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.
As for words you don’t understand, look them up and that’s your first step in learning!
Foundling is simple, it’s just a word meaning an abandoned infant that someone took in and raised.
Whale-road is more interesting. Beowulf uses a lot of what are called kennings, poetic descriptions of things that are almost riddles. The whale-road is the ocean because the whales use the ocean as a road. The sky is sometimes called the shoreless sea. Etc. You can try to puzzle them out, or you can google. It isn’t cheating to do it.
As for books and analysis, it’s a matter of study and thought after studying and learning methods of analyzing a text. There are several formalized ways to look at a text, learning them can help you have a good starting place to go with critical reading.
No one is born knowing all the ins and outs of something as complex as Milton. And some writers loved to pepper their work with either references to historic and contemporary real people, or what amounted to popular memes of their era and like any meme if you don’t know what it’s about it just looks bizarre and confusing.
If you ever read Dante, well, a huge chunk of the Inferno and its sequels is Dante ragging on people he hated, again both historic and real, passages about famous dead people praising him through his self insert character, and allusions to all the social things he liked or hated.
BUT.
Remember also that a lot of what people read into a work through critical analysis might have nothing at all to do with what the writer had in mind, nor is it supposed to. Critical analysis isn’t so much about trying to get inside the writer’s head and figure out what they meant, as it is to use the text as a way of looking at the world and to see what you can pull out of it.
There’s this idea call the death of the author, basically that what the author thinks their work means is no more or less important than what anyone else thinks, because the text stands on its own and we don’t expect the author to retroactively tell us what they think.
An example of this, using pop culture, would be JK Rowling telling us that Dumbledore was gay. She never said that in the books so really her opinion on Dumbledore’s sexuality in the text as written isn’t any more important than yours.
She could, of course, write a sequel or prequel and make Dumbledore gay in that, but in the core 7 HP books he’s not explicitly said to be gay so your interpretation of his character is as valid as hers.
Some people reject the death of the author idea and maintain that what the author meant is what a work ‘really’ means. Nothing in lit crit is set in stone and there are no absolutes. This isn’t a science, there’s not method to test an idea and see if it’s true, all you can do is argue about it. Which is fun as hell!
So yeah, you’re not stupid, you’re just beginning to get into the concept and you picked two absolute monsters to start with. Milton is a mountain of allusion, reference, metaphor, pun, historic commentary, and on and on. Also Milton was a political speechwriter and that adds an extra element to some of what he wrote (Lucifer’s Reign in Hell speech is so well written it’ll have you ready to sign up for his army).
And Beowulf is a translation of an epic poem that was told for hundreds, if not thousands, of years and is filled to the brim with old Norse memes.
Basically you decided you wanted to try out mountain climbing and immediately tried to scale Everest. People have literally built entire academic careers out of each of those texts. So don’t feel bad that you bounced off Everest.
I’d suggest you read a good intro to lit crit, or watch some vids, and then try something a bit easier. The Great Gatsby might be a good first novel to really tear into. There’s a lot there, but it’s an easier text to start with.
Here’s a link to a fairly brief explanation of several of the more common critical models. None are “correct”, they’re all just different ways of looking at a work. https://onehundredpages.wordpress.com/literary-criticism-101/