Maybe unorthodox opinion about literary analysis
I believe that the basic ability to interpret meaning from art is mostly acquired during cognitive and social development, like language is, rather than being installed through formalized education.
Education provides terminology, tools, and methods for interpreting meaning from works that are unfamiliar culturally or experience-wise, helping the learner to seek understanding of works that make no sense at first---importantly, helping the learner to understand further than their own cultural and personal context
However, if literary and artistic techniques such as Symbolism, Parallelism, Foreshadowing, etc. had to be formally taught to people to be understood, they wouldn't exist, because the techniques wouldn't work until the audience had been taught about them. But that is impossible, because the audience couldn't be taught about something that doesn't exist yet
Something bad has happened where people often feel stupid and ashamed trying to understand art, so they are afraid of the part of them that engages with meaning. Education alone cannot fix it, sometimes education caused it
I think often there is an important step missing that comes BEFORE formalized education, and that is: experiencing lots and lots and lots of a very wide variety of art WITHOUT being judged or evaluated on "Performance"
the MOST FOUNDATIONAL beginning of analyzing art is simply openness to fun, curiosity, and enjoyment. So you can ask: How does it make me feel? What parts of it are the most interesting or cool? What does it remind me of?
this peaceful communication with oneself is important. I think it's like a primordial soup that understanding of art comes from. From this beginning, very simple particles of recognition emerge: art makes me feel something, i like this part of the art, this reminds me of something that happened to me, this reminds me of another piece of art, these pieces of art are different but I like both of them, this art makes me feel weird but I like it, this art makes me feel sad, I don't know if I like this art or not
And eventually you need education to help you learn about the author or creator and the history or other context, but everybody has at least a little of that, and importantly, everybody understands that art was created by somebody.
Almost all humans create art themselves at some point (even if just a scribble) and once they develop theory of mind, they are ready to think about how the art communicates something about the creator. The experience of creating art yourself gives you access to other questions: why did they make that art, why did they make it that way, what did they feel when they made it, what gave them the idea for it, what did they want other people to think about it.
People forget the small, simple steps at the beginning of the primordial soup. They think that enjoying art is a different kind of thing from understanding art, but those things are deeply related. Enjoying art provides raw data for developing self-insight, and self-insight is essential to everything-else-insight.
