When I talk about or write literary critique, the most common response is not ‘wow, that’s interesting’, but ‘you’re mad’, or ‘what the hell are you talking about’. That’s more or less what happened last year when I embarked on a joint writing project to pick apart the political and cultural references in the once popular TV series The West Wing. In this venture, it was like my confederate and I were watching completely different episodes.
The reason for such diversity of explanation is that I was trained in Western literary critique as part of my undergraduate degree, and I worked for a time as a journalist, in which that training paid off. It may strike many people as unnecessary or contrived to read meanings beyond the literal or pedestrian interpretations, but it is unavoidable that artists and writers, even script-writers for TV shows, often do know some literary or cultural theory, and embed messages in their scripts that are lost without some similar knowledge in their audiences.
