This month The Blue Bookcase asks:
To what extent do you analyze literature? Are you more analytical in your reading if you know you're going to review the book? Is analysis useful in helping you understand and appreciate literature, or does it detract from your readerly experience?
I think I tend to over analyze literature and tends to detract from any sort of readerly experience. I experienced this recently with The Night Circus. Now I had issues with the format of the book to start with, but I did find that I was over analyzing it as I was reading the book, hoping to find something in it that I clearly wasn't and was making my reading experience with the book not a good one. Its not that I don't enjoy reading, I do. But I find that I tend to over analyze and therefore it affects how I end up viewing the book, unless of course I get the book done quickly and out of the way. It seems that I can't just sit down and read a book and enjoy it and therefore get something out of it and therefore I am back in the vicious cycle that I didn't want to be in.
When I don't over analyze a book, I seem to get the most of the book and can therefore make a better assessment of the book. Its a vicious cycle, isn't it?
2 comments:
There is a real tension in reading to taking the attitude that one lets the work take you where it takes you and assuming that the reader in effect recreates the work every time it is read.
I avoid over - analyzing as a defence, since my academic background is rooted in literary text analysis, instead.
I can't avoid analyzing everything, though. I always do that, both while reading and watching.
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