Contra Thematic Analysis
Or: How I learned to stop worrying and memorize facts
08-14-2024 • Ryan Prendergast
Growing up, my literature curricula obsessed with analyzing deeper meanings. Each analysis took the form of transliterations of embodied truths. "Transliteration" because the truths themselves live in a different meaning-space: they exist as nonverbal embodied wisdom. When you transliterate deeper meanings to English you produce cliches like "sometimes it's the people you trusted most who betray you", or "true love will stop at nothing" or "the arrogantly rich who sneers at his inferiors, is insecure next to the truly rich, who doesn't care about flashy status symbols".
Transliterations are not translations, because they are incomplete. This is not controversial. Nobody upon reading Jane Austen claims to fully understand the experience of Georgian Era British aristocrats. And yet, in English class all through high school, we talked almost exclusively about these lossy transliterations. The shape of it was questions like : "What do you think it represents that Jane Austen had the character rebuke this other one?" and the correct answer being something like "this was reflective of the social status of the time period between the lesser gentry and the more established nobles".
Represents. Analyze. Themes. These are the hallmarks of thematic analysis. They are useless.
Memory
Thematic analysis is useless by one key metric: memorability. I remember zero of the thematic analysis I did in high school. What I remember from my literature curriculum were the bits unrelated to deeper meaning. Producing a movie recreating scenes from Julius Caesar. Memorizing Hamlet soliloquies. Reading the End of Something out loud and hitting the line "It isn't fun anymore".
Memory filters the embodied from the disembodied. What you remember years later is what stuck with you enough to survive years of mental erosion. Thematic analysis is too complicated for high schoolers, because it doesn't stick. Students will pattern match how to respond in discussions with templates: "Going off that, I think that the windiness of the weather in the scene represents the characters changing personality with the seasons...".
Stop it! You are teaching how to break the rules before you teach the rules! You are teaching freeform before you teach the constrained. Miles Davis went to Juliard after all, he was no Kerouac blabbering nonsense high in the night. Something must be certain to be embodied. You cannot transmit embodied truths in English, by talking about them. You have to embody the story first, with simple things- recreate scenes, memorization, recitation. Just like music: you don't learn music by talking about it. You mimic other people's songs. You memorize them. You play them over and over.
We don't elevate music critics above the music they critique. Why then, do we elevate literary analysis?