To start this off, I should get one thing out there; I am not a "theories person". That isn't to say that I do not give credit to people's theories, or that i am close minded to learning about theories, it just means that I do not read a story, poem, script, or any other work and look for theories. I personally believe that the authors intentions are lost on the audience, and what ever theory the audience puts into practice to try to understand or deconstruct a story is objective through the reader, and does not reflect what the author truly means. They are tools to try and add to or dismantle a story. It is like Freudian psychology and dream analysis, outsiders trying to decipher the inner workings of a strangers mind through unfounded theory.
A good example would be Ray Bradbury and his classic work Fahrenheit 451, it is the story of a dystopian society that takes place in mass book burnings and is meant as a stand against government censorship of the arts, right? Well if you were to ask a high school teacher or a professor most likely they would say yes, but if you would ask Bradbury he would answer with a resounding no. He wrote his story warning about how T.V. and radio were killing books, that it was making the populace dumb and taking people away from literature. It was his view on a world where books were destroyed because every one was to ignorant and simple, they were to obsessed with watching television or listening to the radio to read, and this grew into a world where books were openly destroyed. A UCLA audience openly rejected this theory and told Bradbury he was wrong and told the author what his book was about.
Other classics are interpreted wrong as well, but i don't have the time or space to get into them now. The point i was trying to illustrate is the fact that an objective read based on theory does not mean that you understand the book more, or that you get it's true meaning, instead it is reading to far into what is written. Like the example clip shown in class on tuesday, an entire class had an entire set of different theories and ideas about what was "actually going on" in the scene. While i do not condemn theory, and am not saying that i do not think it has its place, i implore you to take theories with a grain of salt. The exercise we did in class allowed us to break down a scene and look into deeper possible implications of each action or symbol, but this does not mean that what we read is true any more than it is not true. It's all in perception, in the eye of the beholder. Where one person can argue that Dorian Gray was homosexual using theories about sexuality and on homosexual protagonists, others can get an entirely different read using freudian theories, or economic theories.
What i want the class to see, for the people to grasp, is critical theory is a lens used to see the writings in a new hue. A way to analyze stories, to find hidden meanings, to open your mind to a new perspective on old stories. It is not a replacement for simply reading the story, and it does not always express the authors true intent or lead to a deeper or penultimate truth, but instead it is used as a way for you to derive meaning from the story. Use it as a tool to connect with the text, to personalize it and understand it through your theories. Do not try to force the story to fit your theory.
If you have never seen Blade Runner, what do you think this scene is about. What do you draw from his monologue.
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