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.
Critical analysis is a skill that can be learned. That Yale professor likely devoted a large amount of time to the work, he did not just read it and have a whole lecture prepared. People major in this stuff so they can learn how to do it. You are not lesser because it doesn’t come naturally to you immediately upon reading a text. Especially when you consider connections to the author’s life and words you just don’t know. If you don’t know something, you don’t know it and no amount of staring at the text is going to make that clear to you. Use outside resources and you will slowly build the ability to analyze things.