Chels

I’ve always taken the stance that just because I enjoy literature, that doesn’t mean everyone else has to. I mean, when it comes to science, I’d much rather not think about it, and I dropped geography the second I was able to, so who am I to judge anyone else’s preferences. One thing I do hate, though, is the notion that got quite popular online in the mid-2010s (and has stuck around) that English classes in school were useless. The most popular sentiment being ‘maybe the curtains were just blue’. Fair enough, sometimes the curtains are just blue, but that’s not the point of analysing literature. Well, it’s part of the point – there’s so much we can learn from digging deeper into novels and exploring their subtext, but there’s more to it.

On the surface, it seems like literary analysis is a niche skill that you can’t really apply outside of classes. In a maths lesson, you’d always hear that you’d need to remember formulas to use in real life (especially before phones became as clever as they are now), but you’d be less likely to hear that in English lessons. Even if you did, you probably didn’t believe it. What does Curly’s wife wearing red have to do with anything in life?

It’s not that the actual content of a novel is essential – it’s just that fiction is a great way to hone analysis skills. The point of honing a skill like reading comprehension and analysis is to provide a foundation to apply in real life, but subtext and hidden meanings are much easier to spot in a fictional story. The curtains may just be blue in the story, but in looking for deeper meanings, we learn to be aware of what colours signify. This is a key skill for spotting when you’re being advertised to, or even for just enjoying other media. Think about all the brands with green logos – Whole Foods, Tropicana, Animal Planet – they’re all associated with nature, be it fresh produce or animals. Green symbolises freshness and naturalness. There are other brands who capitalise on this association – BP has historically had some quite devastating impacts on the environment, but the green logo associates the brand with sustainability. Subway has a green logo and their eat fresh slogan, but we can all understand that Subway’s interpretation of fresh is likely very different to freshly picked produce. 

It’s not just colours that influence us; slogans, jingles, and written and video advertisements can all impact our thoughts. They’re designed that way, using cultural references and psychology to convince us to buy their product or think the way they think. It’s pretty impossible these days to be completely immune to advertisements (they’re all around us), but developing reading comprehension skills can help to separate the facts from the promotion. For me, the process comes in three key stages.

• What is actually being said?
• What is being implied?
• What can people gain from you not thinking critically?

They’re pretty self-explanatory – the first two steps separate the truths from the untruths, and the third helps to understand why we’re being told certain things. What is the outcome of believing the information? Who benefits from that outcome? When it comes to products and services, this is all pretty straightforward. The outcome is the companies benefit from us giving them money. But more importantly, this method can and should be used to analyse political rhetoric. It’s less black and white than ‘buy our product and we make profits’, and arguably has a bigger impact on our lives.

It’s why I find the rise of anti-intellectualism rhetoric, especially online, so dangerous. The most alarming part is that it’s not just one ‘movement’. Back in the 2010s, the rhetoric was mainly just that it wasn’t very cool to be good at school. It was nerdy, but not in the cool fake glasses and mustache tattoo way. Now, it seems that so many social groups have accepted anti-intellectualism, sometimes even in the guise of progression. There’s radical unschooling, and ‘doing your own research’ (read: never touching an academic article but spending hours on echo chamber forums), there are people on the far right and far left considering mainstream education ‘too biased’ and rejecting learning. The biggest culprit is the rise of AI. There’s no need to think critically – there’s no need to think at all – when you can have AI summarise the book you’re supposed to read, or write your essay or email for you. This reliance on sources without a whole lot of regulation has effectively tanked our collective ability to think any harder than we want to, and it’s scary. So many young people will grow up without having learned essential reading comprehension skills, and it puts them at risk of being scammed or radicalised, or even just being poor communicators, unable to grasp implicit communication from others.

Even if you think literature analysis is useless, it’s developing life skills that are incredibly important in the information (and misinformation) age. The more we hone and practise these skills, the better we’re able to think for ourselves, the better communicators we become.
And yes, sometimes the curtains are just blue.