I've taught the book for 10 years in summer school (albeit in Canada, so we may approach things slightly differently in terms of overall aims beyond a "basic" understanding), but I think the standing on the hill scene would have been an interesting place to start a class discussion:

Examine the language of the scene; visualize the physical aspects of the scene (cold, dark, physical distance, watching them from "above", etc.); then, ask the class what kind of "vibe" is being given off. I'm sure--while they may not arrive at symbolism exactly--they could piece together something like "He seems to feel isolated from his peers", or some such "take".

Next, "put a pin" in the idea. Tell the students to keep the scene in mind, and as they read, see if there is any other evidence of loneliness and/or isolation. At some point they will (hopefully) circle back to the scene with additional knowledge and information and connect the proverbial dots.

I think your teacher should start with capitalization before moving on to symbolism.

The teacher telling the class that Holden is a moody loner isn't exactly a major spoiler. I think a reader can still enjoy the story even if these points are being discussed in class.

It helps me to think of "the curtains are blue" style symbology like this: The entire world of the story is constructed. If the author wants the character in a house, wants to describe the house so that the reader can picture it, they must build it from the ground up. They must then choose which aspects of the house to highlight in their description, knowing that the details they mention will draw the reader's eye.

Not every author makes everything symbolic, but some author's use this deep control of the world and what the reader notices to further their point. The curtains may be purposefully blue not bc the author sat there thinking blue = sad but because they want to place cool tones in the house, the way an artist might to bring the mood of a painting down.

Curtains are blue is less about literal one to one symbolism and more about using setting, lighting, and, in your catcher in the rye example, blocking, as tools to further atmosphere

I had an art philosophy class once where the teacher put down a bronze statue of very stylised thin and elongated people. There were three or four of them in different sizes, all hugging their arms around their own body.

He asked us what we saw. Some saw a depiction of depression, people stretched thin and isolated in themselves despite being group. Others saw victims of abuse, raw and vulnerable, having never left their moment of pain. Yet others saw a family, huddled together as the different sized figures made up a group.

There were all kinds of explanations but most of them revolving around the sense of physical vulnerability and mental vulnerability the thin, stretched figures evoked.

Eventually the teacher revealed that the statue commemorated the victims of a concentration camp. Just a group of people pushed beyond all human boundaries, utterly vulnerable but surviving.

And none of us could have known that because there's a difference between recognising symbolism and recognising the specific thing something is symbolic of. Nobody thought that group of people had a positive vibe. But just recognising that they are looking vulnerable in no way leads to realising that they represent Jewish concentration camp victims.

Without context, the sculpture would have worked for any of our explanations. Just like a boy on a hill clearly looks isolated but nobody can tell if he's ignored, seeking peace or something completely different like trying to get closer to the heavens.

The thing about symbolism is that it doesn't have to mean what the author intends it to mean. Authors don't necessarily sit down and think about each item in the scene and what it symbolizes.

When thinking and writing about symbolism, you can make your own connections. You can say that the snowball represents loneliness or the snowball represents masturbation as long as you can argue it and give examples of why you think that.

Symbolism is about metaphor... identifying things that represent other things and discussing how they deepen the meaning of the story. Of course it's just a snowball. But you can think of it in more ways and the story can become more meaningful. You aren't limited to one meaning... there can be many.

I strongly disagree with this take, authorial intent is not the end all be all. All art forms are subjective, and can have multiple interpretations.

I could go on and on but I think the essay ‘The Death of the Author’ by Roland Barthes explains it far better than I ever could.

Sometimes a tree is just a tree and sometimes it is a symbol for something else. The trick is to develop good close-reading skills to recognize when a case can be made that a symbol is really there and when a blue curtain is just a blue curtain.

Had a professor in college teach that Dracula, crawling out a window and down the side of a building head-first ( or "inverted" as it was described in the book) was symbolic of his homosexuality, because the term for it in those days was "sexually inverted."

I just stared back at her, wondering if she'd ever seen a spider crawl down a wall butt-first.

It sounds like your teacher isn't necessarily wrong, just that they might kind of suck.

I think arguably you have it a little backwards. First and foremost, have you read 'Death of the Author'.? It's an important text on literary criticism about the relevance of the author in the whole process of interpretation anyway; does anything they 'intended' matter? Or does the text gain its 'meaning' from an intersubjective relationship between the words on the page and the reader? (That's a gross simplification, but it will do for now).

Second, you talk about 'media literacy'. So you know that the 'media literate' have awareness of the wider, non-literal and often nebulous context of some words. That means authors can drop 'symbols' in *before* a central theme or idea is introduced in order to foreshadow it and (even subconsiously) lead the reader to an implicit understanding even before anything is actually revealed. Post-fact symbolism is arguably actually a little pointless - a 'mere' artistic exercise. Teaching students to 'read into' the potential meaning of each artistic choice rather than post-contextualising it is an important skill.

Now, of course I recognise your main point about symbolism is not about the technicalities of its operation, but instead the risk of its mis-teaching leaving younger readers disengaged, and for that I don't have too many answers. I don't think it lies with the particular area you're referencing. For me, the single most important element for engagement is to eliminate the 'each student reads a paragraph' section, where poor readers are terrified and stutter their way agonisingly through the text, and good readers are bored out of their tiny little minds and become entirely disengaged (I used to get chewed out by my teacher for reading ahead). Reading out loud is an important skill, don't get me wrong, and there should be time on the curriculum for it, but not at the expense of potentially destroying someone's appetite for literary engagement for the next decade.

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I once heard a poet laureate in an interview (I can't remember who - this was about 20 years ago) who said the worst thing you can do to a poem is give it to an english teacher. They will make you look for all sorts of things that probably aren't in it. I felt vindicated for hating my lit classes, even though I love literature.

Most of the best books aren’t taught in class (just a tiny fraction). So once you have the tools, there are many books out there waiting for you. So maybe a number are sacrificed to class, but it’s a tiny fraction.

The lack of appreciating symbols has to do also with the literal nature of interpreting our surrounding. We used to attach more meaning to seemingly unimportant things (eclipses, flowers, weather) because we didn’t understand how they occur.

Some of the lesson is about acquiring the interlinear sense for symbols. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man used to be taught in AP English because the use of color and symbol is insanely intense (overbearing). I.e., the sounds of words refer to other meaning and myth around flight.

I love reading but never did well in Literature. I just can't analyse text according to some examination structure. I just want to feel how the books relate to me and interpret them the way I want to.

This is really interesting. Here I thought I was the only one to have that argument with an English teacher, granted it was a poetry class not literature.

College is a number of decades behind me and I've come to realize that reading is a personal experience. No two people necessarily get the same thing from the same book, short story, or poem.

Scholars may thrive on digging out deep symbolisms but I think they belong in the same box as movie and art credits. I like what I like. I find beauty, sorrow, and joy when I read, watch movies, or visit museums.

When I was in high school, an author was coming for a book talk. In preparation we read some of her work. Every time we read our teacher would dissect the symbolism and metaphors. Here favorite story was one that had a a faimly with a broken clock in their living room. She would spend entire classes talking about the broken clock how since it was in the living room it represented the family being frozen in time and unable to move on with their lives after a tragic event.

When it came time for the book talk, our teacher was so excited. After the author talked for a bit, it came time for the questions and answers and our teacher jumped to asked the first question. She mentioned the clock and asked, "how did you think of such powerful and moving symbolism?"

The author shrugged and said "symbolism? I just thought it sounded nice."

I'm a reader, I always have been, but the way literature is taught in public schools didn't work for me. I didn't connect with anything I read in school and it made me dislike my English classes. If I weren't brought up to be a reader, I think I probably wouldn't have read anything after K-12 because 7-12 made reading and dissecting such a grueling process and felt utterly irrelevant at those ages.

I think you're getting hung up on the word "symbolism" tbh. And taking it to mean that the author intended this thing to be representative of this thing. When like some people said, really, your specific example of the Holden on the hill is about establishing tone, mood, and characterising Holden.

It's not so much about it symbolising that he's isolated from his peers so much as establishing that he is.

Anyways, the best thing my lit teacher ever told me is that there are no right or wrong answers. Just use the text to bring evidence to support your interpretation.

At the end of the day your argument has to have supporting evidence from the text and it has to make sense.

I struggled with the textual analysis part of lit class because of this. My teachers used textbooks containing excerpted chapters from literary works as our "required" reading. Obviously, I had no idea of the context that would challenge my theories unless I checked out the full book. Sometimes, I didn't even see the symbolism in the selection at all due to my own personal experience. (Example: Fishing is a popular pastime in my area, so a book like The Old Man and the Sea is seen as a simple fishing story. For the excerpt we were required to read in class, I struggled to find any symbols of life, manhood, aging, or legacy because of my area's culture.) It took me writing my own stories to see how and when symbolism requires context to be understood as such.

This a poor attempt from the teacher. It’d be better for them to extend this - those two examples could be symbolic, but they more foreshadow these traits of Holden’s life before we are truly introduced to him.

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I'm super confused about this. Every text we went through in school was done AFTER reading the text for homework. It might be done in a handful of chapters at once - but if you're doing this type of textual analysis, you'll discuss "can you see anything in this scene" - look in to what themes may be portrayed. Then, you'll go back, once the text is finished and discuss "now that we've read the whole thing, we can look at these paragraphs again - the standing on the hill now clearly is a foreshadowing of his isolation and the snowball is him trying to hold on to innocence. The author sets the tone here, but is not overt about it and we can through reading the rest of the text appreciate these nuances"...

Bad teachers, I guess.

Funny, I just last week started a chapter with a description of blue curtains. It was intentionally symbolic.

In the words of my prof, "Y'know what, sometimes the curtains are just fucking blue... but we don't read trash in this class. So when the curtains are blue--it means something."

(And no, he didn't mean to make stuff up about the sybolism of blue curtains and snowballs-- he meant, that good books are meaty with ideas. They tell you about the values, the era, they tell you where the characters are coming from. They paint a meaningful scene when taken as a whole.)

I agree, I am an avid reader and even tried turning my hand to short stories once. But English or Communication Studies or whatever they want to call it bored the ever-living fuck out of me.

Depends the format. I've read all but a small handful of paperbacks I have and those were ones gifted to me. Ebooks is something else. I download free books as I can and read them when I'm out of those I bought

I think what you need to realize is that for a lot of these things, I.E. the curtains are blue because blah blah blah, the english teacher doesn't have any evidence from the book for their bullshit theory.

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All "literary analysis" is bullshit intellectual masturbation. It's way to feel clever in a format where you can't possibly be proven wrong.