Is literary criticism just a school of sophistry?
Once upon a time, a high school sophomore was assigned to write a paper about the use of symbolism in The Great Gatsby. This sophomore was quite STEM-oriented, and she really questioned the premise of this assignment. Her understanding was that a 'symbol' was an image in the text that had some kind of meaning that wasn't directly obvious. But the question was: "Meaning to whom?"
The girl herself did not see any particular meaning in either of the two famous symbols in the Great Gatsby. Neither the green light nor the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg had struck her as being particularly noteworthy on her first read of the book. Indeed, she hadn't enjoyed the book very much, and she'd read through it as a chore, purely because it was assigned in school.
In her free time, the girl read mostly science-fiction and fantasy novels, and she’d never been tempted to look for symbols in any of these books. Outside of school, reading was very simple. You sit down with a book, you read it, you glean a story from it, and that’s the book. You don’t interpet the book; you just experience it. But in class, she was asked to read in a very strange, very artificial manner that involved subjecting the text to a series of processes aimed to extract some ‘meaning’ that was different from what was readily apparent on the page.
She had a number of concerns about these scholastic modes of reading. First of all, she didn’t believe that most authors put hidden meanings into their texts. She had some evidence to back this up: in 1963, an enterprising sixteen year old had sent out a survey on the subject of symbolism to one hundred and fifty famous authors. This boy had grown up to become a successful sci-fi writer, and now the story of his survey was well-known in fandom.1
She’d been told that an author’s conscious intentions didn't matter—a text could still have a hidden meaning anyway.
But what she didn’t understand was, if the author hadn’t intended to put the hidden meaning into the text, then in what sense did the hidden meaning actually exist? Which is to say, if she said that Gatsby’s green light represented capitalism, then in what sense was that true? Was it only true because she’d said it? But she’d only said it because she’d been trained to say it. She hadn’t actually thought of capitalism when she’d read about the green light. In fact, she hadn’t thought of anything at all—she’d just been happy the book would be over soon.
Her teacher, frustrated, had said, "Well now that we've told you to look for symbols, are you able to find them at all?"
"I am definitely able, I think, to read meaning into the images in a text,” she said. “But it seems dishonest, because it's just something I'm doing to get an A on the assignment.
"So do you believe everyone is just lying when they talk about symbols?"
"Not everyone, but some people must be, because you are asking me to lie! You are asking me to say that I see something that I don't really see."
"But I am teaching you to see it. That's the whole point of this class."
She was just a student, so she couldn't articulate the ways in which this wasn't totally satisfactory. She wrote a paper about the green light, where she said it symbolized Gatsby's hopes for a better future, and the teacher gave her a B+, saying, "Good for a start, but I think you can go deeper. Next time, try some close reading?"
Close reading utterly defeated her. The concept of looking at the words of a text and pretending that the words had some meaning besides the plain, overt meaning—this was absolutely absurd. She did give it a try several times, but ultimately concluded that this wasn't a skill she cared to acquire.
Over the coming years, she thought quite a bit about this concept of symbolism and close readings. She learned about hermeneutics, which is the study of how meaning is acquired from a text. But nothing she read about hermeneutics ever addressed her main issue, which was: yes, an author can make some claims about the deeper meaning of a text, but in what sense are those claims actually true?
Adorno could tell her all day long that the function of a Donald Duck cartoons was to destroy the viewer’s individuality, and maybe he genuinely experienced these cartoons as an act of violence against his psyche. But the woman, for her own part, didn’t see the same connection. And she was pretty positive that 99 percent of people saw no relationship between Donald Duck and the breakdown of the self.
So then in what sense can we say that the relationship truly exists? It might exist for Adorno, yes, but not for anyone else. And for her own part, the woman didn't want to pull specious Donald-Duck-represents-capitalism style readings out of texts, and she saw no particular reason why anyone should want such an ability. To the extent that hermeneutics just analyzed the plain meaning of a text, it seemed trivial, and to the extent that it created new meaning, it seemed unnecessary.2
One day, many years into her career as a writer, the woman sat down to re-read The Great Gatsby. Unlike the first time she'd read the book, this time she was transfixed by the aching sadness within the book—the sense that Gatsby and Tom and Daisy were all chasing something that would be forever out of reach, and that in the process they were expending their god-given youth.
But what she liked best in the book was that undertone of dark delight—the sense that even though these people were vain, frivolous, and deluded, there was a restless fertility in their lives. That, in some way that was impossible to fully articulate, the book was a celebration of the human spirit, and the human desire to overcome all obstacles, all opposition.
This woman has an idea about The Great Gatsby. She believes it celebrates wealth and excess just as much as it denigrates those things. She doesn’t see any particular need to convince anyone else that her reading of the book is correct. In fact, she’s not sure what it means for a reading to be “correct”. Her reading just seems, to her, to be the most plain, surface meaning of the text.
If she was to attempt to convince someone else that this idea about the book is right, then she could probably conduct a close reading of the novel's penultimate lines, which are:
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further...
But...to her, the meaning of the passage is utterly clear. Anything she wrote about it would just be a way of re-stating what everyone with a brain can see. The passage contrasts the brightness of the future with its ever-receding quality. What, in the end, is there to say? She hadn't understood this book as a kid, because she hadn't cared about it. The moment she actually read it, she understood it perfectly.
Re-reading the text, she understood now that, on a literal level, the green light was the light from the end of Daisy Buchanan's dock. And that Gatsby could see it from the end of his house (as he mentions at one point to Daisy). That although the two of them both live in mansions in the Hamptons, there is a geographic and social separation between them that still can't ever be bridged. That although Daisy is tantalizingly close, she's still impossibly far away.
But...that's just the story of The Great Gatsby! Jay Gatz, a kid from North Dakota, falls in love with the socialite Daisy Fay, and tries to reinvent himself as a mogul in order to get her. And he does that not just because he loves her, but because Daisy represents something: the good things in life.
The writer has come to realize that the way to succeed in her high school English paper was to say something true about the story as a whole, but to somehow cunningly launder it through this one image, so that a part of the text comes to serve as a microcosm of the entire text.
And she also understands, as an adult, that the purpose of these English-class exercises was to teach her how to formulate and defend an argument. The high school assignment wasn’t training her to read books, it was training her to explain her ideas to other people.
But she still believes the assignment had been, at its core, a bit dishonest. Training kids to find meaning that they didn't really see—this taught kids, on a deeper level, to spew bullshit. Unless a kid's schooling paid attention to truth (in this case, the truth of their own reactions to a text), then it was only schooling in sophistry.
It's easy to say that there is value in teaching kids how to tell convincing lies, but surely it's much more valuable to teach them how to tell the truth.
On ‘Lay Reading’
In high school, because I switched schools, I had to read The Great Gatsby twice, for both 9th-grade and 10th-grade English. Both times, I had no reaction to it—I generally had no interest in any of the books we read for English class.
However, in college I took a creative writing class, and we read “Babylon, Revisited”—Fitzgerald’s most famous short story—and I have a very clear recollection of the sound of a bell tinkling in my head after I read the famous last lines of that story (“He was absolutely sure Helen wouldn't have wanted him to be so alone.”) I went out after that class and bought a volume of Fitzgerald’s stories, and I really loved them for precisely the reasons I write about above. His characters are very selfish, but also very alive. There’s a certain power that comes from caring deeply about yourself—it’s a dangerous power, because it empties you out, and can make you solipsistic and megalomaniacal, but…it’s better than just not caring about anything (or, worse, caring only for what people tell you to care about).
My work of nonfiction, What’s So Great About The Great Books? is chugging through the publication process and should come out in 2026—and one of the core messages of my book is that you don’t need sophisticated tools of analysis to understand the classics. You can read them the same way you’d read a romance novel. The meaning of classic books is complex, yes, but it’s also fairly clear. And that’s a good thing! When you get to the end of a classic book, you’re able to perceive and articulate some kind of nuance that maybe you couldn’t see before. That’s exactly why the book is good.
Oftentimes that nuance is at the core of the story. In The Great Gatsby, the core of the story is that Gatsby is a figure of power and mystery, but he’s hung up on this girl who isn’t necessarily worthy of his time, because she represents a life that he always thought he wanted. And there’s no real way for him to let go of Daisy, because…he did everything for her.
The kind of reading I’m talking about—the kind that I engage in—is called ‘lay reading’. This term— ‘lay reading’—is an extremely ugly-sounding phrase invented by English professors to describe the act of reading a book without using any of the theory or critical lenses provided by academia. As John Guillory puts it in Professing Criticism:
If there is one thing about which literary scholars might agree, it is that the practice of reading works of literature can be raised to the level of a discipline and further, a profession. Literary scholars and teachers in this way move reading literature beyond a merely intuitive practice. This movement beyond intuitive practice contradicts the assumption of lay readers who believe they already know how to read such works.
I hate the way that ‘lay reading’ sounds, but I think the actual practice is good. Lay reading is much better and more useful and more honest than professional literary criticism, and my upcoming Princeton University Press book is, in large part, a defense of lay reading.
Next Week
I have a deadline for my Princeton Press book, so I am reserving the right to put less effort into my posts for next week (Jan 28 and Jan 30).
This is a reference to a famous passage about Donald Duck in Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment:
To the extent that cartoons do more than accustom the senses to the new tempo, they hammer into every brain the old lesson that continuous attrition, the breaking of all individual resistance, is the condition of life in this society. Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate victim in real life receive their beatings so that the spectators can accustom themselves to theirs.
So a few thoughts.
1. As a provocation: for some of us, literary criticism *is* lay reading. It's the way we're inclined, perhaps a bit like some composers and music critics know theory back and forth and others compose and critique intuitively. I can certainly "just experience" a fantasy novel to some degree, but when I first read Lord of the Rings as a teenager, I was thinking about the themes of Lord of the Rings in a literary-critical way--the historical context, the theological underpinnings, the overall meaning of the West, etc. And I know people can have a knack for this because across widely different subdisciplines, methodologies, opinions, and inclinations of my professors, I got almost identical feedback for all of my English papers, and my peers, whether they were English majors or not, would often agree with literary-critical insights that were made in the classroom.
It's not any more or less valid than a lay experience of reading, just like a self-taught musician releasing indie EPs on bandcamp to a small devoted fanbase is, no less valid than a classical composer or a pop star, but it is its own thing.
2. I think it is hugely important, for literature's longevity, to have this conception of an ecosystem of readers serving different functions, so I am very happy you're writing your book, especially if the observations are as useful and interesting as the ones you have here. I don't think those observations lack for anything just because you aren't talking about the green light in a specifically "deep" or broadranging way.
3. It is a lot more popular in 2025 to denigrate literary criticism than lay reading. We all have to go through the high school literature meat grinder, but this is really not any sort of hot take, and I really don't think the way to "save" literature is to denigrate criticism as a practice. At least as many students, in my experience as a teacher, *come to* literature through criticism as are repelled by it, particularly now when criticism can be applied to other forms of media.
4. The "find-the-symbol" game ruined my formerly-STEMlord spouse for literature! I have a lot of sympathy for the teachers that teach it because it's a heuristic, but it sounds like it completely poisons the well if it doesn't work.
5. Most literary critics aren't opposed to lay reading at all. There's a whole field of literary criticism, postcritique, which is dedicated to, in essence, folding in a more 'raw' experience of reading. The reasons why this had to be explicitly laid out are complicated and have to do, in effect, with the way literature has been used philosophically. Literature is quite good for philosophy in a lot of ways since it gets at nuances plain philosophy and ethics can't always capture, but there is always the threat of lossiness. And even the critics that look at lay reading as a potential site of unconscious ideological transfer or what have you don't think you need to be a literary critic to reach whatever intellectual points they're trying to make if you caught them outside of scholar mode, you'd just get there in different ways.
There is more to discuss here if anyone wants a rundown of how literature became conflated with cultural criticism and the debate between cultural criticism and other forms of criticism, but suffice to say there are versions of your arguments being discussed in the discipline.
6. The undergirding notion of "truth" you are trying to espouse here is very much an *aesthetic*, a version of "truth" with a very specific valuation attached, and pinning down what such aethetics/valuations are, and why people hold them, is one thing that examining the world through literature is, I will assert, peerlessly good at. It's better than psychology or philosophy at it. Nothing can get closer to examining, processing, and debating our actual moral and valuative assumptions, the ones that inform every single action we take, than literature can, and literary criticism is the best lens for figuring out how. Criticism can be fuzzy about discussing it if you want it to sound like STEM, but frankly that's a feature, not a bug, and we all need to get very at home with uncertainty if we're going to be talking about such important-to-discuss, difficult things. We can get into this more if you want. I am quite happy to defend the way literary criticism talks about meaning and its real-world relevance.
It's not the *only* thing literature can do, but it is one thing.
7. Some time periods cannot be read lay-style. I'm incredibly pleased you're reading 19thc American literature, but I know I and the students I teach generally need help with my own time period, Romanticism. Once you get the hang of it (with help and context), many find it well worth the effort and incredibly relevant to our present day, but it needs lots of scaffolding.
Love it. Not just because I had a similar realization a similar way with the same book. My high school English teacher gave us a handout with "all the symbols," so we could find them in the book. I reread it over the summer on my own, and enjoyed it much more.
This post also helped me articulate why I drifted toward philosophy instead of literary criticism as a college English student. Literary criticism felt, very much like you describe, like pulling the Truth out of the text and arguing about it. Philosophy, when it used texts, was more often using the text as a tool to explore interesting ideas. I ended up lay reading books and reading philosophy more seriously -- rarely ever reading literacy criticism.