not because they're stupid, but because no one's offering good answers to their very legitimate questions.
i mean, it's a similar thing wrt plagiarism. i think the awkward entanglement of & tensions between forces like copyright law vs public domain vs "is this illegal stealing or just boring and derivative stealing" vs "sampling" are just bubbling up in places like this. unlike Ye Olde Days, when everyone agreed you could just ape from the Bible as much as you wanted, that's both considered stylistically boring nowadays (we put tremendous emphasis on novelty compared to previous art periods) and potentially dangerous (again: copyright law, don't want to get sued, etc). so people start pouncing all over little snippets of "plagiarized" dialogue. of course they do! lawyers do it too and they get paid way more than their high school english teacher!
so, idk, i suspect the problem isn't canon collapse, so much as... i guess, a need for a meta-canon? it'd be really nice if we taught high school students, "hey, there is more than one way to approach a work of literature! here's five different major schools of thought, and how each of them may approach something like Hamlet!" because anything that's just taught as Here Is The One Correct Way Because I Say So is bound to either produce slavish compliance to form, or rebellion and incoherence, and neither's great.
((...also, in general, i expect Star Wars to be uh, the last place i'd find actually serious/interesting critics.))
((ALSO i think you might like this piece by n+1's film critic, in particular starting with "THE INTERNET DIDN’T INVENT BAD CRITICISM or gullible and complicit thinking. For that I blame USA Today, which began the 1980s trend of dumbing-down news into bite-size nuggets, and Entertainment Weekly, which institutionalized the consumer-guide approach to film criticism . . .))
no subject
when a kid asks the teacher, "how do we know that 'red' symbolizes 'life' in Heart of Darkness," they're asking a perfectly legitimate question. this isn't fuckin Biblical allegoryville, or at least not obviously so; yeah they're referencing red blood a lot but that's because blood is fucking red, so where exactly are you going with this?
ideally, the teacher would be pointing out this symbolism in service of some greater argument—say, perhaps the author abruptly drops all mentions of color partway through the book, and we can infer the author was suggesting that Things Strongly Suggested By Those Colors disappear partway through the book as well, transforming a subtle event into one that has devastating impact and magnitude, and blah blah blah—basically, the teacher could point out that all literary criticism is kind of a meta-artform, and paying attention to possible symbols can make your meta-art more rich, lend itself to more deep and interesting readings, and so on.
but generally the teacher says some equivalent of "just because, i mean, did you even read it," and if you're me you roll your eyes and answer "blood = life" on the dumbass multiple-choice test you're given after reading the book. but if you're the kind who actually tries to push back against dumbassery, of course you scrawl "this is bullshit" on the multiple choice exam and fume about how all this symbolism stuff seems pretty made-up.
the root cause of a lot of these particular issues, i think, is that the average high school teacher has only been trained in one school of literary criticism, and it's a school that places outsized importance on Art As A Wholly Autonomous Unit, The Author Is Dead, Don't Consider Any Outside Context, and also Symbols Are Extremely Cool. if that's the only framework a teacher has to think about literature with, then their only answer to Did The Author Really Mean That is The Author Is Dead, whereas a more dynamic background may allow a teacher to pivot and say: okay, let's really think about what the author meant, then. let's go read a biography of his life, and the historic events of his time, and think about how those things might've influenced their making of this particular art... which is a perfectly valid way to approach literature, just tremendously unfashionable, but i'd rather a kid learn an unfashionable mode of criticism while actually being engaged, instead of just deciding this whole criticism thing is bunk.
outsiders to a discipline are often way better at sniffing out bullshit than insiders. i think kids are rightly detecting some bullshit and just drawing the wrong conclusions. not because they're stupid, but because no one's offering good answers to their very legitimate questions.
i mean, it's a similar thing wrt plagiarism. i think the awkward entanglement of & tensions between forces like copyright law vs public domain vs "is this illegal stealing or just boring and derivative stealing" vs "sampling" are just bubbling up in places like this. unlike Ye Olde Days, when everyone agreed you could just ape from the Bible as much as you wanted, that's both considered stylistically boring nowadays (we put tremendous emphasis on novelty compared to previous art periods) and potentially dangerous (again: copyright law, don't want to get sued, etc). so people start pouncing all over little snippets of "plagiarized" dialogue. of course they do! lawyers do it too and they get paid way more than their high school english teacher!
so, idk, i suspect the problem isn't canon collapse, so much as... i guess, a need for a meta-canon? it'd be really nice if we taught high school students, "hey, there is more than one way to approach a work of literature! here's five different major schools of thought, and how each of them may approach something like Hamlet!" because anything that's just taught as Here Is The One Correct Way Because I Say So is bound to either produce slavish compliance to form, or rebellion and incoherence, and neither's great.
((...also, in general, i expect Star Wars to be uh, the last place i'd find actually serious/interesting critics.))
((ALSO i think you might like this piece by n+1's film critic, in particular starting with "THE INTERNET DIDN’T INVENT BAD CRITICISM or gullible and complicit thinking. For that I blame USA Today, which began the 1980s trend of dumbing-down news into bite-size nuggets, and Entertainment Weekly, which institutionalized the consumer-guide approach to film criticism . . .))