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.
To be fair, Lit majors do reference a lot of other sources when they write critical essays to analyze a work of literature. And a lot of it is open to interpretation, so there’s no “wrong” answer. It’s all symbolism, metaphor and subtext. And it goes beyond what the author intended.
I came here to say similar. I’ve never had a professor who expected a certain interpretation from a student studying literature. Once art is out in the world, interpretation is up to the individual. I’ve had a literature professor push me to write more about my own personal thoughts on a piece. After my third essay, where I held nothing back about one of Wilde’s works, I was even invited to specifically attend her classes going forward.