/lit/ - Literature

>>18576509
Read, read, read. Do your own research. Be prepared that sometimes things will seem boring, but if something piques your curiosity jump on it. Familiarise yourself with the key players and ideas in literary theory, and the critical traditions of various texts. Routledge do good critical source books for various works. When you first read something, though, read it 'blind'. Connect with it, let it move you as it was made to. Approach your professors, build relationships with them. Develop your own ideas. Read, read, read. I also recommend keeping a reading log. Once you've read something, summarise he main arguments of the piece and write them out. Then analyse their argument. Then, finally, write a response - to what extent do you agree? To what extent to you disagree? Why? This will greatly help your essay writing technique.

>>18576522
Sure, pic rel is the start

>>18576521
Shakespeare was Grammar school educated and thus well versed in classical rhetoric. The master example of this can be found in Brutus and Mark Anthony's speeches in Julius Caesar. We don't know what Shakespeare thought or felt about it, but it was exceptionally skillful of him to make Brutus' speech so compelling whilst working in subtle flaws to his delivery. For example, look at the opening tricolon of each speaker: Mark Antony's 'Friends, Romans, Countymen' possesses a kind of internal logic, it expands from intimate friends, out to Romans, and finally countrymen. This natural progression is reflected in the 1, 2, 3 syllabic structure. Brutus, on the other hand, opens with 'Romans, Countrymen, and Lovers'. The syllabic structure is jarring in comparison, 2, 3, 3, and seems to indicate that Romans and Countrymen are exclusive from Lovers. This reflects Brutus' key failing, that his rhetoric is if anything overly polished, reliant on logos and tight linguistic structure rather than pathos, and his tendency to think in abstract terms quite separate from his emotions.