Why can it be difficult to do literary analysis?

Answer 1

One of the difficulties I have noticed in literary analysis throughout the years is that people become hung up on the concept of deriving from the book exactly what the authors put into it. If an analysis becomes too far-fetched, people will argue, "There's no way the authors thought all that through to include it." Quite honestly, they are right. Authors often write spontaneously and by what "feels" right; their writing is not always driven by intellectual thought. While they may not have included elements consciously, though, there is always an unconscious aspect that creates connections and relationships that even the authors may not see until later. Some people have a hard time resolving this idea, though, and therefore have a difficult time with literary analysis.

Another reason people have trouble with analysis is because it is so subjective. Reading is a dialogue between author and reader, and each reader will glean something different from a book than another person. There is a large amount of freedom is literary analysis, and this freedom can be overwhelming. Our school system so often teaches students to produce the "right" answer that when there is no strictly right answer, students don't even know where to start. Approaching a novel from any point of view, with any idea, is sometimes simply too much freedom and not enough structure.

Additionally, many people's minds do not work well for literary analysis. People can have brilliant analytical minds, but simply do not think about novels in an appropriate way to analyze them. This is nothing of which to be ashamed; rather, it is something to be celebrated, that there are so many diverse minds among us. Not everyone can be naturally suited to literary analysis.

Answer 2

Literature denotes the use of written language, but is generally understood to include oral tradition as well, traditionbeing the operant word. For literature gets read and re-read (or recited from memory) over long time, so that its references become part of the cultural identity, passed on through the generations, that defines a nation or a civilization.

There are many literary fields, great and small. They include fiction and non-fiction, prose and verse; they may have visual and/or aural sources. Perhaps even the movies and television are literature, but beware: the word is also loosely used to mean promotional tracts, advertising material and even the more earnest kind of comic-book.