dearest /lit/, I've been lurking here and reading for a few months now, and perhaps my biggest frustration so far is that I feel I don't have the tools to form advanced criticisms or analysis of what I read. I feel like the significance of some works are maybe being lost on me.
Now, I know many of you study literature for a living, so I was wanting to ask you all -- how do I learn more about the theory surrounding literature? I want to get to the point where I can read and understand academic criticism/analysis of literature as well as form my own. Are there any books or articles that can get me started? Thanks.
>>7806287
bump
OP
Check out YouTube for open Yale courses. There's a good intro lit 101 primer course worth watching.
Also research book options for some good lit criticism. I have none to offer but Mortimer Alders how to read a book which was my first exposure to the field. It's slightly outdated but still a good starting point.
For poetry I really enjoyed Haas 20th century pleasures. Good luck.
>>7806361
Thanks, friend. I'll check out that book. It's pretty overwhelming trying to get into an entire field of academics when you don't have any lecturers or whatever to guide you.
>>7808320
Might be some relevant lectures here as well.
https://pirateproxy.tv/torrent/10375085/_The_Great_Courses_-_The_Teaching_Company_Megapack_280_Courses
>>7808326
don't suppose you have a youtube link for the lit 101 course do you? I'm struggling to find it.
What level of critical analysis do you already have?
>>7806287
>Now, I know many of you study literature for a living
Oh, god forbid. I'm a STEM fag. Only reason why I'm capable of literary criticism is because I have an annoying innate impression of what a good story ought to do.
Read Aristotle's Poetics, fundamental story structure and analysis right there. All I ever needed, really.
>>7808369
Pretty much none. I can read books and explain whether or not I enjoyed it and why, and can also point out key themes, that's about it. I really enjoy reading but I've never studied it.
>>7808386
>I'm a STEM fag
stopped reading there
>>7808407
you're doing me a favor then
>I want to get to the point where I can read and understand academic criticism/analysis of literature
Why? The vast majority of academics absolutely hate literature, and are terrible readers. Unless you're forced into this because of some university course, steer clear.
Norton anthology of theory and criticism, will give you pieces by all the important theorists
Then it depends what you want, whether it's more strict textual analysis or stuff like postcolonial theory
I'd recommend the intentional fallacy as a baby's first lit crit essay
>>7808421
Yeah all these academics that specialise in literature, driven by an interest in it sure do hate it
>>7806287
>Check out YouTube for open Yale courses. There's a good intro lit 101 primer course worth watching.
Great advice.
A "primer" would be something like "How to Read and Why", but let's skip that.
google scholar => Name of work. Recieve academic articles on said work. Google : name of work +".pdf"+ uni usually yields at least reasonable results too. Reading some interesting academic criticism on stuff you already know works wonders and serves as a great complement to reading "just" the theory.
Aristotits : Poetics
Also some relevant Plato.
Also get some short introductions/anthologies or actually read a little into (the most relevant works of) :
Schleiermacher
Saussuere
Eichenbaum
Jakobson
Auerbach
Freud if you are into that
Spooky stuff includes :
Kristeva, Iser, de Man, Derriduck
Iser is actually understanable.
>>7808479
I have no insight into their motives. It does seem strange from the outside though.
>THE only time my passion for reading steered me in the wrong direction was when I let it persuade me to go to graduate school. There, I soon realized that my love for books was unshared by many of my classmates and professors. I found it hard to understand what they did love, exactly, and this gave me an anxious shiver that would later seem like a warning about what would happen to the teaching of literature over the decade or so after I dropped out of my Ph.D. program. That was when literary academia split into warring camps of deconstructionists, Marxists, feminists, and so forth, all battling for the right to tell students that they were reading “texts” in which ideas and politics trumped what the writer had actually written.
>I was struck by how little attention they had been taught to pay to the language, to the actual words and sentences that a writer had used. Instead, they had been encouraged to form strong, critical, and often negative opinions of geniuses who had been read with delight for centuries before they were born. They had been instructed to prosecute or defend these authors, as if in a court of law, on charges having to do with the writers’ origins, their racial, cultural, and class backgrounds. They had been encouraged to rewrite the classics into the more acceptable forms that the authors might have discovered had they only shared their young critics’ level of insight, tolerance, and awareness.
