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.

  • italianpoetry@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Science is only a few centuries old, and no one expects a physicist to understand biology, or even a particle physicist to be well versed in, I don’t know, materials science.

    Now what you are saying is that you cannot, without guidance, interpret and find hidden meanings in some of the texts that most of any other drew on a history of literature that spans millennia and continents?

    I’d be surprised if you, or anyone without formal training, could.

    We dilettants can glimpse something, and we are both lucky and cursed that the surface level of a novel is much easier to enjoy than that of quantum mechanics.

    Be we are also lucky that we get to enjoy literature in the age of internet, where experts are just a click away and can explain us stuff.