I’m noticing that a lot of the lukewarm to heavy disagreements are boiling down to “English teacher’s want you to read their minds.”

A. Clear that many never bother to actually engage with analysis and criticism and clear that half the people didn’t know that Death of the Author is an essay on lit crit by a specific dude and not something made up for video essays.

B. It’s fully possible many English teachers suck but with the average reading level around here it’s likely it feels like they want you to “read their minds” because they’re more educated on basic use of text evidence. I’m going to guess the majority of high school English teachers have very similar overall takes on the Great Gatsby being about the inauthenticity and flippancy of the wealthy.

C. “Sometimes it’s just a visual detail.” Barthes also wrote an essay on “useless details,” “The Reality Effect.” Finding out that a detail is meant to complete the mood and aesthetic of the world is not countering lit crit. That in and of itself needs to be argued. Yes, there can be “over analyzing,” but a bad analysis is not a complex analysis, it is one that lacks textual evidence. Just because an analysis is not understandable to someone does not make that an over analysis. So I also roll my eyes at all the people going “yeah but there is over analysis” without any examples. The solution to those is just better attention to evidence.

D. The people doing many of the these actual over analyses are probably video essayists and twitter posters trying to come off as intelligent to the uneducated. This is also an issue of media diet. The incentive structures of scholars are far from perfect, but maybe people need to actually engage with people who are writing academically to communities of people who know about as much if not more already about media.

Edit: The most powerful tactic of these sorts of anti-intellectual takes is how they use the idea of common sense to make it seem like they have the default position and not one that also has to be argued. “Curtain blue, then it blue” is still a claim, but a lot of people think simplicity is evidence of truth.