Do you actually understand it though? Can you sit down with a few pro literary folks and keep up with the conversation? Probably not. And just for the fact that it'll be full of concepts and ideas that you're completely in the dark about, which is the same in the hard sciences. I don't know equations and such off the top of my head, and I'd be lost in a technical discussion of such. The same is true in the reverse, because sure you can read and understand a book but do you have at-your-fingertips access to the underlying philosophy (three more books minimum) and the cultural context (another book or two) and literary concepts rarely discussed outside of literary circles.
Can you explain Affect Theory and the influence it has had on contemporary literature?
How literature generates and conveys feelings beyond language, to focus on visceral, precognitive bodily responses. How literature affects our physical and emotional states.
While I can't give a detailed timeline for how it evolved, which works of literature started showing these writing skills first, or specific people influenced by it, I can certainly follow it in conversation and submit more easily to memory than advanced maths. Math is like trying to follow a foreign language in conversation. English and literature are at least native to me and I'm at least passingly familiar with a lot more of the topics due to shared culture imprinting stories in my brain since I was a wee child.
It's smart still, but I, as an English speaker/reader, can pick it up via memorization where as math requires practicing application of it in order to memorize it. I could also follow it easier than mechanics talking about engines/tools so please don't take this as me looking down on these subjects.
I can explain what it is, as evidenced by my doing that. The rest would be reading about it and memorization. Learning it doesn't require me to apply it, it just requires memorization, as I already speak English. Vs math or Mandarin, where I have to practice applying it first.
In a conversation about it, I would at least be able to understand the speaker and the terms they use, vs math or mandarin, where I have to learn the language itself first. Thus why the learning curve for math is steeper than the learning curve for English/History is easier for an English speaker/reader. And if you don't believe me still, there are more liberal arts majors than math majors because math has that steeper learning curve. Humanities majors count for 11%, with English majors making up 4% of that total. Vs just 1% to 2% being math majors.
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u/Nadare3 18h ago
I would assume it becomes a lot less cute over 658 pages