Applicability: Difference between revisions
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** Literary critic Harold Bloom's wrote in his article,[http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/dec/13/classics.miguelcervantes ''The Knight in the Mirror'':] "The aesthetic wonder is ... when we stand back from the huge book and ponder its shape and endless range of meaning. No critic's account of Cervantes's masterpiece agrees with, or even resembles, any other critic's impressions. ''Don Quixote'' is a mirror held up not to nature, but to the reader. How can this bashed and mocked knight errant be, as he is, a universal paradigm?" That means that every reader will interpret ''Don Quixote'' in his own way, and all of those interpretations will be valid. It also means that none of them could be valid, because every reader’s impression ''of himself is reflected by the novel''. [[In Soviet Russia, Trope Mocks You|You reader can interpreted all other novels, but in Literature/DonQuixote case, the novel interprets YOU!!]].
** This was parodied by [[Jorge Luis Borges]] in "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote." The story is about a man who attempts to write a novel ''identical'' to ''[[Don Quixote]]'', from a modern perspective.
* ''[[The Wonderful Wizard of Oz]]'' is a case of confusing applicability with allegory. The connection between ''The Wonderful Wizard of Oz'' and the then-contemporary American political landscape was not even raised until 1963, when summer school teacher Henry Littlefield, while trying to teach the 1896 Presidential election and the turn-of-the-century Populist movement to bored history students, stumbled upon the idea of using the characters and events of ''The Wizard of Oz'' as metaphors to teach the concepts. He and his students made a number of connections - the Scarecrow represented the farmers, the Tin Woodman the factory workers, the Wizard was President Grover Cleveland or Republican presidential candidate William McKinley, the Cowardly Lion was Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, the silver shoes were the silver standard, the yellow brick road the gold standard, and so on - and Littlefield eventually wrote an article, "The Wizard of Oz: A Parable on Populism", which was published in the magazine American Quarterly in 1964. You can read this article [https://
* Umberto Eco is a major pioneer in this technique. ''[[The Name of the Rose]]'' itself is about this; the detective character is constantly trying to interpret the clues in their proper contexts. There are so many ways to read the book that like the symbolic rose, the conflicting interpretations make it practically meaningless. All the interpretations any reader gets are all valid. The same holds true for ''[[Foucault's Pendulum]]''. In one of his essays, Eco wrote that even giving a work of fiction a name is to determine the reader's interpretation of it too much.
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20110311003309/http://www.salon.com/books/feature/1999/12/06/borges/index.html This essay], which argues that Argentinian author [[Jorge Luis Borges]]'s biggest influence was the internet, which was invented four years after he died.
* ''[[Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas]]'' has a huge number of different interpretations as to what [[Hunter S. Thompson]] was trying to say with it, whether it's supposed to be a comedy, whether it's supposed to be serious, political, or just an exaggeration of things Thompson actually did. The reality is that they are ''all'' right, as the whole point of Gonzo journalism is to allow the reader to be put in the same frame of mind as the author, whatever the author was thinking at the time, which in the case of Thompson, a man who was politically astute, had a great sense of humor, and was known for being over the top, you get a book much like him: something equal parts genius, lunatic, and poet.
* [http://www.cracked.com/article_18787_6-books-everyone-including-your-english-teacher-got-wrong.html This article] at [[Cracked.com]] lists several books whose main theme was interpreted in a completely different manner than expected.
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