Scorn directed at people who regard science or nature as wonderful

[Deleted User]

See, I agree with that attitude in theory, but in practice analyzing something really does tend to make me less passionate about it. It's the main reason I've been trying to stop reading trope pages. On the plus side, I can turn this character weakness into an advantage whenever I need to stop being overtly emotional about something by chanting reductionist mantras: "Pain is just an evolutionary response that means I am taking damage. I already know this damage isn't severe and I have already decided to endure it. It's just electrical signals in my brain... I can just ignore them", and it really does help.

...I need to get better at Joy in the Merely Real.

arks

I'm speaking from experience here. I enjoy things a lot more when I know how they work.

Myrmidon

"The idea that analysis and understanding destroys any enjoyment, wonder, or mystery that the subject might have."

Yes, how could solving a mystery get rid of the mystery? I know I still watch The Usual Suspects and get surprised every time.

Pykrete

It's not deeper analysis that lessens the impact of the original, so much as analysis to the exclusion of its greater impact and bigger picture.

For instance, my English class made us analyze everything from Huck Finn to Dave Barry.  The former was something that got sweeter on closer inspection.  The latter was something that kinda got killed by it because our methods of analysis rather missed the big picture.

Khwarizmi

^^ But would The Usual Suspects be anything like as entertaining without that plot twist?  Because never understanding something isn't equivalent to watching The Usual Suspects without knowing the ending beforehand, it's more comparable to starting to watch it and then never getting around to watching the end.

I think, where literary analysis is concerned, it needn't ruin the work providing you are allowed to enjoy it as a work beforehand, rather than being told the whole plot before you've so much as opened the book (I hate when they do that).

arks

Analysis assumes that you have already experienced the work (or at least that's what I feel). Review assumes you haven't. Therefore, analysis should be allowed to spoil what happens since everyone reading is coming from the same point of knowing where the work goes. Reviews should be conservative in what they reveal because you don't want to ruin it for your audience: the people who are interested but haven't watched yet.

@ Myrmidon: the big mystery of Usual Suspects is not the ending of the film. The mystery is how they are able to hide it from the audience while still having them accept at the end that the explanation is internally consistent. An analysis would look at the small clues hidden, cover the misdirection that the directors use and so on.

Khwarizmi

I was talking about when you're conducting your own analysis at college/uni.  Sometimes the lecturers tell you the major plot twists in the first lecture, and there are so many books on the reading lists that it's impossible to read all of them in advance.

arks

Man. My professors usually waited until we had a chance to read (or often in my case listen to) the work before they started talking about it. Your professors suck.

Khwarizmi

Yeah.

To be fair, I think they expect us to read them all in advance, but we're doing 3 modules at a time, two of which have a list of 5-8 required texts, plus all three have the requirement that we do additional reading of some texts from a much longer list specific to that module.  So there's never been time to fit all the reading in.