What does academic study of literature actually do?
Does it help elevate the feeling of the sublime you get when you read something amazing, something that makes you go "damn..." when you've finished the last line?
Or is it just a bunch of theorizing, historicizing, this-book-is-actually-a-political-object stuff? (Not that this is necessarily inherently bad, of course)
Or are these complementary?
>>8257039
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnEB2F_v_cE
>>8257039
you read books until you hate reading
>>8257068
I'm wondering if it's actually worthwhile when alternatives like watching films is so much easier and arguably plenty rewarding
>>8257039
>Or are these complementary?
precisely.
look, stop looking at theory as a "science," start looking at it as a genre of writing. it has its own pleasures, just like literature does, and like literature, these pleasures deserve to be taught, learned, and argued.
>>8257083
do whatever makes you happy
you have to really like literature to now want to kill yourself in academia literary studies after a while
an old prof said english academia is where they "beat the love of literature out of you" and it's a fair if somewhat facetious point.
It makes you approach and enter text in ways the innocent common person can't. It just opens a new, actually educated, point of view so you can discuss literature in a serious way with other people who have put time and effort in studying and researching, thus updating old approaches to the same works.
>Does it help elevate the feeling of the sublime
If you go around being a manchild saying shit like this, you just will get laughed at. I get the idea though, but there's no happy and conceited ways to read, if you like literature genuinely, you will enjoy it regardless, and I'd say that it would even motivate you to go beyond mere innocent reading and look for these new perspectives that can open up a book in so many ways you couldn't on your own.
>>8257115
>If you go around being a manchild saying shit like this, you just will get laughed at
not necessarily, a lot of study is still devoted to the sublime, in its 18th-19th century as well as "postmodern" incarnations
>>8257120
Maybe by dull British literal who's or aestheticians. Is aesthetics your thing? Then you're welcome to say pompous shit about beauty and high art, just keep in mind that lit theory, and the interesting one, is far from aesthetics.
>>8257146
>aesthetics
>dull
>marxist circle jerking and thinly veiled identity politics as "criticla theory"
>important
this is why no one takes literary criticism seriously anymore, and why the field has lost all semblance of relevance and is relegated firmly to joke status.
>>8257146
What is it about, then?
>>8257146
>Edmund Burke and every Romantic is a literal who
Look, just because you've never heard of Byron doesn't mean everyone else doesn't want on his cock.
