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.
I didn’t study literature, but I studied languages at uni and visual arts with a specialisation in photography at college.
It often makes me laugh when I see literature/art critics pointing out these elaborate hidden meanings in words and photos. I once had a class where an art critic who had no experience with taking photos herself, did exactly this. Interpreting the reasons why a photographer had done this and that and what it could mean. Giving it her own interpretation. Without knowing the photographer’s intention.
I can’t speak for other photographers, but I can tell you that when I take a photo, it’s just… taking a photo based on an intuitive feeling. Reason has nothing to do with it.
(I díd learn to give my work intellectually sound reasons & explanations. Inventions to impress the art critics and examinators, because it’s what they expect.)
A friend of my uncle was an artist. His work was published in a magazine and given all sorts of complicated, hidden meanings. When my uncle asked him about it, he said: I had some junk on my attic that I wanted to get rid of.
Of course with literature & writing there is more reasoning, more intention involved, but still. I think those literature and art critics are often just intellectuals with little actual creative experience, giving the work their own subjective interpretations.