How can I get a deep literature education without going to college?

College is actually demoralizing if you want to seriously think about books.

My professor took twelfth night and used it to force all the ideas she got from Judith Butler on all of us. It was pretty fucking excruciating.

You must search nooks and crannies to find people with discernment and taste. College can have that sometimes but no, generally it's just demoralizing.

Of course the simple answer is that everything you need to know about this is already in a book. So really talking to people is moot and any theory on this would be better explained in a book.

And yes, though sitting in a 300 hundred year old Yale classroom with possible qt3.14s and meme professors like Harold Bloom has more aesthetic appeal, shitposting on Veeky Forums is basically the same thing if not better.

> Cancel your internet subscription.
But then how can I get bookz and torrents and gutenberg PDFs

cosmoetica.com/top.htm

Ask someone to Amazon for you

Atrocious.

What isn't in the book is context, for example Pushkin earlier work will look like cliche sentamentalism, if you don't know about political & literary climate in his time, which will make you realize that was his deconstruction of sentamentalism & already beginning of deconstruction of romanticism. This is what college, or good seminars, lectures, etc. provide.

Dont worry. One day you'll understand.

/thread

tbhwy tho famalam a literary analysis blog worth a shit will require the author to have some years of experience already. OP sounds like he's iliad-odyssey tier.

read a fucklot of books. start with the greeks, but really just read what interests you. my first lit adventures were many years ago with homer followed by scott's Ivanhoe. I hadn't read malory or chaucer, I just started reading. you have Veeky Forums as a resource. listen to what people tell you here.

don't try to be erudite before your time or fall for the ego meme. accept that you are a novice then when you have something to say, say it.

Well, I would recommend listening to Veeky Forums book reccomendations (they are generaly good), but not to opinions of people here about what books are about. Get a good companion volume instead, it will have a lot more info about context of the work that some user opinion has.

Starting with greeks is good af advice, even if it sounds like trolling. Homer and Hesiod are great, not to forget Ayshillus and their philosophers. Then progress shallowly through european literature history, reading the crucial books of each period (Decameron, Anna Karenina, ...), focusing on these movements that grab you. Maybe try some African & Asian philosophy and literature, to get different perspective and some contrast too.

well see but you just told me these wonderful things about Pushkin on a Veeky Forums board and I believe you.

What is the difference if a literature professor tells me this? We presume that a degree and a position confers certain rights and privileges to the beholder (i.e the right to be an authority, the right to be listened to) but analysis of the current collegiate system compels one to feel that this things are arbitrary and standards have degenerated. Then we say that the admissions system for a college creates a community of engaged learners willing to discuss the material, but yet again my experience falls far short of this ideal.

The bitch are details. I just told you what is in it, not how it is, how exactly did context impact it, what even was this context.

To be fair you can also get this from good companion book, but in my experience there are more good teachers than good such books. Depends on the place though, but I think so it is in most of EU, I don't really know about USA.

You can achieve it by
reading

By reading secondary sources, not only primary sources. Where in Pushkin Village can you see students planning revolutions, his education, etc which led to his exile? This is what good lecturer or good companion book give you. And lecturer gives it to you usually easily, since dialogue is still the best way of passing information on.

Cosmoetica has to be one of the strangest anomalies on the internet. Easily the most bizarre Veeky Forums-related thing out there. I've been occasionally visiting the site for over a year and I still can't tell if Dan Schneider is sincere, autistic, a genius or some combination of the three.

Hello Captain Mr. Obious

Here's a video from 1998 of him writing a poem in real time (be sure not to skip all of the accolades at the start, no doubt written by Dan himself):

youtube.com/watch?v=gpI9ETsh8qs

Because if you got out of your muddle and attempted to explain and unravel what was actually occuring, I'm sure this context you're speaking so highly of would amount to the same cognitive process one undergoes while reading alone (as far as learning is concerned) only with a different aesthetics. You sit in a class, you spent money on it, you want to feel like you got your money's worth, and you tell yourself something magical and transformative happened, that your path was worth it and you underwent a unique intellectual change no one else could because you are special. A "spook" if ever there was one.

Also here's a trailer he made for his website:

youtube.com/watch?v=Leay2iCofxw

So the benefit is that you have access to experts, but not just experts but tangible experts who you get to hear speak? But also you could reap the same benefits from the book but it's just harder to do that when you could pay for a class and put yourself through the regimen of routines, schedules, and degradation of student life?

Does something result from that regimen? Yes. Is it entirely possible to recreate the parameters of that regimen without the assistance of an institution? I think so and I'm saying this as someone who is currently a student at a university.

I think frowning upon autodidacts is just the result of vanity. The reality is that there is an abundance of freely accessible learning resources.

Good thing that education is public here, I hope you do enjoy american one.

Lecturer can do something book can't. He can adapt to his listeners and clarify points. Thats what makes lecturing more valuable than books.

Are you German? Again, you haven't really engaged the point oh enlightened one, you just keep gabbling on.

I never said that autodidacts are any lesser in knowledge, just thats it easier to acquire it with lecturer. So who is not enganging whom now?

Damn, that's not what I expected him to look like at all.

It's incredible that somebody who prides himself on his analytical abilities (which he actually does seem to have to at least some degree) could have so little self-awareness with basic things like this. He at least clearly puts thought into the poetry, I don't know a hundredth of enough on the subject to critique him, but this was clearly thrown together in Windows Moviemaker over the course of an hour.

And these very same benefits could be acquired outside of a school and it's only the faith invested in the splendor of accreditations and institutions that make the lecturer unique.

Let's narrow this discussion specifically to the study of literature. There is only one right to answer a math equation and (for all intents and purposes) only one set of rules for a given language. I can measure a student's ability to solve linear algebra questions or ask that he properly identify specific muscle tissue on a model of a human skeleton. It's all very cut and dry. I would say that the training an engineer gets from an instructor is quite essential.

How would you go about evaluating how someone understood a book? In what way does having a degree and a position confer upon someone the right to say "I understand this author and have the right to say you do not"? What is the examination and hiring process for a literature professor? He writes a thesis on a book, gets a degree, keeps getting degrees, then earns a moneyed position in his faculty. The type of writing he is good at and evaluates has almost nothing in common with the literature he is studying and supposedly knows so intimately.

The real question is how you can get one while GOING to college.

The Well Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had
The Essential Oxford Guide to Writing by Thomas Kane