The main thing that we do at Clockworks Academy is teach literature, and that might lead to the question: why? Why bother analyzing and interpreting literature? Why do we read?
The first, simplest, and perhaps most important reason why we read literature is for pleasure. That’s not a problem and it’s not something we need to hide! If you don’t enjoy reading, and don’t enjoy stories, you’re not going to enjoy Clockworks Academy. That’s fine! There’s something out there for everyone. But maybe you can send your literary friends our way?
We read for pleasure, and the pleasures that come from literature are many. In the most distilled terms, though, we read to achieve two diametrically opposed purposes:
To learn something we don’t already know.
To be reassured of something we do already know.
Both of these purposes are just as important in reading fiction as they are in reading non-fiction. The only person’s experience we ever get first-hand access to is our own, so we read, listen to, and watch stories to learn about what it is like to be someone else. We hope to learn that other people are like us—to be reassured of something we already know. We want to learn that we are not alone, that we are not unique. We want to rest assured that other people, who are in one profound sense opaque to us, are actually like us. At the same time, we want the opposite. There is no pleasure, and only very limited joy in stagnation. To feel like we have a place in the world that is worthwhile we want to learn that others are not the same as us, and to feel—to be—worthwhile we want to grow: to learn and experience and feel things we didn’t feel before.
And those two reasons, the reasons why we read in the first place, are also the reasons why analyzing literature is worthwhile. Human beings are reasoning animals. That is not all we are, but it is part—an important part. We experience the world and we crave understanding of our experiences. Through analyzing and interpreting literature we can learn not only about literature but also about life itself—about what it is to be human. Reading gives us an experience that is both familiar and alien. Analyzing what we have read helps us to understand that experience.