Why should you learn to analyse a novel?
It's really fun, I promise!
This post is the first instalment of a course I’m currently running for paid subscribers called How to Read and Analyse a Novel. For full introductory details, start here. You can adjust your notification settings here if you would like to opt out of these emails.
Surely we have all been in that English lesson where a student bemoans the fact of having to ‘read between the lines’ of any given novel? Despite my certified English nerd status, there was a time when even I couldn’t stomach looking for yet more religious symbols in Middlemarch.
I don’t want to get into the weeds too much, but there has been a lot of debate recently about how English should be taught in schools, including some complaints about having to analyse novels in the classroom—why can’t English teachers just let (or make) kids enjoy the books they’re reading? Why ruin it with all this talk of symbolism and allegory? Luckily for me, Sara from FictionMatters has already written a whole post about how this is patently absurd, and it is not an English teacher’s job to help you or your kid love reading.1
But of course, these posts did get me thinking, especially as I knew I’d be tackling my own course on analysing novels. We aren’t in an English classroom and hopefully you already want to delve deeper into your books, so I’ve got a much easier job already. But whilst I have always been that person for whom analysing novels brought satisfaction and a more profound sense of enjoyment, that clearly isn’t immediately true for everyone.2 I think some of the power of this process will make itself known in practice, but I wanted to pause and make a case for analysing novels, beyond the classroom experience.
As Sara rightly says, English lessons are about giving you the building blocks for writing, the tools for literacy—reading and understanding a text and its context—and teaching you a bunch of technical language for reading poetry, say, that you will probably forget (much like any other subject).
But for me the situation is reversed. I actually would quite like to impart some kind of enjoyment; to infuse this experience with the revelatory energy of exploring a novel in greater depth. Focussing on this, then, why might this be a good thing to do? And how will it not ruin your experience of reading and put you off for life?
