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 others have said, it’s a skill that gets developed. If you were a Lit Major, you start small. Is this character happy and does it matter? Does part of this text remind you of a famous person or event, and if so what does the rest of the book say about that? How does the context it was written in change your understanding?
Start with more approachable texts, and focus on something you find interesting. It doesn’t even have to be a book, when I got my MA in Lit one of my classmates were analyzing Harold and Kumar movies. Another looked at Atonement. Another did Lovecraft stories. Keep it breezy, this is supposed to be fun