Australia

I have to agree with @jjjalljs@ttrpg.network. I have seen the perspective that @Longmactoppedup@aussie.zone, yourself, and others have shared many times, and obviously I haven't been in your lives to know exactly why you think that way, but I can't help but think that you they had an exceptionally bad high school English teacher, or just completely failed to understand what your teachers were saying.

You should never be "making up some deep meaning". You're reading the text and working out what meaning is contained in the text. This might have been meaning intentionally put there by the author, but it also might have been subconsciously done by the author because of their own life experience and the culture in which they live, or even something that becomes possible to interpret out of the text based on the reader's lived experience which may not have made sense as an interpretation when and where the author wrote it. Often a combination of all three.

Recognising how a text can contain ideas that carry more meaning that just the surface leaving reading adds so much depth and meaning to them. How a text can actually say something about the real world and the people within it. Reflect our hopes and fears. Reinforce or reject society's norms and mores.

I'm reading Dracula right now, as part of a book club in !vampires@lemmy.zip, and it's one of my favourite books because of the many possible readings and themes contained within it. Its commentary on "women's place in the world" (as @jjjalljs@ttrpg.network put it) is an incredibly strong one. The difference between Mina and Lucy; the one engaged and later married to her one love and completely chaste, the other a rather more sexually free woman (by Victorian standards) who receives three marriage proposals in one day, and regrets "why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble?" This latter is the one turned into a vampire who, as a woman vampire, feeds on children and babies, unlike the titular male vampire who feeds on adults. But before she is turned, she receives blood transfusions from each of those three suitors. I'm sure there's no possible subtext in that: the three men who loved her each, in turn, injecting their bodily fluids into her in the aim of giving her life.

And it's not limited to books. Film and television are literature too. As I write this I'm watching a video (not available on YouTube yet) that does literary analysis on my favourite TV show, Avatar the Last Airbender. A show I love precisely because of how deep and ripe for thematic analysis it is. Earlier today I had a chance to ramble some of my favourite themes at an unfortunately uninterested audience in a thread on Lemmy. Earlier this year, discussion about Star Wars: Andor was very popular because it is full of themes with very obvious applicability today. Heck, learning how to analyse literature can help you better appreciate dumb meme stories shared on the Internet.

If you didn't learn an appreciation for literary analysis in school, you have my sincerest pity. Because it adds so much richness to the world when you can do it.