I hate reading analyses of anything I have read...

I hate reading analyses of anything I have read, I just can't get over the feeling of being such a brainlet for not having seen the things they did.

>"When Ching Chong wrote '-some deep shit-' he was clearly referring to the imperialistic ambitions Japan had in China, it may also be an allusion to the books of Genesis and Exodus. Some theorize it's a witty parody of Plato's Republic"
>me: I thought he was just describing some fucking blue curtains

anyone else experience this feel?

I try coping by just thinking they're pulling that shit out of their asses, but I can't help thinking that I would have missed out a great deal if I hadn't read the analysis.

How long do these people take to come up with their theories?

Literary critics are people who have read books at a high level nearly all their lives and have read and reread through their areas of expertise many times. Even lit students at universities can be a great deal more educated and experienced than an anime nerd who only recently decied to pick up books.

Don't feel terrible if you can't read like them. It takes time to pick up things like allusions and symbolism, and to analyze deeper and subtler themes and character development. Just try not to force it because it will come naturally if you keep reading and know how to be patient and thoughtful about what you're reading.

Analyses can be very helpful guides for reading this way but you should never take them too seriously (especially if they're from sparknotes or similar sites) because there may be a point when you can say, "Hey this is obviously a common misinterpretation which is wrong because reasons."

i always found analyzing literary texts easy and enjoyable...i think what helped was doing a shitload of lsd when i was a teenager, now when i read i would just let those weird paranoid acid thoughts run wild, and it turns out this is what literary theoriests at universities do, shit's rad af desu senpai...bro u know wut, watch the yale class "introduction to literary theory" and see what the prof does with "tony the towtruck" then just do that to every text and u gud

thank you

it's often more about knowing the period and style the author was writing in, all the concerns of the time and the author's personality and biography more specifically, to know that (e.g.) this guy had an obsession with the possibility of christian grace in modern human society and a lot of his protagonists are damaged in a certain way, OR if he's responding to contemporary events it's pretty goddamn obvious

a good example is turgenev's fathers and sons, which is very obviously about a generational gap between the pre-crimean war liberal aristocrats and the postwar nihilistic ones. an analysis saying "ahh yes it's about generational disconnect between fathers and sons" might seem weirdly insightful, until you realise literally everyone at the time got that immediately because they were living through the shit the author was talking about, and waiting with bated breath for every major book release like his so they could ALL talk about it in unison (so, interpretations spread quickly)

So rather than take some time to learn something that will enhance your critical/analytic abilities and help you to pick up on these veiled literary implications yourself, you decide to deliberately turn away from any enlightenment out of sheer pride and insecurity.

Got it.

Most of these 'analyses' are rubbish anyway.

The preface to my edition of Moby Dick says that it's all a deep allusion to american history or some shit. I just thought its a cool book about whales m8

This is a good post

Remember that these people spend dozens of hours re-reading the text and studying it in depth, along with studying the author and their context.

Cut yourself some slack user.

>It takes time to pick up things like allusions and symbolism, and ...
No it doesn't. It takes some basic knowledge of literary theory, seeing as 'allusion', 'symbolism', 'theme', 'character', etc. aren't categories that are immanent to a novel, but rather are 3rd-party man-made concepts which were intended to do exactly what OP asks -- speed up and deepen the process of critically approaching a literary text that you're reading.

Great tools all in all, as long as you don't trick yourself into thinking that recognizing and pointing out aforementioned lit crit buzzwords is the be all, end all of enjoyment in literature.


Also
>Even lit students at universities can be a great deal more educated and experienced than an anime nerd who only recently decied to pick up books
absolutely untrue

hot take faggot

But LSD is all apophenia... are you implying that literary analysis is just made up bullshit?

Analyses are essential when you're reading old works like Tristram Shandy, because the subtle innuendoes which would have been hilarious for everyone educated in the 18th century are just lost upon us nowadays
From the 20th century onwards, no need for analyses.

To illustrate my point further, even if I was Roldy fucking Bloom, my power level would still have its limitations somewhere.

I wouldn't be able to just apply my divine lit crit powers and discern some complex message from mere two or three words that a semi-illiterate brain damaged buffoon had written online in a rage post.

Although since "the author is dead", I've taken the liberty to assert that the message was just that -- that the author had been a semi-illiterate brain damaged buffoon.

As bad as it seems, taking some accepted analysis and reading the works they analize so you can use them as groundwork for developping your own gives you a great deal of understanding on the critical devices needed for such writing similar essays.

No, you dolt. I get how it's the cool thing to understand nothing has any meaning and shit, but the kind of paranoid state LSD keeps you in is great to further your pattern recognition skills.

If you're open enough to the text that you can see patterns that aren't even there, you'll be able to see the ones that are if you try to pick a similar path to the one you did while high, only sober now.

Oh okay, good post.

You don't really know what an analysis is, don't you?

You are completely retarded. Please explain where would an anime faggot gain the literary knowledge and experience that a literature student doesn't have.

I'm like you user, well the thing is i can enjoy analysis when i feel like it brings something to the text but it annoys me a great deal when it's so specific that it sounds pretentious. Honestly i'm pretty sure a lot of analysis you can read, most of the time it's a coincidence and the author didn't mean it at all

And about symbolism and all, the thing is most of the time you don't notice it directly but it still has an effect on your reading experience, so i kinda hate it when you have an analysis like "THE AUTHOR WROTE -THIS- TO MAKE YOU FEEL LIKE -THIS-" because it kinda ruins the effect.

It comes with experience. You may be an analytical person, but without experience or a whole bunch of context/significant amount of prior reading, analysis is hard.

If you read Infinite Jest, you might pick up some of the main messages and some deeper meaning in the text, but if you haven't read then read TBK and Hamlet you wont pick up on the similarities in the characters/their relationships etc.

Literary analysis draws upon years of reading and experience. To get good at it you need to read, and theres no starting point - just keep reading.

>Actually there is a starting point: the Greeks.

Don't sweat it: the more analysis you read, the more you'll have a sense of what to look for and be better at noticing such details. I just finished a class on Barth's "Lost in the Funhouse," and not a single student had even picked up the sex acts that are referenced obliquely by the narrator. They're essential to the plot, but people raised on straightforward fiction aren't used to carefully analyzing each sentence. They figured if an 11 year-old girl was giving a surprised 10 year-old boy in a tool shed his first blowjob, it would be stated clearly; but for various reasons, that wasn't what Barth wanted to do. The information is clear enough if you're used to the sort of language Barth's using, though.

Calling another living and breathing person "an anime faggot" is analitically speaking pretty reductive in and out of itself, so I'm inclined to assume that you mustn't be one of those hypothetical literature students which you're talking about.

I will humor you however, by reminding that the "market" of most schools' lit degrees under doctoral level, or at least under grad level for elite universities, consists of at the very least 50% future hs teachers who are in it only for the job stability, possibly not liking or even understanding literature at all, and 15-20% """creative writers""" (people who regularly browse tumblr and/or reddit), both of which have read a suspiciously small number of actual literary works, and/or are unaware of the distinction between low and high culture regarding books.
Seeing as we currently live in capitalism, the general assumption follows that due to intertia, schools will not be the ones setting the bar. Instead they will develop their curriculum how? So that it suits the M A J O R I T Y of their customers. And how is that? It is such that the *work* will keep the customers *busy* (see: busywork) from such ugly thoughts, and above all, provide an environment where they can reasonably compete with each other through some fully arbitrary measures of academic success so that they can know where their money went. (presumably the only thing that matters or should matter to them)

The defense mechanisms against this realization are simple and do sometimes include a disdain for anyone attempting to partake in studying letters who didn't see fit that they should go through this highly unnecessary inferno as a means to secure bread and butter.
Alas, the fact remains that should an "anime faggot" want to gain literary knowledge and experience, he would look in exactly the same places as a "literature student" would: works of literature, works about those works of literature, works about the periods in which those works of literature were set, and works about literature in general.