i am eternally aggreived on behalf of people who were clearly never taught what literary analysis can be. people who were never shown the incredible satisfaction when you see something in a piece of literature and you can /prove/ it’s there, the slow and careful tugging at an image, at chasing implication and meaning, at pushing and pushing until it all falls into place.
sometimes that looks like catching a “throwaway” line in a novel (“[the drawings] remembered Beardsley”) and chasing that single image until you have five thousand words about attempted freedom, conformity, and inescapability.
sometimes that looks like noticing a motif of reused roman ruins and going through and through until you can argue about colonising gaze and welsh devolution.
sometimes that means reading a novel where every chapter tells a story of someone telling a story and proving that that is an attempt at catharsis that fails.
it’s not all “the curtains are blue therefore the character is sad”
and besides, that’s actually “this character seems sad but the author never says so > how does the author create that? > oh hey there sure are a lot of washed out or cool colours in this scene > wait hold on the furnishings are almost obsessively described > does that say something about material culture? can i parallel that against appearances vs reality? > “in this essay i will argue that this short story interrogates arts and crafts aesthetic ideals by portraying an obsession with furnishings that ultimately leads the main character into despair. In order to do so let me first demonstate the connection between the furnishings and the emotional state of the main character”
If I may add on to this: I study English lit at uni, and I struggled with it for a little while because I didn’t truly understand what I was writing about. There would be little glimmers of things that caught my eye and excited me in my essays, but a lot of it was just regurgitating other people’s arguments. And a lot of my class felt the same way, they kept saying that they couldn’t have their own opinions because they had to back everything up with sources, and how everything felt like a reach. And I will admit i did, and sometimes still do, refer to essay writing as the academic circlejerk. It seemed like everything was just grasping at circumstantial evidence to back up an argument made in the 70s!
But THEN, I think the moment it really clicked for me was last semester. I was taking a class on gothic literature which I was really excited about, and I pushed myself to read all the extra material, which was really easy because I actually enjoyed it and engaged with it! I was chewing through heavy theories and as I read then I was making connections back to my notes and actually really enjoying the process. I would show up to class like a conspiracy theorist with red string links between x theory and y text and z cultural phenomenon. So when it came to writing my essays I already had things that fascinated me enough to dig into.
I wrote about how Kristeva’s theories of abjection (how horror can be created by transcending physical boundaries, and how the (cis) female form is inherently abject due to its childbirth abilities) permeated the female driven narratives of the texts we studied. How it intertwined with theories of the grotesque and reinforced the otherness of the characters. How the stories reinforce or subvert the marginalisation of these women through these devices.
I spent months of that class arguing with my teacher and my class about the way witchcraft is represented in british folk horror, and so I took that frustration and I turned it into another essay. I wrote about the way witchcraft is used as an easy signpost for evilness and otherness in these stories, and how it is often removed from its historical context and yet irrevocably linked to it, so by showing witchcraft as a simple force of evil which threatens rational peoples despite the fact that it was a way to oppress marginalised groups, we reinforce that cultural knee jerk response to otherness, prioritise ‘British rationality’ which is constructed through stories like these, and never challenge the preconceptions of the readership. ‘Why should we fear otherness?’ I ranted, backed up with academic sources, ‘look at the society we have created through this mentality’.
I ended up getting some of the best grades of my life that semester. Every assignment I did across the board got a 1st degree grade. That’s not a brag, it was a breakthrough for me, realising that if I let myself enjoy the process and get experimental and write about things I cared about, then that would be reflected in the work I was producing.
It has opened my eyes as well, and I see these connections in everything I read. Some people say it ruins books to read them like this, but it makes them all the more wonderful to me. Critical analysis of text trains your brain to make connections and unearth meaning, and it helps you reassess or reinforce the way you look at the world. The way literature shapes it and reflects it. For two and a half years I thought my classes were just a fun piss take, and I’m so sad that I didn’t appreciate them more and sooner.
Tl;dr – listen to your English teachers!
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