31 days meme: Literary criticism

kaberett wanted to know:

I'd also adore knowing more about how you approach literary criticism etc - when you're starting out with something new, what makes the critique-goggles slam on? What do you have to do to keep them away? What sorts of themes etc do you notice first?

Okay! Whee. This is probably going to get long because there are a lot of things going on here. But the first thing to say is this: I do a lot of stuff that falls under the lit crit umbrella, but one thing I don't do much of is thinking about how and why I do this stuff. There are certain parts of it that are totally unconscious, so this is using muscles that I am not accustomed to flexing.

So I'm feeling my way around a bit blindly here. The rest is going under a cut, because it'll probably get long.

( Lit crit and how I approach it. )