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The text of my email to my English teacher which he chose to read in class and shoot down:

I chose not to pay attention in Math class and instead chose to ramble in my notebook, here is what follows, I believe it is relevant to a discussion we had on the first day of the semester:

The ability to put thoughts and feelings into solid and symbolic form is one of the most basic skills of the civilized man. One must wonder though if the essential primal function of writing, communicating the contents of the author’s mind has not been diluted by the modern analytical approach to writing in vogue today, relativism. To avoid falling into the trap that I am so self righteously positing that others avoid, I shall be explicit in my statements.

I wish to examine the relativist or audience centric perspective regarding the study and analysis of both rhetorical and fictional texts. You see, in order to sidestep the calamity of inferring a meaning from a work that the writer did not wish at all to invest the work with, anyone attempting to delve beyond the surface of a work from bored housewives to well established members of academia escape to a school of thought called relativism. This intellectual shelter shields them from being purely false by asserting that the meaning of a work rests not upon the intentions of the author but the interpretation of the audience. If this theory were true then no work has any innate value. The attempts of authors to create meaning are all for naught, as audiences are the ones determining what they take away from the work. The essence of the work lies not in the mind from whence it came but in the mind of the reader. It doesn’t matter what the guy on the other end of the literary telegraph is attempting to communicate in morse code, whatever the person receiving the communication wrote down, no matter how wildly inaccurate, is whatever the sender’s communication meant under this school of thought.

Never mind, the logical errors of relativism and its ideological cousin empiricism, if one simply strips the function of writing to its absolute essence, the communication of thought from one person to another via the process of symbols imprinted in solid form, one finds that the shelter’s walls quickly dissolve under the rains of actual inspection. If you, the reader takes away from this essay the conclusion that I believe relativism is a perfectly valid mode of thought and that I have presented a incredibly well reasoned defense for the theory, which I so clearly detest, then I will have diverted my precious attention from the ramblings of my AP Calculus teacher for nothing, nothing at all. By judging everyone’s opinion equally valid, relativism leads to a thousand different truths, thereby defeating the definition truth itself and leaving the work nothing but ink on paper.
On a side note, if AP Literature teachers truly do believe in this relativist approach then rid the world of the institution called AP Friday. The college board assumes that the author has invested the work with meaning, and grades the students based on the similarity between their conclusions and what the author actually meant. It is wildly hypocritical and entirely all too convenient to tell a student that the meaning they derive from the work is all that matters, yet hand that same student an F when his meaning does not match the established meaning of the work. Perhaps that is why the best students are always failing.

On a final note, the current approach of the English department to Literature, one that denies the importance of objective truth or the meaning the author puts into the work, falls in the face of reason. Reason is man’s attempt to reach this objective truth or Plato’s form, through observation and logical constructs. If this objective truth doesn’t exist then we are truly shooting our rhetorical bullets at thin air. All our essays are aiming to figure out the effect the author intended with the choice of a certain word, an extended metaphor or a juxtaposition, should be burned by the busload as they assume that there exists this objective meaning. The english department’s denial of objectivism flies in the face of Plato, reason and is logically self defeating, not to mention it is the reason the author will probably achieve nothing more than a D on the next AP Calculus test as he fails to match the objective truth of the equation’s solution because he was too busy writing pointless letters to his English teacher in a (most likely) vain attempt to bring a contrarian perspective to established literary theory.

by

Vman (Someone who believes that everyone should read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance)