/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.13918689]

2 questions. Would you say there is a minimal age you'd have to be to fully understand/appreciate older and larger works of literature. And, do you need a basic understanding of poetry to appreciate something like Dante's Inferno. I'm 21 and have never been much of a reader, but I'm slowly getting into the habit, and I'm curious about these questions.

[Anonymous No.13918707]

>Archetypal criticism Biographical criticism Chicago school Cultural materialism Darwinian criticism Deconstruction Descriptive poetics Ecocriticism Feminist criticism Formalism Geocriticism Marxist criticism New Criticism New historicism Postcolonial criticism Postcritique Psychoanalytic criticism Reader-response criticism Russian formalism Semiotic criticism Sociological criticism Source criticism Thing theory

Choose your literary theory.
I'll quickly go with
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author
i.e. you'll always read something else into it/get out of it, so it's not like there's an age barrier, but if you will the author might have wished for their readers to have a similar context/background and that might only come with age.

I mean I remembering giving a talk on The Old Man and The Sea by Hemingway in school and my English teacher congratulated me for making it such an action packed story

[Anonymous No.13918721]

>>13918707
PS knowing history surely helps too. But this isn't strictly a matter of age per se.

[Anonymous No.13918749]

>>13918689
35 if you're a normie, or never if you're an autist. You need actual life experience to properly appreciate literature.

[Anonymous No.13918787]

Doestoevsky's "White Night" is a book centered on the lack of life experiences, so I'm sure some books are better read with even little life experiences.

[Anonymous No.13918806]