u/Few_Locksmith7312

People on here act like memorising 30 critics is what separates a B from an A* in English Lit, when honestly it’s probably one of the biggest wastes of revision time imaginable. Propaganda from our shit terrible english teachers in this system. You are the critic.

This is coming from someone who averages 24-25/25 comfortably. The entire point of literary criticism is to critique. To think perceptively. To produce an argument. (literally Ao5) Yet half this subreddit treats critics like Pokémon cards you collect and force into essays for AO5.

Examiners do NOT reward you for desperately name-dropping “Marxist readings” every paragraph. It rewards conceptualised, exploratory interpretation. Most top-band essays use critics sparingly because the student themselves is functioning AS the critic.

For example, in La Belle Dame sans Merci, I argued that the ending is unsettling because the cyclical return to “alone and palely loitering” collapses any real distinction between before and after the enchantment. Structurally, the knight may never have been meaningfully changed at all; the dream merely interrupts an existence already defined by sterility and emotional inertia. Even the blunt closure “and no birds sing” suggests that reality itself is spiritually barren, making the destructive enchantment paradoxically preferable to ordinary existence.

That interpretation did more for me than memorising 15 random opinions from JSTOR ever could, because it actually engages with the text instead of outsourcing thought to academics.

People revise critics because it feels academic. Maybe its procrastination, who knows. Actual high-level analysis is much harder because it requires original thought. Please please stop. And if anyone argues with this, i aint replying. Please do not not not not, at all. AT ALL. Waste time revising critics for p2

quite frankly I think its very peculiar how people don’t see this over potrayol of mental health. it’s almost as if society has to accept every thing as realism.

The Sam storyline in Coronation Street has gone completely over the top now.

People defending it by saying “this is exactly what psychosis is like” seriously need to stop getting their medical knowledge from TV dramas.

Corrie has basically turned hallucinations into a ghost storyline. Sam isn’t just confused or distressed he’s having long, coherent, back-and-forth conversations with Roy as if he’s physically there in the room. That’s not how psychosis is experienced in reality.

Hallucinations in real psychotic disorders are typically fragmented, distressing, inconsistent and disorientating. They’re not usually cinematic conversations written conveniently for the audience to follow along with.

TV shows exaggerate mental illness all the time because realism is harder to write and less dramatic to watch. They simplify symptoms into neat visual scenes so viewers instantly understand what’s happening.

Even severe drug-induced psychosis is usually described as paranoid, chaotic, frightening and detached from reality — not calm scripted conversations with a fully formed imaginary person who behaves like a normal character in the scene.

I’m not saying hallucinations aren’t real. Obviously they are. I’m saying Corrie has dramatized them to the point where it feels more supernatural than psychological.

There’s a difference between “inspired by real symptoms” and “realistic portrayal,” and this storyline crossed that line ages ago.