[CLUE-Talk] Tolkien and allegory

[Jed S. Baer]

On Sat, 10 Jan 2004 14:42:33 -0700
Dennis J Perkins <djperkins at americanisp.net> wrote:

> I'm not a believer in literary analysis and avoided literature classes 
> in high school and college whenever possible.  The purpose of most 
> stories is simple... tell an entertaining story.  Good stories have real
> plots to hold our attention.  They do not require analysis to understand
> them, altho some people might enjoy analyzing them.  And trying to apply
> analysis to stories from another era or culture is bound to produce 
> ludicrous results.
> 
> I remember Asimov's autobiography saying that someone once told Asimov 
> what he meant in one of his stories..  The guy justified it by saying, 
> how would Asimov know what he meant?

I'm reminded of the movie "Back to School" (Rodney Dangerfield), where
Dangerfield's character hires Kurt Vonnegut to write a book review (term
paper?) for him (of one of Vonnegut's books). The paper gets and F or a D,
with the professor (Sally Kellerman) saying it was the worst analysis of
Vonnegut she'd ever read.

jed
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