How do you develop the ability to deeply analyze literature and other media? I feel like sometimes the author's intentions completely go over my head and it's not obvious until it's pointed out.
>>25225364It’s actually rather simple, did they not teach you this in high school literature class?You start by identifying things like plot, characters, setting, tone, themes and then you go a little deeper with things like plot devices, flashbacks and foreshadowing.The third and hardest level of analysis concerns shit like iambic pentameter and alliteration but I never cared for that stuff tbqh.
>>25225364You start by analysing the Symbols present in the text and try to think about what the author could mean by them. That's it. Just try to think why the author included the things he did, why in such a specific order, and what he could mean by that. You make various inferences based on what you know about the author and what you know about the commonly used symbols (3, 4, 7, 12, 666, 22, white, black, life, death)3 represents Trinity, 4 represents the four cardinal directions of the world (and, by extension, the entire world) or the number of elements, 7 represents completeness/perfection, 12 is the number of Apostles, 22 is the number of major Arcana of the Tarot etc.I think the gold standard in teaching you how to interpret symbols is the Whiteness of the Whale. Look at how Melville analyses the colour white, how many different things it can represent: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2701/pg2701-images.html#link2HCH0042Here's also a pro tip: sometimes the author speaks directly to (you), the reader, through the mouth of one of the characters, but does so in a bit more subtle way. For instance, the character might seemingly talk about a painting, but only on the surface. He might instead be talking about the book you're reading, explain what was the thought process behind writing it. Off the top of my head the painting trick was used twice, by Melville in Pierre and by Gaddis in the Recognitions:>—This . . . these . . . the art historians and the critics talking about every object and . . . everything having its own form and density and ... its own character in Flemish paintings, but is that all there is to it? Do you know why everything does? Because they found God everywhere. There was nothing God did not watch over, nothing, and so this . . . and so in the painting every detail reflects . . . God's concern with the most insignificant objects in life, with everything, because God did not relax for an instant then, and neither could the painter then. Do you get the perspective in this? he demanded, thrusting the rumpled reproduction before them. —There isn't any. There isn't any single perspective, like the camera eye, the one we all look through now and call it realism, there ... I take five or six or ten . . . the Flemish painter took twenty perspectives if he wished, and even in a small painting you can't include it all in your single vision, your one miserable pair of eyes, like you can a photograph, like you can painting when it ... when it degenerates, and becomes conscious of being looked at. Gaddis here talks about art movements in literature, where a similar development can be observed. Pre-19th century literature was very inventive, often changing genres mid-book, examining the world through many different points of view, Ad maiorem Dei gloriam. Then came the 19th century realist novel, which was often linear, moralistic and examined things from only one point of view, the Social.
>>25225561And Gaddis claims that his novel is a return to baroque/renaissance exuberance, that by mixing many different genres, styles and points of view, he's able to examine the world around him better. But he does so not for the glory of God, but because his book is self-conscious, because it's art turned inward, analysing itself. Meanwhile Melville in Pierre; or, the Ambiguities:>It seemed plain that the whole must be a collection of those wretched imported daubs, which with the incredible effrontery peculiar to some of the foreign picture-dealers in America, were christened by the loftiest names known to Art. But as the most mutilated torsoes of the perfections of antiquity are not unworthy the student’s attention, neither are the most bungling modern incompletenesses: for both are torsoes; one of perished perfections in the past; the other, by anticipation, of yet unfulfilled perfections in the future. Still, as Pierre walked along by the thickly hung walls, and seemed to detect the infatuated vanity which must have prompted many of these utterly unknown artists in the attempted execution by feeble hand of vigorous themes; he could not repress the most melancholy foreboding concerning himself. All the walls of the world seemed thickly hung with the empty and impotent scope of pictures, grandly outlined, but miserably filled. The smaller and humbler pictures, representing little familiar things, were by far the best executed; but these, though touching him not unpleasingly, in one restricted sense, awoke no dormant majesties in his soul, and therefore, upon the whole, were contemptibly inadequate and unsatisfactory.claims that his novel is ambitious, but because of inadequacy of communication, the written word being incapable of fully expressing an idea in the artist's soul:>He did not see, that even when thus combined, all was but one small mite, compared to the latent infiniteness and inexhaustibility in himself; that all the great books in the world are but the mutilated shadowings-forth of invisible and eternally unembodied images in the soul; so that they are but the mirrors, distortedly reflecting to us our own things; and never mind what the mirror may be, if we would see the object, we must look at the object itself, and not at its reflection.that all things in Art, as are in Life, are Ambigous. The entire novel is Melville's attempt at putting one man's soul to page. A soul in its entirety, with its conflicts and Ambiguities, and came to the conclusion that it's impossible, that the medium is limited. The novel ends with the exclamation “All’s o’er, and ye know him not!”, and indeed we seem to know very little about the titular character in the end, despite the book being focused entirely on him.
>>25225562But these are all, in the end, inferences we can make about the text. It's possible I completely misread both of these passages, perhaps I'm a complete and utter retard who reads Meaning where there is none, or worse, misreads the author's intended Meaning. But it doesn't matter, you should read for yourself, after all. What matters is the connection YOU made with the text, what you brought out of it, what you learned, what new perspectives you gained, and how you plan to apply it to your life. Or perhaps you don't care about analysis at all. You don't need to, you can just enjoy the ride and the aesthetic experience it produces in you.
>>25225364I used this painting as an album cover lol, It feels weird seeing it anywhere
>>25225364What's a piece of literature or "media" you enjoy, and why do you enjoy it?>I like it cause... like... cause like it's good... cause like... Yeah haha >I like it cause... cause like I relate to it n sheit... cause like... Yeah hahaIf you say either of these things I'll kill you
>>25225890it's a vibe fr
>>25225890This SKEWERS the media critic
>>25225564Not OP but whether you’re right or wrong, your interpretation has provided a sort of impetus for me, to actually read Gaddis. So I thank you for that.
>>25226239Cheers, I think he's a great writer. As I mentioned, I see him as a sort of a modern revival of the Renaissance/Baroque writer; erudite, elegant, lush, formally inventive. And that's how I view the modernist movement in general, rather than it just being a polemic with what came before. A revival, not a teardown.I also think we should be bold in our readings. We run the risk of misreading, sure, but it also reveals how we, personally, view the world. A lay reader, unlike a scholar or an academic, is not bound by frameworks, convention or the need to maintain his reputation. A great misreading, like how Blake viewed Milton, has its own charm.>Now do you really and truly believe that Homer, when composing the Iliad and the Odyssey, had any thought of the allegories which have been caulked on to him by Plutarch, Heraclides of Pontus, Eustathius or Conutus and which Politian purloined from them? If you do so believe, then you come by neither foot nor hand close to my own opinion, which decrees that they had no more been dreamt of by Homer than the mysteries of the Gospel by Ovid in his Metamorphoses (as a certain Friar Loopy, a filcher of flitches, endeavours to prove, provided that he can chance upon folk as daft as he is: ‘Lids,’ as the saying goes, ‘worthy of their pots’).
