6 questions from literature lessons that harm us in reading and in life

Literature teachers are different, and they teach classes differently. But most of us most likely heard these questions often in school. And now they prevent us from reading, thinking, and living.

1. What does this book teach us?

Let's start right away with the belief that literature, like other forms of art, is obliged to teach something, to convey something. This is wrong. Works are created for various reasons. Someone is really trying to bring everyone to their senses and show them how to live. For example, in the works of Leo Tolstoy you can see how he literally stands on a stool and speaks the truth. But some people simply cannot remain silent, some want to go to eternity, and some want to pay off their gambling debts. Everyone has it author your own motivation.

And then the work sets off on its own voyage, and everything depends on the reader. A book can teach him, enrage him, entertain him, leave him indifferent - there is no right answer here. And it has no pedagogical task, especially if it was written in the era of modernism and later. Try to explain what the poems of Velimir Khlebnikov teach, for example, besides the fact that since then you can write like that.

But even if the book was intended by the author as a textbook on life, this does not mean that it is worth learning lessons from it. The world is changing, and many things that were considered normal in the writer’s time are now a reason cancel person. And even in less outrageous cases, modern optics make it possible to rethink what is happening.

For example, Tatyana Larina - “sweet ideal” - in the final explanation with Onegin says:

I love you (why lie?),
But I was given to another;
I will be faithful to him forever.

What does her action teach? Even the opinions of the classics were divided. Fyodor Dostoevsky in his speech “Tatyana Larina - the apotheosis of the Russian woman” calls her action brave and correct. Because to reciprocate Onegin would mean covering her husband with shame and making him unhappy. Meanwhile, the destiny of a real Russian woman, according to Dostoevsky, is to endure, as long as everyone around her is happy. But the critic Belinsky called it “a profanation of the feelings and purity of femininity.”

But what should the book teach us in the end? Appreciate achievements feminism, apparently, because then Tatyana would not be forced to get married. She could get an education and find a job, send Onegin, but also send her husband, and not remain in an unhappy marriage. But we know this not thanks to the novel Pushkin, but thanks to all other experience.

Not only books, but in general everything that happens around us gives us food for thought. We decide for ourselves what to take away from this. Some people learn from their own mistakes, some from those of others, and some constantly step on the same mistakes.

If works of fiction were necessarily taught, it would be a directive message that would not need to be discussed at all. After all, in physics lessons they don’t discuss the correctness of formulas in textbooks.

Therefore, it would be more correct to ask not about what the book teaches, but about what thoughts it prompted the reader and what conclusions he drew for himself.

2. What did the author want to say?

Let's go without much preamble: we have no idea what the author wanted to say. Unless he released an explanatory essay or gave an interview in which he was asked this specific question.

Teachers at universities quite convey the idea that we know nothing about the author’s wishes, and his work can be interpreted in different ways. However, school teachers often insist that there is only one right answer. Because the critic Dobrolyubov bequeathed it this way, it’s written so in the textbook, or the pedagogical institute said so. Or because the teacher himself thinks so.

As a result, analyzing what you read, which supposedly should contribute to the emergence of new thoughts, turns into either a guessing game or blind adherence to authorities. Which is rather harmful both in reading and in life.

We can only guess what the author meant by analyzing his biography, the sociocultural and political situation in which he lived. But we cannot know for sure. Therefore, it would be more useful to ask what ideas we gleaned from a book and why exactly like that. And here again there is no one correct answer.

3. Who is the positive character in the book and who is the negative character?

This includes any questions that suggest dividing the world into black and white. But when it comes to characters, things get extremely complicated. Because both people and anthropomorphic creatures that personify people, of course, cannot be approached with such a standard.

Man is a complex, multifaceted creature. And in literature, too, even if we are talking about simple genres. For example, in classic fairy tales the characters are usually pretty flat. But they can also be deeper than it seems if we go beyond the limits of a specific event, as modern interpretations eloquently tell us. For example, the stepmother is certainly evil, but it is unlikely that she was born this way and shook a poisoned apple in her cradle instead of a rattle.

People, or in our case characters, generally cannot be clearly positive or negative. But their actions can be like that. Attempts to divide someone into good and bad cause even more damage when we carry this habit into real life from literature lessons. And we do it, otherwise we wouldn’t hang it so generously shortcuts on others.

It is much more interesting to look at heroes as three-dimensional personalities, rather than as flat figures. And talk about what their positive and negative sides are, how they express themselves and how they came to live like this.

4. What techniques did the author use?

It seems impossible to study literature without understanding how books are written. But most people won't need it any more in life than algebra.

Deconstruction of a work of art will be useful only to those who want to connect themselves with books professionally. But for everyone else, such an analysis can completely discourage any desire to read, because it shifts the focus.

For example, many people love music and know how to turn on the player to listen to it. But few are interested in disassembling the gadget and putting it back together. If everyone is given such a task, most will remain sitting in silence with a bunch of details.

Author's techniques are best left to literary scholars and future writers, not to seventh graders.

5. What was the main character wearing?

When details matter, they are remembered. If everything in Dostoevsky is yellow, we will not forget this until the end of our days, whether we like it or not. If someone coughed at Remarque’s, we know for sure that everything will end in tuberculosis. If in a detective story a brunette with a knife flashed on the first page, then we will certainly pay attention to the hair color of others women's characters. But if the heroine wears red boots that have no effect on the plot, this knowledge is useful only for cosplay, otherwise it is unimportant.

Details from the works are convenient to use when compiling tests, quizzes, and the like. But their mechanical memorization does not bring anything useful, moreover, it makes reading very difficult. You need to be able to skip the unimportant - both in a book and in life.

6. What do you think about it? But only in the words of Belinsky and Dobrolyubov

Question "What do you think?" itself is great. It should be heard more often everywhere. The problem is the answer. Few people want to hear what we really think. And this applies primarily to literature lessons.

In the 10th grade, a new literature teacher came to us. And she asked me to rewrite my first essay - based on Ostrovsky’s “The Thunderstorm”. Not because it was bad or illiterate, but because one cannot think that Katerina is not such a “ray of light in a dark kingdom.” The teacher suggested that I copy the work from some collection of ready-made essays. When I told my father, who is 22 years older than me, about this, he shared his exact same story. He also wrote that suicide is this is not an option, and his grade was lowered for this.

The reader's conclusions may be unfounded, illogical, and superficial. But thinking is a skill that needs to be developed. This can only be done by thinking boldly and freely, and not by repeating someone else’s thoughts or adjusting to the correct answer. In life this is very will come in handy.