Analyzing Literature

I think there are a variety of ways we respond to literature. Everyone responds to literature in a different way, and each person can have their own individual and separate response to the same piece of literature. Our primary response is based on our first impression of a work. When you read something through the first time, you get a feel for what the story is trying to say. Whatever your impression is on your first read through is what’s most likely to get you interested in the work in the first place. Our secondary response is based on alternate impressions of a work, which come from reading it two or more times over. When reading something through again and again, you are able to pick up on things that you would have missed before. Reading a work multiple times through can leave you with a second, enhanced impression of a work.
One of the main ways people respond to literature is through their emotions. When the read something that provokes an old memory or makes them think of something they feel passionately about, they have a strong response to it. I think that the more a person feels emotionally connected to a piece of literature, the more likely they are to try to understand it fully. I think that emotions can be one of the most powerful connections between a reader and a piece of literature. Another way people respond to something they read is intellectually. Many people will react to something that really makes them think and challenges their intellect in a whole new way. Personally, I know that if a read something that gives me a challenge and makes me think about something in a new way, I’m far more likely to spend time trying to understand it to the fullest extent.
By learning to critically analyze literature, it can affect our lives in a several ways. Through literary analysis, we can learn to better analyze things that happen in our daily lives. Practice with analyzing literature can help chance you perspective on how you approach the things you read, which can also just change your perspective about everything that you see. It changes not only how you view literature, but how you approach everyday situations. Through literary analysis, we can draw from experiences we’ve had in life to help us understand what an author was going through, or what message they were trying to convey. By using our own experiences to understand more about literature, we can in turn understand more about our own lives. Understanding how a lifetime’s events have influenced what an author is saying can make us think twice about the things that have happened in our own lives.
Analyzing can aid us in understanding influential works of literature that have been made popular throughout the decades. Reading some novels that have been written in the past can expose us to new ideas and new concepts that may not be as popular today. Everyone experiences literature in their own unique ways depending on how their mind works and what experiences they’ve had in their lifetime, and I think that learning to fully appreciate and understand literature can help us not only bring new perspectives into our own minds, but also introduce new ideas to each other that we may not have thought about before.