by William Heath

 

Once students were taught 

to look for symbolism, 

almost anything, in their eyes, 

stood for something else.  

 

This kind of displacement 

often led to bad reading, 

the student was abstracted 

away from the particulars 

 

of the text—the actual images 

and specific behavior of 

the characters—into a realm 

of misleading concepts that

 

were often a perversion of 

the book’s meaning. Nowadays 

a PC reading does similar 

damage—students play 

 

gotcha with characters 

and authors and the texture 

of the work is torn 

beyond recognition.