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Message: <blockquote data-quote="billd91" data-source="post: 8931669" data-attributes="member: 3400">I've been thinking about whether or not I even want to get involved in this thread for a couple of days and, having decided to do so, I want to emphasize these points. It's entirely possible to approach criticism with a variety of different frameworks, each of which focuses on different things and will give you different results. And this is OK. There's nothing wrong with it. You just have to accept that not everyone will agree with the framework you used and anyone listening to you has to similarly accept that no single framework is ideal or is superior in all instances, not even the one that's their personal favorite. When I was a senior in college, I finally decided to take a course in the English department to round out my liberal arts credit requirements. I took Literary Criticism - an intro class for the department and an important one for setting expectations for majors. The professor taught it as Five Flavors of Literary Criticism to emphasize that there are multiple approaches - the important thing was to understand how they operate and to gain some practice in using and understanding a variety of them, not to emphasize any one of them as TRUTH. I can't remember the 5th but we looked at Classical, Marxist, Feminist, and Deconstructive approaches to literary criticism. Any work can be put through them with differing results, some of which will yield more grist for the intellectual mill than others depending on the work under analysis. This may seem like BSing around if you aren't part of the process. And sometimes it does seem like noodling about with an intellectual toy since it's not building bridges, bolstering public infrastructure, growing the crops that feed people, and directly improving people's lives. It's never going to be practical enough that you're putting the literary critic in the bunker over the physician when the bombs come falling down.  But that doesn't mean that there isn't some value in applying some intellectual rigor in a critical fashion, using a variety of approaches, and interacting with the results - and, importantly, keeping our minds open to a variety of ways of doing this.</blockquote>

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