Barry Bruce ! Listen to me now ! 27 % we got . Bruce Barry I know this , its November for crying out loud , learn to time travel to someone else ! <| sep |> Cocoa dusted almonds . BEST treat EVER <| sep |> The joke . Your head . <| sep |> Even in the humanities , disciplines like sociology or political science or economics have aims , that is better understanding of society or power or the economic system . I have to point out that these fields are all traditionally identified as within the realm of social science , not the humanities , which traditionally encompasses things like the academic study of music , art history , literature , language , etc . Isn ' t literature supposed to be enjoyed , and then moved on from ? I ' m not sure that literature is supposed to be anything . That ' s one of the trickiest things about it . Every time we try to define what literature is or how it is supposed to behave or how we should relate to it , it changes on us . Certainly many people read books and forget about them . But the opposite is true too . Many people read books and never move on from them and not just English majors . Plenty of people outside of the academic study of literature read a book and never forget about it . They name their kids Scout or create elaborate roleplaying scenarios in which they are Rohirrim protecting Helm ' s Deep or dress up in costumes and put on amateur productions of the Tempest . People look for comfort in poetry and song lyrics in times of loss , or use agitprop to stir up action in times of political unrest . Whatever literature is , it is clearly much more than a momentary distraction , forgotten as soon as it is put aside . If you start from the idea that literature is meant to be moved on from , then you quickly have to confront the fact that lots of people don ' t move on from literature , and then you have to ask why that is . Also , a pretty basic question in literary study is what does it mean to enjoy literature ? If I fall apart as a consequence of reading a literary work something that happens with some frequency , am I enjoying myself ? Why do people spend so much time reading about loss and suffering ? By overanalysing literature , attributing things to the author they possibly never intended to say , aren ' t we just missing the point of literature ? I would challenge this as a misconception of what literary study does . It is a pretty common misconception , to the extent that there is even a meme about it , in which the teacher asks why the curtains are blue in a story , and the author ' s response is that they ' re just fucking blue , and it ' s supposed to be about how teachers are idiots who don ' t understand that sometimes curtains are just blue . It ' s honestly a really stupid example , not least because in many allegorical works colors have clear symbolic importance that the author would have been conscious of , but also because it ' s not the way that most people who study literature would ever frame the question . If you ' re looking at a work that is placed within a clearly allegorical framework , you would ask what symbolic function the color serves , and if you were working in a nonallegorical framework you might ask what effect or associations the color provokes in context the immediate context of the work and in the mind of the reader , but you would only really ask the question if it seemed to be of some importance . If the author keeps returning to a particular image again and again , or a particular color crops up multiple times , or if a work dwells at length on a particular image , it ' s worth considering what effect that image has . The other thing to keep in mind is that literary studies is a big , capacious field . There are theater historians combing through archives of material trying to understand how plays were put on in Shakespeare ' s time , paleographers comparing medieval handwriting to determine which scribes worked on which manuscripts that were written in what time in order to determine what medieval authors actually wrote and in what time and place . There are philologists who try to understand what specific words that only appear once in Old English actually mean . It may have been obvious a thousand years ago , but we don ' t live then and can ' t hop in a time machine to ask someone what the word dogode means in a particular poem . People read scientific texts written in the sixteenth century in order to understand how Margaret Cavendish or Ben Jonson drew on scientific discoveries in their literature . People read Italian literature together with Chaucer to understand how Boccaccio influenced the development of the Canterbury Tales . Even the analysis of everyday objects in literature can be important . Understanding rituals about how food and drink were served in medieval Germanic societies was huge , given the importance of the mead hall in the society in general and representations of it in literature . Literary study encompasses a whole range of practices that sometimes work together and sometimes against each other with the goal of understanding how literature wasis created , how it produces meaning , for whom , to what effect , impacted by what cultural practices , etc . The study of literature is as hard to slot into a box as literature itself is . What bothers me about an attitude that says that literature is meant to be moved on from is that it is an attitude that would lead to a world in which there is no literature read from prior times . No translations of Latin or Greek or Old English would exist , because no one would think literature was important enough to bother to translate it from one language to another . Translation is one of my favorite kinds of literary activities , because even small choices on the part of the author take on great significance . If a word in one language could be translated in three different ways in another , you have to think very carefully about the choices you make . ETA All this isn ' t to say that I think every literary analysis is great . Literature professors aren ' t immune from Sturgeon ' s Law 90 % of everything is crap , but people necessarily disagree on which interpretations are crap and which aren ' t .