Insomnia #1808
Over the course of reading The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde I’ve decided to create a Read-along category for posts wherein I will share passages from texts available at Project Gutenberg.
What’s the point? Final summation? None. Just looking to provide a few tie-ins with whatever mind I have left (as I exsanguinate a dead man’s stash of aqua vitae) and classic literature… consider it a backlash to the problem of “unwrapping the author’s meaning” which (no offense, past English literature professors) is naught but a paramasturbatory exercise in circumlocution.
Interpretative criticism is the pass-time of the hack and the bane of creativity itself – it’s a paint-by-numbers way of digesting literature and, for all the evils of the Five Paragraph Essay, this critical bent’s just another way of diluting the author’s meaning without registering or creating any meaning of one’s own… and if one should manage to really express what some author’s work means to oneself, who cares?
Parasitism is all well and good, but I’ve got to draw the line when to comes to fan fiction.
I hope to have the motivation left to provide a summary analysis which draws on the pragmatic / empirical / utilitarian lessons of a given novel / story at its conclusion (arguably more useful than some tripe about the symbolism of the color red – seriously, we all have better things to do).
FUCK ART. LET’S KILL!
