Dumbest Literature Mistakes You've Made

I completely missed the aphorism "the plans of mice and men often go awry" in the opening of Of Mice and Men, and thus the book came off to me as just "dumb selfish people kill each other."

/pedant hat on. The proper Scots Dialect quote is:

"The best-laid plans o' mice and men gang aft agley"

/pedant hat off.

Yahoo Answers thinks it was written by a bloke called Ken Burns. Abody and thir mither kens it wuz by Robert Burns.

^Isn't it "schemes"?

(I'm sorry, I couldn't resist).

When I first read The Westing Game, I thought that Turtle was a boy until halfway through, and Judge J.J. Ford was a white male the entire time through.

Oh, someone else who has read the Westing Game!

When I first read that, I thought Sandy Mc Southers was a girl, and I was completely confused as to the gender of Pulaski.

Bastard. It was schemes. Argh. I have to hand in my Scotsman privileges and start taking up morris dancing and competitive soap opera watching.

@Chihuahua Oh that must have made somethings confusing.

@ATC I know I was like "But Sandy is a girl's name", a lot of the way through.

edited 20th Mar '13 8:45:38 PM by phantom1

I thought Gilderoy Lockhart in Harry Potter was a woman for my entire first read of Chamber of Secrets. I can't think how.

Might be the name. Gilderoy is a very fancy name. On the other hand, he was illustrated at one time, so...

Be fair, even Kenneth Branagh looked fairly girlish in his portrayal of Gilderoy.

Still quite good looking though.

...Does that mean you thought that Hermione was gay, or at least bi, in your first read through?

It means I completely missed she had a crush on him. Somehow.

...HOW?

By not having had a crush yet, I suppose. That's the only thing I can figure.

Hey, this is the dumb mistakes thread.

I don't think I ever paid attention to who was crushing on whom when I read the HP books. Then again, I was like 13, and I took mom's "don't date til you're 16" to mean "don't even look at girls" until you're 16. So of course I graduate at 15, then go to a community college where the teachers are the youngest females there...

Taking five English Literature classes at the same time senior year of Uni....so uhh right now.

I have Modern Euro Novel, Selected British Authors: Jane Austen (KILL ME!!!), Early American Novel (actually turned out to be fairly interesting), Brit lit 1616-1780, and Literary Criticism and Theory. Now excuse me I need to go finish Master and Marguarita, Emma, and The Way of the World.

Wow, good luck with that. That sounds kind of like a big mistake. Do you have to write a lots of essays or assignments, or is it just discussions and presentations?

I remembered one more of mine.

There is this very famous Czech poem May from Romanticism period. Everybody here knows its first lines and most people know its Foregone Conclusion. Basically, everybody dies: Girl meets man. Girl gets "seduced". Girl meets boy. Boy is a leader of highwaymen. Boy learns girl was seduced and murders her seducer. Boy learns man was his estranged father. Boy gets caught and executed. Girl commits suicide. Poet writes poem.

When I first read it, I knew that much. What I didn't know was that it had been written in How We Got Here or In Medias Res mode. It starts with the poet coming to the country where it happened and the first part of the actual story has the young woman's suicide. There is one guy from the highwayman's band who comes to tell her about her lover's execution. But I assumed, nay, I was convinced that the man coming was her seducer, and it made no sense whatsoever. Why would she jump into the lake? Does she seriously think she could run away (swim away) from him? What? I was like: He has a boat, Jarmila, he will catch you, certain sure! Face Palm. I actually asked about this in my literature class. Double Face Palm. But at least I got the explanation.

The poem is very beautiful, very melodramatic. And the part when she drowns herself is very sad and very touching, but every time I re-read it - I just have to laugh at myself.

edited 27th Mar '13 5:54:11 PM by XFllo

Two papers per class pretty much. My last three semesters have been more or less the same though. Last semester was Brit lit 1900-1960, American Lit Beginnings to 1860(or so), American lit 1900-1945, Post-Colonial Studies.

At the same time I was also writing my undergrad thesis which is a novel....and is about 180,000 words. Yeah senior year sort of sucks. Four weeks, four weeks, four weeks.

Not one I made, but a good lesson in not necessarily trusting those online sites that help you cheat on assignments.

I'm a fan of both The Threepenny Opera and the play it is based on, The Beggars' Opera.

Well, I remember an entry on Sparknotes I came across that confused them, to the effect that it was writing about Marx's influence on The Beggars' Opera, which I'm pretty sure was written at least a couple of decades before Marx was born.

Whoever wrote the entry, seemed to have it confused with Brecht's adaptation, written in the 1920's, which has deliberate Marxist themes (it is quite plausible to see Marxist themes in The Beggars' Opera, but you are going to get an F if you write that it was influenced by Marx).

This is just tangentially connected to literature, but I though the Les Miserables musical was composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber. Fucking hell...

This actually isn't my mistake, but the timing with this thread is too good to pass up.

A fellow literature student (college age, mind you) went it a small fit when she was told that the beating heart in The Tell-Tale Heart was a metaphor for the narrator's guilt. She thought it actually was beating that whole time. Once she realized this, she proceeded to thump her head repeatedly on her desk for being dumb. Now she knows, and knowing is half of something.

Related to that, it bugs me how many people think Les Miserables (and to a somewhat lesser extent The Count of Monte Cristo) are set around the French Revolution.

I think it is because people tend not to know that France had any monarchs after the Revolution/after Napoleon, and I don't completely blame them, since it isn't really covered in American schools, and history of that period is kind of confusing, since France was really politically unstable during that time (I learned about the Revolutions of 1848, but there isn't really coverage of the period just before, which is when those novels are set).

Its kind of funny that the recent Les Mis film actually has this little song from Gavroche that gives some historical background to the audience (basically that they had overthrown one king and now they have a king again, and he sucks too).

edited 8th Apr '13 8:46:47 AM by Hodor

To be fair, Enjolras does tell that one soldier that they're the French Revolution.

Re: "The Tell-Tale Heart" — Hmm, I kinda feel for your fellow classmate because the first encounter with an Unreliable Narrator or Through the Eyes of Madness tends to be tough.

I have a similar story. Our literature teacher at uni told us a story about how he taught a class of non-literature students. He assigned them to read Jonathan Swift's "Modest Proposal". He said those guys had been utterly disgusted because they had thought... Yeah, Swift meant it literally. Kids of the Irish poor should be eaten. It solves everything - hunger and social problems. And moreover, the rich will have cool new gourmet meals.

edited 10th Apr '13 11:43:02 PM by XFllo