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.

  • BelleTStar@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    Analyzing the text isn’t about reading the text and immediately understanding every possible eccentricity. It’s about creating a deeper understanding and appreciation for the source material through hours of research of factors both internal to the text and external. In this case, I choose to not ascribe any of these people (even those with as prestigious a background as a lecturer from Yale) with such an adjective as “smart” as much as “learned.” In other words, they are only as intelligent as the information they take in.

    In the case of the stories you’re reading, those are stories with hundreds upon hundreds of years of dissection and analyses. So if you’ll forgive the cliché, anyone who chooses to do a lecture or publish an essay on them in the current day is standing on the shoulders of giants. It would be unrealistic to expect to read any book so dense both textually and historically and expect to immediately have a thesis statement ready to be prepared. The Yale professor you watched probably prepared and refined that lecture over the course of months and years. They very likely did not read the poem and just vomit out their thoughts to magically produce an intricately detailed and insightful textual analysis.