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.

  • herebekraken@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    If it makes you feel better, I have had a college reading level from a very young age and I STILL learn a ton when looking up a text on the internet or sitting in on a lecture. Different people get different things out of a text (which isn’t to say that the author’s philosophical intention can’t be discerned by the educated, if it’s well-written.)

    Of course, I am only a hobby reader nowadays (to be fair, I do have a degree in Russian, which did involve a lot of literary analysis) and have a lot to learn from professionals. It sounds like you’re on the right track.

    I second the advice to study the Bible. It is the foundation of Western literature. I was raised profoundly religious, reading and dissecting the Bible and similar texts every evening from infancy (to say nothing of Sunday School and daily seminary courses as a teenager) and I always credited my sky-high standardized testing scores in reading/writing to that.