This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Working Title: True Art Is Didactic: From YKTTW
Gamer9190: Am I the only person who thinks that this article has basically just turned into Complaining About Literary Criticism You Don't Like? The thesis of this trope seems to be that, just because something is enjoyed popularly, means it can't have a deeper message. I mean, saying that Kingdom Come and Sandman, written by absolutely brilliant popular authors, doesn't have things to dig into and think about? It seems to me that the purpose of this trope is for works that very explicitly have no meaning or when the author discourages examiners from searching for meaning— it seems like it's on the road to becoming just complaining when you think a critic is off-base. Remember, a lot of what we do on tv tropes is amateur literary criticism.
Scifantasy: For my own sanity I'm pulling the Natter about Charlotte Perkins Gilman:
- Of course, since Charlotte Perkins Gilman is also the woman who wrote Herland, the allegorical assumption isn't all that unreasonable. They both work.
Vampire Buddha: Removed this:
- The creators have admitted that they know next to nothing about Christianity and that all the symbols and superficial references are really just there to look cool.
- Actually, the producer stated that a lot of the material was put there to Mind Screw the audience, which does not necessarily mean that all the material is not symbolic, as some of the religious symbolism is fairly accurate.
Prfnoff: I keep remembering this trope as True Art Is Didactic rather than What Do You Mean, It's Not Didactic?, despite the former name having been originally proposed and rejected in the YKTTW. Like the other True Art tropes, this is about what the critics think; What Do You Mean, It's Not Awesome? and What Do You Mean, It's Not Symbolic? are more about the kinds of Spectacle creators are putting into their works.
Laurus: Am I the only one who thinks Don Quixote doesn't belong in this page at all? The reasoning to add the example is this: How this parody got to be held as the best Spanish literary work ever, and an outstanding psychological portrait of the dialectics between idealism and realism, is beyond this troper, but it makes no sense at all. It's held as "the best Spanish literary work ever" because, among other things, it's the first modern novel, the first work that reproduces people's dialogue according to the way they talked in real life, and one of the first works to play with the fourth wall. Yes, it's a parody. That doesn't mean it doesn't have literary merit.
Fast Eddie: Easily fixed via deletion, which I've done. The confusion between "literary merit" and "didactic" will not be resolved here.
Count Spatula: Removed:
- At the risk of bring down the tone this happens often on web message boards about games, movies and books that have been out for more than a few months. The first few months people are careful to not reveal the plot points or hide them in some fashion yet after a while people become more loose, much to the annoyance to those in other regions or those having not yet pick up the subject matter.
Wellington: Rewrote the Dickens example, because, no matter what students like to say, Dickens wasn't paid by the word. His books seem padded because readers liked the rhetorical flourishes and the little incidental details, and Victorian style frowned on bluntly direct sentences. But the current example was a clear-cut case of Complaining About Shows You Don't Like.
The example's still necessary, because of all the Revered Classical Classroom Authors, Dickens was one of the most obviously built for mass consumption. There's no need to slag on his style to make it clear that he's a case of this trope in action.
... I won't touch the Shakespeare example, because, as much as I disagree with the claim that Shakespeare'd write anything like Eastenders, that's just a matter of opinion. But saying that "Dickens sucked because he was paid by the word" is factually wrong. If he sucked, that wasn't the reason for it.
Wellington: Scratch that, I will touch the Shakespeare example, if only to prune down the verbiage. Also cut this:
- This Troper once got graded off on a paper on the movie "The Graduate" because he interpreted the ending as happy. The teacher in question sited the blank stares of the characters at the end as proof of this. Later on I learned that the scene played out that way because the directer kept the camera rolling after the scene was finished so the actors just stared into space. Perhaps the director chose to include this footage for that purpose, but it wasn't part of original screenplay, and the teacher was grading me off for having a oppinion that was different from hers. Then again this was the same teacher who graded me in inverse proportion to how much effort I put into an paper, even putting a note "You didn't put much effort into this" on the paper that I put the most effort into.
... beause this isn't the trope. This isn't a case of one person treating a work as popular art, and another treating it as Deep Art. It's a case of one person extracting one meaning from a final, deliberate shot, and the Troper extracting another and being punished for it. Regrettable as it is, it's not an example of this trope.
An example of this trope would be if the Troper had said, "It's just a fluffy love story with an inspiring ending," and the teacher had said, "It's deep! Points off."
Maso Tey: I'm a bit concerned about the examples which breathlessly reveal that "The author spoiled his own work in the opening chapter!" These have nothing to do with this trope, and if no one objects I will delete them soon.
- At one point, this very wiki's entry on Wuthering Heights casually spoiled such major events as Catherine's death. Which, then again, isn't that big a spoiler: we see her ghost in the second chapter.
So... is it an entry or not?
- Jorge Luis Borges's prose has spawned hundreds and hundreds of critics saying all sorts of highly convoluted theories about his work. Mind you, though: this is most probably intentional, as Borges's writing has been qualified as "by a writer, for writers". An example of this is an essay on the "information society", by Raúl Trejo Delarbre, which compares our society with The Aleph, one of Borges's stories; the logic is that the Aleph, being a point from where you can simultaneously see everything in the world, is like a nigh-infinite but disorganized information source, kinda like our modern information society.
- The Glass Bead Game can be interpreted as being about this sort of thing. This troper hasn't read it, but has heard that it ends with the legendary greatest player of the game (by analogy, the literary critic who is best at coming up with these sorts of theories) drowning because you can be brilliant at the game without being able to survive in the real world.
If it's intentionally this, does it really count as an example? And "This troper hasn't read it, but..." is usually a warning sign.
- How could Watership possibly be a childrens story?
- It was my absolute favorite story in second grade, for one. I was quite surprised when I found it being taught as High Literature in ninth grade.
- How could anyone consider Hansel and Gretel a children's story, when it's about a witch who snatches children to commit cannibalism, and the children commit murder by pushing her into a hot oven? (Now, in their case, it's arguably self-defense, but they have to get the idea to conspire push her in, and this presumes they couldn't just hit her over the head and run away.) A lot of stories supposedly written for children are not happy and innocent.
- Just look at Roald Dahl's.
- This troper has never been able to uncover whether or not this ability was a Charles Atlas Super Power, a racial trait, or something Thrawn simply had a knack for. He finds this lack of clarity disturbing.
- Later books have revealed that it's definitely not a racial trait, and that Thrawn had the capacity during the Clone Wars. Take that as you will.
- Only possible because every one of the races in the Star Wars universe is a Race of Hats.
- On a related note, this same troper once saw a production of Sweeney Todd where a talk was given before the show. While this troper really didn't want to have the show ruined (it wasn't, although it didn't really pick up until halfway through the first act), he was fascinated by such facts as "the theme is modified from an inverted variation on a Dies Irae".
- What does this troper think it is? A girl letting her imagination run wild and skewing how utterly silly the teaching methods back then are.
- And apparently the only time Alice is meant to be enjoyable works is when it's in a movie format.
- Unfortunately for that line of reasoning, the second character in the poem could equally well have been a baronet or a butterfly. Carroll let Tenniel, the illustrator, choose which of the three he'd prefer to draw.
- This troper read somewhere that "The Walrus and the Carpenter" is about capitalism and socialism. Oh rly?
- This troper thinks any serious criticism of the work is futile, since the majority of the story was invented off the top of the author's head to entertain friends (children, especially Alice Liddell) during a boat ride. Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There on the other hand...well let's just say that one's quite a bit darker than the first and may have more symbolism than the original.
- Does James represent Ash's suppressed homosexuality?
- This troper bets that Misty is simultaneously Ash's longing for, and in fear of women.
- How could Watership possibly be a childrens story?
Conversation In The Main Page. (I might've gone a bit overboard here, so if you object to something being pulled out...)
Also, moving a bunch of stuff over to the Troper Tales page.
Jimmy: I'm a little concerned that this entry is getting Flanderized, at least on the Troper Tales page.
time=1230690164
Zephid: Moved the two big quotes into their own Quotes Wiki page. —- Robin Adams: Cut this, because it's just not true:
- FWIW, none of Dodgson's mathematical treatises are still in publication, as since they were published, every single theory Dodgson had was wrong. And the ones that weren't wrong were ripped off wholesale from other mathematicians.
His Symbolic Logic is still in print, as are his Collected Works. None of his results were wrong or stolen. It's true, though, that none have proved to be enormously important, and he's read today mostly out of historical curiosity, to see what the writer of Alice in Wonderland did for a day job.
—- Is this troper the only one who loves, loves, LOVES doing this with different media pieces? Semi-tongue-in-cheek, but partially seriously as well. I absolutely love doing this with people after watching a movie or reading a book. In other words, the seeming negativity of this page made me sad :(
Removed this:
- Just pick a Charles Dickens novel. Dickens's works were mass entertainment, serials designed to reel audiences in, populated with over-the-top caricatures and implausible coincidences. Does that stop high school English teachers from assigning meaning to every last word of them? No.
- Dickens notes (carefully preserved for most of his later novels) showed that he did in fact spend a lot of time carefully planning and considering the symbolism and characters in his books; he did intend them to have meanings.
Dickens novels are well known for their Anvilicious messages. He was an outspoken social critic of his time.
