I want to study literature. I’m not an English Literature major or anything related, but I feel a pull to it. I wouldn’t mind dissecting and analyzing a text. So I figured I’d give it a try on my own.

I read about 80% of Paradise Lost and could follow along easily. On a surface level I understood the story. But then I watched a series of lectures from a Yale professor where he deep dives into the nuances of every line and what they meant to Milton on a personal level, along with hidden possible meanings and metaphors. I was left both amazed and feeling like I’m too dumb for this.

So I tried again.

I read the prologue of Beowulf… and there’s a lot I don’t understand. Just in the first few lines, whats a “foundling”? What’s a “whale-road”? I know I can watch videos of people explaining it, but that seems like having the answers just handed to me.

I want to have the skills to read a text and proficiently find an essays worth of insight within it. Maybe I’m just underestimating myself, but I feel like the world has so many highly intelligent, quick-minded people, and I’m sadly and frustratingly not one of them.

  • CHRISKVAS@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    1. Professors will often present their interpretation of a work as objective truth. This isn’t always the case. Nobody (not even the author) gets to definitively be the authority of deeper meaning. Your views are equally valid as long as you support them.

    2. Analyzing classic books generally requires a pretty extensive knowledge of the time, place, culture, etc. that they were written in. See if you can make sense of something a little more modern.