i think one thing about the ‘maybe the curtians were just blue’ issue is that the kind of education that post is responding to...
i think one thing about the ‘maybe the curtians were just blue’ issue is that the kind of education that post is responding to is actually a strange, outmoded form of literary criticism known as the ‘close reading’ which has long since faded into obscurity for being, essentially, a psuedoscience with unrealizable pretensions to positivism, but which continues to be taught in English classes in America and the UK because it produces readings which are homogenous and, for this reason, gradable (the questions will actually have correct answers on the grading sheet which is an approach to reading we would consider highly unusual). it doesn’t need your defense; it probably bears a lot of responsibility for the incurious attitude towards literature that we’re worried about. in highschool i was able to get my classmates interested in medieval Germanic poetry by producing dramatic renditions every time we had a public speaking assignment (no matter what the topic was), enough that my boyfriend stole my copy of the Edda, and these were cynical proletarian students who under normal conditions were bored to tears by Macbeth!
I don’t think this is accurate, or at least it’s not true to my experience in the mediocre end of the American public education system. Maybe at one point close reading was taught in public school, but I never saw it. Instead, I think “the curtains are just blue” acts more often as a strawman argument where literary criticism of any stripe is substituted for the obvious bullshit of close reading in an attempt to discard the entire concept, or a guilt-by-association where just because somebody did close reading once, all literary criticism has been revealed to be bunk through and through. In thinking about the popularity of the “curtains” meme (which was certainly the dominant memeplex among e.g. people I went to college with), I think that you’re confusing cause and effect—it’s popular less because people need a way to resist the overly broad application of close reading, but instead because close reading is so widely derided that it’s seen as a knock-down argument against any type of literary criticism, no matter how distant.
This is absolutely correct, “close reading” was a signal technique of the “New Criticism” about after WWII and suitable to rapidly expanding educational offerings (G.I. Bill-swollen colleges and an aspiration of universal high school graduation). American high schools largely drew from that at the time and then never really updated, which is why high school still treats the then-recent Hemingway and The Great Gatsby as particularly relevant. It’s also that this was really the first successful attempt to create a purely American canon of English literature.