5 Classics That Have Been Misinterpreted by Modern Audiences

Hi friends! 👋🏻 Lately I’ve been feeling pretty confrontational (which is odd for me) and it’s thanks to the title of a certain classic dystopian novel being thrown around by anti-vaxxers and their ilk. One thing that you learn when studying literature is that there are no objectively wrong interpretations, but I don’t know if I fully agree with that. There are some out there interpretations, but some people are absolutely wrong about a text and I want to say why I think they’re wrong without getting too analytical. If you didn’t know, I have a Masters degree in English and I like being able to use it as much as possible, whether that’s by rambling about things that people don’t care about, or putting it into blog posts. Before I jump right into roasting these interpretations, I want to briefly introduce the concept of Death of the Author, which was proposed by Roland Barthes. This concept states that the author’s intentions and background should hold no weight in how their work is interpreted. There are some issues that I have with this because while there are authors who just set out to tell a story, there are others who […]