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.
Hey, I totally understand. Old work is hard to understand because of outdated language. As well, someone might give a long lecture on how they interpret a text. But as long as you back up your interpretation with lines from the book, your interpretation can be very very different. As a writer I sometimes see people go really deep into my work. This honestly makes me so happy to see someone interpret things at such a deep level. But not all details I insert are intentional. Not every flower is a symbol. Consequently some people interpret everything as a deeper symbol and that can be overwhelming and is usually untrue.
Therefore, readers miss key information and symbols authors put in their work but readers interpret symbols the writers did not intentionally put in. This can be fun but becomes a bit too much if the reader interprets every line and every word as something greater.