How To Get The Most Out of Literature - Literary Criticism 101 

"Critical thinking" is curtailed by parents and policy. The educational system can only go as far as it is allowed to.

You can't quantify or measure critical thinking, so our educational system is unable to teach it.

The best book to practice criticism (not sure which branch of criticism you’re looking at) is Beginning Theory by Peter Barry. It’s a playbook of all major branches of literary criticism that stresses practice over merely teaching you the theory. Best of luck!

I would exclude Gandhi out of that. Read up about what he actually did in South Africa and the Indian Freedom Struggle, your perspective about him might change. He was a crook and a fraud.

Noted! Thank you for the feedback. :)

FYI: cable knit is just the type of weave (a knit, specifically, as the name implies) and can be done in several materials in addition to cotton.

@@philliplee7658 In the Ralph Lauren store this same sweater is in either cable knit or cotton. I just want to know which one he chose

I politely disagree. Any honest reader would know that there lies multiple layers of a text and a honest writer knows his story usually slips out of his control once it reaches the public.

You're arguing in ultimatums, and in favor of a text-external interpretation with complete disregard for a text-immanent approach . What you have described is known simply as a text-external approach. As the name indicates, this methodology takes external information into account in an attempt to understand a written work. Such Information can include very important life events or trivial absurdities, such as the era/time period, circumstances of the author, genre of work, conditions of release, amount of editors or influences, notes or press releases of the author, etc. This video however speaks more about the latter, something more closely resembling a text-immanent approach. This one is more focused on the text in isolation, and only the text in isolation. In my opinion this is the more fun stuff as it--by its nature--leaves many unanswered questions. It makes you wonder, why things could be the way they are and come up with ideas on your own. You have to comprehend, not memorize what you've googled for (to put it most bluntly). There are many different ways one can use language to get our thoughts across. Despite how common it may be to assume that we think in language, in truth we simply use it as a tool, a translator between minds. If it weren't for this, we wouldn't have so many different languages in the world, and dialects, and accents, and scripts, and rhetorical devices, and our language would not have word continuously change their meaning over generations. Your methodology would take external information into account in an attempt to understand a written work. Such Information includes things such as the time period, circumstances of the author, genre, conditions of release, amount of editors or influences, etc. But it disregards the most important question, why should you even bother?

I think it's good and healthy to be able to analyse something in a context other than which the author intended. For example; a book about growing up and going through childhood with a hidden secret about yourself, such as an alternate life or personality trait, can absolutely be interpreted through a queer lens and analysed as a metaphor for growing up as anything other than cis-het and having to hide that part of yourself. The authors might not've intended this, but whats the harm in analysing the book that way?

Why would you assume that an artist or writer creates from a state of conscious intention? You can ask almost any living artist or writer to explain what meaning(s) they intended when they produced a given work, and most of them will either fumble for an explanation or shug and say, "I don't know, I just made the thing. You decide what it means." Why would you think that authors and writers of the past were any different? Of *course* they don't realize that their works would one day be considered classics. How could they? The best art and literature raises questions - poses those questions to us. It doesn't answer them. And it doesn't, because artists and writers don't create from answers but from their own questions. Works of art and literature become classics because the questions they pose remain relevant and engaging for successive generations.

​​@@RCWaldun Your comment is on point but in the video you negate it yourself: 6:12 I believe that "intention" is quite a problematic term because it always implies "the best or the original" meaning of a text, "the meaning of the author". Edit: I'd also suggest looking into the notion of "intentional fallacy".