Is there a popular interpretation of a particular piece of literature that you think is pure bullshit?

Is there a popular interpretation of a particular piece of literature that you think is pure bullshit?

>it was all in gregor samsa's mind

1984 is about le stalin

That Shakespeare intended for the audiences' sympathies to lie with Shylock and the play is a denunciation of antisemitism.

Many.

Jay and Gatsby are gay

Achilles and patroclus
Ishmael and queequeg

Whenever someone shoves a religious interpretation on a Beckett work.

Yeah, I think there's a tendancy for people to like Shakespeare so much that they project modern morality onto him. Dude was a great poet and had a massive capacity for empathy, but cmon, he was still a 1500s Englishman.

That Hamlet's famous soliloquy was about suicide.

>1984 is about Trump

but they are

>Interpreting literature
That sounds pretty gay

So 90% of Beckett interpretations?

The guy actually puts an albatross around his neck

[insert character] was black, gay, trans, etc.

That The Prince is satirical. It most certainly is not.

heres one

> "The Grand Inquisitor" is one of the best passages in the Dostoevsky canon

it's not, its a satire so thin it amounts to a political pamphlet in the middle of a work of literature. Dosto takes a few pages off from solving the problem of the universe to bark at the Catholic Church like a yappy little terrier and people applaud it as the best thing he ever did. It's a joke.

Also that it's not satire

The back of my copy of Steppenwolf calls it a 'condemnation of Bourgeois society." It's obviously anti-bourgeois, but the main theme of that book is clearly about isolation and loneliness. It fits half of /r9k/ perfectly, and I certainly found it very relateable.

This too. The Prince makes some pretty good points, and though very brutish, is the safest way to run a country. I'm very idealistic, but the people who spout these meme just want to delude themselves into an irrational optimism.

That hamlet was crazy

What is it about then?

It was about Stalin you idiot. Orwell wrote it to show what the logical end of communism looks like.

Reminder that Orwell helped communists in catalonia

Is this what neocons really think?

the enemy of my enemy describes that situation pretty well to be fair. Orwell is getting dumped on as a literary figure because of the Amerijew rush to buy out his book after Trump was elected.

I would say Orwell is probably the most Veeky Forums figure of the 20th century. He was a literal autist and was totally prescient in his understanding fascism and communism.

Nick is gay for Gatsby

I wouldn't call it satirical, but I think there's more to it than just an instruction manual. The book was a document of the types of measures that were effective for controlling the populace, and then the populace was given the book to see how they were being manipulated. So it was truthful, but it was written more for public knowledge than for the use of the Medicis (this opinion is mostly taken from Rousseau but I couldn't find his exact quote)

IT'S A FUCKING CRITIQUE

JUST LIKE THE DISCOURSES

THE DIFFERENCE LIES IN MACHIAVELLI'S ACTUAL REPUBLICANISM. THE MAN LOOKED TO MANIPULATE THE WORLD INTO WHAT HE SAW AS BEING GOOD FOR THE WORLD AND ALSO GOOD FOR HIMSELF.

The Grand Inquisitor is a lot more than a satire of the Church, buddy. It's about the troubling implications of freedom, free choice, and a God who gives his subject those instead of guaranteeing their safety and salvation, for starters.

...and was disgusted with what the communist movement became

He was disgusted by the fact that many of the anarcho-communists were just stalinists using the movement as a means to set up an authoritarian regime
Orwell was a disillusioned leftist but nevertheless had communist ideals

That The Great Gatsby is about the "American Dream."

Fitzgerald was obsessed with romance, especially the honeymoon phase/early stages courting type stuff. Gatsby is so obviously about nostalgia, and the nostalgia of young love, that I find it ridiculous that people could see any different. Literally every novel he wrote was about love in some form or another.
Gatsby is about how you can never get back that innocent and perfect feeling of the first time you were ever in love and you brought no baggage or hurt into the relationship, and you really believed you found your soulmate instead of some roastie. The closing line is so transparently about love that I find it laughable when people trumpet Gatsby as a critique of the "American Dream" or some other similar bullshit.

this
My highschool English teacher tried to insinuate that Caliban was meant to be read as an empathetic character and that The Tempest was about the damaging effects of Colonialism.

In 16fucking00
That Great Gatsby contains any discernible talent, you mean.

Gatsby is a fucking self-insert work extolling Fitzgerald's angst about having missed the opportunity to win cultural capital by participating in WWI, as well as blatantly acting as an escapist outlet by which he could ignore the reality that his wife was a demented whore.
Fitzgerald was a complete goddamn failure of an artist and would have been doomed to obscurity had it not been for the national hunger for Roaring Twenties cultural works during the Depression.

Fitzgerald was on the same artistic level as modern Fanfiction.net authors turned YA novel churners.

No, The Great Gatsby is pretty good. Not great, but good. if it didn't have its overblown reputation and was kind of obscure, people on Veeky Forums would probably recommend it and talk about how good it is so they can seem classy for liking obscure good novels

>The Great Gatsby is pretty good
The book is 170 pages of purple prose, devoid of any meaningful plot or character development and lacking completely in expressionistic originality except perhaps in the vague, underused symbol of the Green Light and the brief and wholly irrelevant and tone-deaf ash yard which on first read clashes so heavily with the fabric of the rest of the novel that it unfailingly confuses readers.

And it took Fitzgerald, quite famously, hours upon hours of editing to cook up. Even the staunchest art subjectivist has to admit that some judge of talent can be made by comparing a work's length with the time it took to develop.
Had Fitzgerald written with actual talent and produced works of similar quality more prolifically, there might be room for a different judgment of his abilities, but for god's sake the man couldn't sell Hollywood scripts in the 1920s.

Nigga sit down u aint shoot a 3

Have you read tender is the night faget