[Vampires123432]

When I was in grade school, I had an exam question regarding "The Outsiders" and why Dally told Ponyboy and Johnny to hide "in an abandoned church".

My response was that it was abandoned. I got marked off because "it represented a chance for salvation".

I was raised an atheist. Go figure.

[nickff]

I'm not sure if you're being serious, but it seems that the teacher was asking you to interpret why the author had the characters hide in a church (i.e. symbolism). A similarly reductionist (to your) answer would be 'because that's what the author wrote'.

I must also say that your answer was more agnostic than atheistic; the atheistic answer should be 'because they were fools'.

[Vampires123432]

I wrote to S.E. Hinton to ask about the significance of the church. "Why an abandoned church?"

She responded and told me there was an abandoned church where she grew up. She liked to hang out in the building because it was a convenient place to read.

I have the letter stowed in a box somewhere in my parents' attic.

[anigbrowl]

The author's intent is only one aspect of literary criticism; it's not the 'correct' answer. If enough people subscribe to some other explanation, then that will become the 'meaning' of a literary device for all practical purposes, regardless of what the original author had aimed to communicate. For that matter, I've frequently gone back to my own creative output and found myself reinterpreting stuff I wrote from a completely different point of view to the one I consciously had when I was writing it.

Your conscious reasoning is often a mere rationalization of some underlying subconscious drive whose object or direction may be obscure until later in life, if at all. When you hear people talk of 'literary novels' they're often speaking of work which addresses such questions. In such stories the stakes often seem low, and the disinterested reader easily gets bored because nothing much is happening besides the characters reacting dramatically to ordinary or even dull events, compared to genre fiction where the stakes are frequently life and death, and the characters are forced into rapid and highly consequential decision-making.

[metaphorm]

impressively done. in the comment thread discussing an article titled "What's Wrong with Literary Studies" you have managed to summarize the topic succinctly, and by accident too!

[anigbrowl]

What leads you to think I didn't apply exactly the same analysis to my own comment before posting it?

[Vampires123432]

Tweet, tweet.

[metaphorm]

atheism means specifically "does not believe in God(s)". the "because they were fools" comment you made is a social/moral/political judgment independent of the stance of atheism.

in other words...Richard Dawkins is not the prototype of all atheists.

[zaccus]

You mean anti-theistic? In any case, I don't see how it's either. It's just a flippant non-answer.

[nitwit005]

One might imagine a Christian student ignoring that possibility because the building would presumably be de-sanctified.

Most of the things characters in normal stories do are going to be for practical reasons. Requiring that students find symbolic value in every detail is silly.

[mc32]

When you're raised in an atheist environment, you "miss" all the references and other religious things which seem to permeate life and also permeate the critics of religion. To many it doesn't occur that some atheists just don't have the religious reference an ex-religious now atheist person has.