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Advice for learning in a structured way after college? I’m in a few book clubs, but part of me is considering enrolling in some kind of part-time or online English master’s degree program because I miss structured learning with a teacher so much :/
Get Nabokov's lectures on literature and go through each book he taught one by one. Read the book first and then his lecture on the book. Start with Don Quixote.
Did you study English in college? If not, edX offers introductory- and intermediate-level, asynchronous survey courses on authors and movements. You might need to filter out quite a bit to find something of interest to you -- most of the courses cover texts an avid reader will likely have read -- but it's a free site with structured review of the material, which is pretty cool. https://www.edx.org/search?q=literature&tab=course&subject=Literature&subject=Art+%26+Culture&subject=Humanities&page=1
Two of the EdX English courses are the top-rated ones by Class Central users! I haven't checked them out personally yet, but I would definitely take a look at them if you're interested.
I've found this to be a useful compendium of courses online: https://www.classcentral.com/. It also offers advice on getting courses for free.
There are plenty of free resources to give structure to learning certain topics, such as: -MIT Opencourseware: https://ocw.mit.edu/ (better for STEM than humanities, but still worth it) -Open Syllabus: https://www.opensyllabus.org/ has the most commonly assigned texts for certain disciplines. -Free YouTube Lectures and Talks (usually from top scholars in a field) -Grad school pre req reading lists. You can't always find these, but I've encountered a few helpful lists by Googling something like "Harvard/Yale/Oxford Medieval History pre reqs/reading list." Often there will be lists of texts that the departments expect incoming students to be familiar with or that they suggest students who are looking to get a head start read. What's really hard to get is not information, syllabuses and reading lists or even self-discipline, but feedback. For this you could: -Write your thoughts down in a (semi-) formal way and post them online. You may not get much helpful feedback depending on where you post, but I think writing helps test whether the feeling of "I get this" is true. When you have to be explicit about your arguments, it is harder to bullshit yourself. -Cold email professors. If they study the author/period/movement you are interested in, they might be happy to give detailed or at least helpful feedback. I recommend asking direct--though non-basic--questions rather than asking them to read anything extensive. The worst thing that happens is they ignore you. -If you know anyone irl or online who you think has a better grasp of a topic than you, ask them. Pretty obvious but can be easy to forget about. There's also an interesting online group called the Catherine Project. They read and discuss classic texts with a facilitator. It is free and has no prerequisites, but is very hard to get in because of space constraints. https://catherineproject.org/ This was a little long, but this is everything I can think of off the top of my head.
What is it exactly that your college was offering you that you found so useful? Was it the lectures, the reading lists, the discussion times? Was it learning to deconstruct texts or to compare them etc?
There's no trick. You just need self-discipline. If you don't have it, it's not for you.
I think this comment is a non-answer and doesn't address OP's question at all. It's true by definition that if you want to self-study, you have to self-study. I think OP was asking about better/worse ways of doing this.
Bulk download your school's syllabi if you can. Some can be good reading lists.