How to Read Literature Like a Professor Revised: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines
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About this ebook
Thoroughly revised and expanded for a new generation of readers, this classic guide to enjoying literature to its fullest—a lively, enlightening, and entertaining introduction to a diverse range of writing and literary devices that enrich these works, including symbols, themes, and contexts—teaches you how to make your everyday reading experience richer and more rewarding.
While books can be enjoyed for their basic stories, there are often deeper literary meanings beneath the surface. How to Read Literature Like a Professor helps us to discover those hidden truths by looking at literature with the practiced analytical eye—and the literary codes—of a college professor.
What does it mean when a protagonist is traveling along a dusty road? When he hands a drink to his companion? When he’s drenched in a sudden rain shower? Thomas C. Foster provides answers to these questions as he explores every aspect of fiction, from major themes to literary models, narrative devices, and form. Offering a broad overview of literature—a world where a road leads to a quest, a shared meal may signify a communion, and rain, whether cleansing or destructive, is never just a shower—he shows us how to make our reading experience more intellectually satisfying and fun.
The world, and curricula, have changed. This third edition has been thoroughly revised to reflect those changes, and features new chapters, a new preface and epilogue, as well as fresh teaching points Foster has developed over the past decade. Foster updates the books he discusses to include more diverse, inclusive, and modern works, such as Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give; Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven; Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere; Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X; Helen Oyeyemi's Mr. Fox and Boy, Snow, Bird; Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street; Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God; Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet; Madeline Miller’s Circe; Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls; and Tahereh Mafi’s A Very Large Expanse of Sea.
Thomas C. Foster
Thomas C. Foster is the author of How to Read Literature Like a Professor, How to Write Like a Writer, How to Read Nonfiction Like a Professor, and other works. He is professor emeritus of English at the University of Michigan, Flint, where he taught classes in contemporary fiction, drama, and poetry as well as creative writing and freelance writing. He is also the author of several books on twentieth-century British and Irish literature and poetry.
Read more from Thomas C. Foster
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Reviews for How to Read Literature Like a Professor Revised
78 ratings53 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Thomas Foster presents the reader with a number of skills in literature analysis. It is a light and pleasurable read providing a good introduction to symbolism in literature. The first few chapters cover simple object and form analysis, then he expands into looking at events and actions. The book concludes with a short story and full analysis at three different levels. Thomas often states that analysis isn't necessary to enjoying literature, you can still enjoy a story for what it is. And a good story should stand on its own without analysis. But understanding symbolism can open a new window to literature and its enjoyment. The book has loaded with examples from well-known literature. Thomas does a very good job of helping the reader to understand the symbolism and how the reader can get there.The book is very enjoyable and enlightening. Anyone who enjoys literature, but misses the symbolism, should check it out.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Foster provides a basic but interesting primer on symbolism in literature. He uses fairly standard classics to provide examples, but still makes them interesting and witty.Not for the very learned, and not for the novice reader. This book would be most helpful for the college freshman or the adult reader who's decided to look at books a bit more seriously but still have fun reading.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Breaks down some of the major elements of literature and how to identify them in order to appreciate more of what you're reading. A great book for my AP students!
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I feel like I need to defend this book. Many readers are submitting poor reviews of How to Read Lit simply because it doesn’t sound literary. They don’t envision a graying, sixtyish lit professor in a high-backed, winged armchair beside the fire saying these things while he smokes his pipe. And guess what. That’s exactly the point. For some nonsensical reason, there is a portion of the literature world that dons an offensively Holier Than Thou attitude, and it is precisely because of those people that this book is so good.I’m an English major at Maryland, and too many times I’ve seen professors demeaning students who don’t fully grasp a concept (a symbol, a theme, an allusion – whatever it may be that day). In his book, Foster talks about how it’s hard to be really, totally wrong about a book, but that the more you read and experience literature the more you have to base your opinions on and the deeper your connections with literature become. These are words of a teacher. The complimentary disdain shown by the PhD’s in the classroom could not be more unproductive, and, frankly, it is exactly what scares people into picking up books and joining the lit world – the fear that they don’t measure up to these goofy, unreasonable expectations. It’s all about personal experience. In this book, Foster offers his own personal thoughts and ideas (as well as those of a few others occasionally) on some of the more common concepts and symbols in literature. He fully discloses that these are personal ideas formed through his own reading, but goes on to explain that the majority of them are popularly held ideas and why. There are lots of literary examples and citations to help readers grasp what Foster discusses, and a wonderful suggested (if you are feeling inclined at the book’s close, and, well, I certainly was) reading list. Furthermore (and this is, apparently, a big part of this book’s criticism), he explains everything in a humorous, easily accessible way. How dare he.In his closing remarks, Foster states quite plainly that there is no way to put every symbol/pattern/etc into one volume, because there are so many and for the simple fact that symbols are so subjective that anything can be one. This is another issue many of this book’s antagonists harbor. I also thoroughly enjoy that Foster – as opposed to that asshole of a college professor we’ve all had at least once – encourages his readers to disagree with him and defend their reasons. Afterall, that’s what literature is about – the forming and sharing of concepts and ideals to strengthen and broaden information. If you’re looking for yet another stuffy professor exercising his higher intelligence on you, this is not the book for you.4 stars.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I recommend this book to my incoming 10th grade Honors American Lit classes because it's one of the few books that covers archetypes, motifs, literary theory, and other important literary elements that's actually readable. Throughout the course of the year, we will put all of his chapters to use using varied works, and they will see how viable the information he provides actually is. I love too that Foster repeats that much of literary analysis has to do with "feeling" that there's something important about a certain aspect of a novel, because reading should be an emotional journey as well as a cerebral one.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5It's a rare day that I'm willing to give a full five out of five stars to a book. It's rarer still that I'll give the five stars, and then put it back on my bed-stand for continual reference in my future reading.
It's just that kind of a book, and every bibliophile should read it.
In "How to Read Literature like a Professor," Thomas Foster has given us a delightful little romp through literature, producing a guide to the themes, symbolism, ironies, allusions, and plots that reoccur through-out almost all of the fiction we read. Whether it's Charles Dickens or Charles Schulz or even Tom Clancy, Foster's collection of essays are each a fun and enjoyable guide to what you've been reading, and what you will read, when you pick up a work of fiction.
For example: in chapter 10, "It's more than just rain or snow," we read that "weather is never just weather. It's never just rain." Rather, Foster says, instead of providing just a setting, a backdrop to the story, weather in fiction is rooted in our fears and hopes. In addition to appearing as a feature character in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic biblical tale of the great flood, it makes notable and significant sightings in mythologies from all over the world, often, if not always, appearing and appealing to our fear of drowning. "Rain," Foster says, "prompts ancestral memories of the most profound sort. So water in great volume speaks to us at a very basic level of being.
So rain--and floods--signifies drowning? Kind of, but it doesn't stop there. Citing D.H. Lawrence's "The Virgin and the Gypsy" (1930), which I've not read yet, Foster sees it as a "big eraser that destroys but also allows a brand-new start."
Kind of like baptism? Yeah. If you're part of that Christian tradition, this is what baptism is: death of the old, imperfect, and flawed man, and rebirth of a new man. And such is the role that this element--rain and floods--plays in literature. Well, most of the time. Fog can represent a lack of clarity, sunshine hope and clarity. In short, weather is rarely just setting.
That's rain and weather. Each chapter is a written with a quick and light wit that allows a reader, whatever his level of experience with literature, to follow along, see the theme, enjoy the examples, and find a taste for the point. Other chapter titles include the following:
•"When in Doubt, It's from Shakespeare..."
•"…Or the Bible"
•"It's All Political"
•"Marked for Greatness"
•"Nice to Eat with You: Acts of Communion" and, of course,
•"Nice to Eat You: Acts of Vampire." (Stephanie Meyer ought to pick that one up to understand why people who love literature hate Twilight).
Weighing in at just under three hundred pages, "How to Read Literature Like a Professor" doesn't require deep commitment, deep concentration, or deep literature reading. My brain-candy of choice usually falls in the science-fiction or fantasy categories, and yet, I've started to find the themes and allusions and ironies that I saw in classics like "Howards End" and "Bleak House" appearing there, too. Whatever you read, it applies the symbolism that Foster walks through. As a result, my experience, whatever I'm reading, has been more enjoyable since I started it. It's that moment of sudden realization when the whole theme of Steven Erikson "Book of the Fallen" subplot (and there are a lot of them) is an allusion, or imitation, to Spartacus (I think). Or that the journey (all journeys are quests) across the water is a journey of transformation, where the fallen man chooses to start a new life, emerging from the water, as it were, reborn.
It's fun. A lot of fun. Even just reading the book itself is fun. To boot, at the end Foster provides a list of all the books he refers to throughout his essays to allow you, the reader, to pick them up and read further. And what could be more fun about reading than delving into great fiction?
Pick it up, start reading, and enhance your general reading experience. If you're going to read fiction, and you should, you might as well get the most out of it. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The author is able to present broad concepts in an engaging way that will relate to a modern audience that is looking to add a little depth to that which they read. Certainly, there are more things that could have been covered, but this is an excellent starting point for most people.Throughout the book, the author includes a number of examples for the areas he covers. He not only uses classic from mythology and celebrated authors like Joyce, Hawthorne, and Lawrence, but is also able to reference more contemporary works and some authors you may not expect. The fact that he gives modern literature so much respect is refreshing. Also included in the appendix is a long list of suggestions, though he does make it a point to say that the list is neither comprehensive nor exclusive. Take what he presents and apply it to whatever you want to read and it can enhance your personal experience with the work, even if the author didn't intend that deep a meaning.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This was a very entertaining book. My daughter had to read it in her Junior year of high school, and it has become one of my favorites. It opens up the worlld of literature for the common man.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Wonderful book. I refer to it frequently, especially when reading a book for discussion. It has enriched all my reading, however. Highly recommended.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Revealing, interesting, eminently readable. I tend to be only dimly aware of themes, parallels, mythic re-creations. This wonderful book leads the reader (me) to trust my own instincts when interpretations come to mind. The author has some good rules to keep in mind ("The real reason for a quest is always self-knowledge." or "It's never just rain."), but he spends a good deal of time on the exceptions, and the alternate paths of reasoning. And, of course, irony trumps everything.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In a lifetime of avid reading, I honestly never put much thought into what anything meant beyond the basic story itself. Not even the required English courses in high school and college provided me with the tools to search for symbolism or allegories or the like. I'm sure that teachers dutifully brought up the question of "so, what does this story mean?". Whether it was their fault, or mine -- my curiosity was never sparked enough to go beyond the surface layer of a story (be it a short story, a play, poetry, literature or a novel). How to Read Literature Like a Professor (note: I read the first edition, not the new revised edition) was an eye-opener for me. While it's not the be-all/end-all resource for literary concepts, it has been a very good introduction to the topic. I will probably be reading literature with a new eye from now on. It doesn't mean, though, that henceforth all books I read will be discussed in this way. As Professor Foster does point out by quoting Freud's statement "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar", yes sometimes a story is just there for the sake of story-telling. That's fine. However, Foster convinces me that one's reading can be enriched otherwise when looking beyond the basics; it's like unlocking a treasure box. Not only does Foster touch upon varied devices such as symbolic references to Greek mythology, he also gives a good reminder: "don't read with your own eyes" (p. 228). What does the latter mean? It means that we need to try to read the work as it was intended by the author. He gives the example of "Sonny's Blues" by James Baldwin -- we need to try to read it as it was meant to be read back in 1957, and especially not from the perspective of whether addiction is good or bad, because it was meant to be about a relationship between two brothers. I plan to pick up his other book, How to Read Novels like a Professor (and I'm sure he'll discuss the difference between "novels" and "literature").
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5his wonderfully witty, relaxed, accessible explanation of what all of our lit professors were talking about contains all of the play and enthusiasm that let me to a degree in English lo these many years ago, and serves as a gentle reminder of what it was I knew and focussed on back then. Foster is just delightful, or he makes me full of delight, or both. I heartily recommend this to everyone, even some of our most accomplished reviewers and readers. Delicious. My only complaint was that it wasn't longer.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5My wife's been after me to read this one and I finally got round to it. I was put off by the title thinking it would be a boorish, condescending exercise in Harold Bloom-like pretentiousness. It's quite the opposite. Foster does a very good job of deflating the myth that only a Ph.D. can really appreciate and understand literature. His approach is accessible, practical, and frequently entertaining. He draws some great comparisons between the classics and familiar films and TV series. He also doesn't hold his nose at contemporary popular writers. I can see why this book frequently appears on lists of recommended reading for high school students.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar” until you read Thomas C. Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor. Many writers in the history of writing smoked cigars. One of them a famous neurologist as Foster points out. But that probably has no consequence and points to the fact that sometime a cigar is just cigar unless they are all connected in some way. Then a cigar is never just a cigar it’s the cigar or so it seems. It is a phallic symbol of sexual consequence in some way or other. Or maybe the smoke from the cigar forms a haze that clouds the thinking of the protagonist in the story who is unable to see beyond the end of his nose but whenever he smokes a cigar some mysterious happening occurs that affects the story in various revealing ways. Memory. Symbol. Pattern.....and Irony.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5As a fairly new teacher of high school English I thought this title might suggest some ideas for my students. In fact, it's probably a bit advanced for my sophomores, but left me with a few ideas nonetheless. Foster focuses on the idea of symbolism in literature and then goes on to suggest themes and specific examples. While this would normally be a fairly dry topic, he writes with wit and sarcasm that makes it all a bit more fun. The last chapter gives the reader an opportunity to discern themes and examples of symbolism in an Elizabeth Mansfield story. Included is an annotated list of great literature.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I really enjoyed reading this book. As several reviewers before me have said, Foster's tone is very readable and "un-snobbish." Each chapter is devoted to one specific theme/symbol/etc. with titles like "It's Greek to Me," "It's More Than Just Rain or Snow," and "It's Never Just Heart Disease." He covers quite a bit of material in this relatively thin book, but obviously, there are still some stones left unturned. He gives a list at the end of the book for more titles on literary criticism as well as literature and movies to check out. Another thing this book offered was a "test case" at the end. Foster includes Katherine Mansfield's short story "The Garden Party" at the end and challenges you to put your new knowledge to use.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is a great guide for all of us who love to read but whose education was at the other end of the campus. His style is informal, chatty and humorous -- now that he has the cautiously curious in his room, he doesn't want to scare us off with concepts that seem dry or irrelevant. He wants to show us how to apply these ideas so that our deeper understanding of the book will take our enjoyment of it to a new plane. "Reading literature is a highly intellectual activity, but it also involves affect and instinct to a large degree. Much of what we think about literature, we feel first. Having instincts, though, doesn’t automatically mean they work at their highest level. Dogs are instinctual swimmers, but not every pup hits the water understanding what to do with that instinct. Reading is like that, too. The more you exercise the symbolic imagination, the better and quicker it works."
He illustrates his ideas with numerous works of different types, and doesn't restrict them to the classics. Popular modern books (eg Inspector Banks) are as easily discussed as the traditional classics and are mixed in with occasional movies too.
"... when writers send characters south, it’s so they can run amok....Conrad’s visionaries, Lawrence’s searchers, Hemingway’s hunters, Kerouac’s hipsters, Paul Bowles’s down-and-outers and seekers, Forster’s tourists, Durrell’s libertines—all head south, in more senses than one".
For instance, vampires and other monsters are explained in terms of "...exploitation in its many forms. Using other people to get what we want. Denying someone else’s right to live in the face of our overwhelming demands. Placing our desires, particularly our uglier ones, above the needs of another." The vampire/monster thinks, ' In order to remain undead, I must steal the life force of someone whose fate matters less to me than my own.' Foster says, "I’ve always supposed that Wall Street traders utter essentially the same sentence. My guess is that as long as people act toward their fellows in exploitative and selfish ways, the vampire will be with us."
You can't go wrong with someone who can so easily link vampires with Wall Street. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This is a nice primer on literary analysis. Individual chapters could be very useful in high school literature classes, especially when reading classics that most students don't relate to--such "The Old Man and the Sea".
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Recommend for anyone taking any AP English courses or enjoy analyzing literature and the author's ambiguous meanings. Not too bad considering the statute of its topic, since the author often gives comic examples that keep your attention.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I found this to be edifying, entertaining, and a great introduction to literary analysis. As a long time reader I found this helpful in understanding symbols in literature.Being the product of an an era and an educational background that never really examined literature in depth I am eagerly anticipating delving into some of the recommended reading materialsto experience reading on a deeper level.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Foster, an English professor at the University of Michigan, writes about literature with an endearing, self-deprecating style, which allows the reader to be entertained while being, if not educated, than at least encouraged in her reading.The main thrust of Foster's book is that the reader should watch for patterns and symbols while reading and that things such as weather, food, sex and violence rarely mean only one thing. In other words, writers are always trying to say more than one thing at a time. Subtext and allegory. Symbol and irony.While he may not bring anything terribly new to the discussion of literature, this is a book I would recommend to any young person who wants to deepen their reading or, for that matter, any reader who wants to graduate from pop fiction to something with a little more meat on its bones.The reader list Foster provides at the end of the book is a fine one.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Whether you're a relatively new reader of literature or you have decades of reading experience under your belt, you're sure to learn something from this book to enrich your future reading experience. Although I'm convinced that I will never achieve Foster's depth of analysis, Foster has also convinced me that reading is a skill that I can improve through practice. Foster reassures his readers/students that ”if the story is good and the characters work but you don't catch allusions and references and parallels, then you've done nothing worse than read a good story with memorable characters. If you begin to pick up on some of these other elements, these parallels and analogies, however, you'll find your understanding of the novel deepens and becomes more meaningful, more complex.” So, it's not like I've been reading the wrong way all these years, but I can work at becoming a better reader and have a better appreciation of what I read. I'll be referring to this book often from here on out. Highly recommended.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I enjoyed this guide to reading literature. The author is a college professor and this book is a short course in how to study and appreciate literature. It gives the reader a broad overview of literature; the origins, themes and motifs, narrative devices. He uses poems, short story, plays, movies, and songs. So I guess it is fitting to give the Nobel for literature to a song writer. Finally you get to practice what you've learned on the short story The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield. I've read that particular short story for a total of 3 times now since reading this book. The book also contains a list of novels, poems, and plays that he recommends to the reader. This book will add to your tbr.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5My chief complaint, although more my fault than the “non textbook, with How to Read Literature Like a Professor is that most of the novel, plays, and poems Foster discusses I have not read. In fact, I only recognized three of the works he mentioned; Animal Farm, Hamlet, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Therefore, I found it hard to understand exactly what Foster was trying to say through his examples and his connections from one example to another.And I feel like, since this was required reading for my advanced/gifted and talented English IV class, this book would have served as a better introduction to literature and been more helpful, as it has many tips and tricks for recognizing common symbolism and other literary techniques, the connotations of which can be easily missed, if this “non textbook” would have been required for Language Arts in eighth grade or, at least, Freshman English. Since “reading between the lines” has always come somewhat naturally to me, and for my “gifted and talented” classmates, How to Read Literature Like a Professor was some what lost on me. And it is my belief that even people seeking help wouldn’t appreciate the italicized text that supposedly voices the reader’s confused and helpless thoughtThat said, How to Read Literature Like a Professor served as a nice refresher on critical reading. As an added bonus, Foster’s writing style makes him easy to understand, not patronizing or intimidating. In fact, some of what he writes received a chuckle from me here and there. “When they’re writing about other things, they really mean sex, and when they write about sex, they really mean something else. If they write about sex and mean strictly sex, we have a word for that. Pornography.” {pg. 144}
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This book was much more fun to read than it sounds from the title. It's easy to read and easy to understand, and most importantly, Foster makes analyzing literature seem natural and fun. He also stresses that literary works have multiple interpretations and you shouldn't be freaked out if you don't get the "right" one. He closes the book with this quote, which I really liked: We speak, as I've said before, of literary works, but in fact literature is chiefly play. If you read novels and plays and stories and poems and you're not having fun, somebody is doing something wrong. If a novel seems like an ordeal, quit; you're not getting paid to read it, are you? And you surely won't get fired if you don't read it. So enjoy.Foster talks about different types of stories (quests, vampires, etc.) and oft-referenced influences (the Bible, Shakespeare, folk tales), symbolism and irony, sex, setting, and lots more. And he makes it fun. He also includes a list of suggested works that actually looks like fun to read. Well, except for Ulysses.I think I'll hang on to this one and use it to help my kids once they get to a more analytical stage in their reading.Oh, and my favorite quote from the book: But we haven't read everything. Neither have I. Nor has anyone, not even Harold Bloom.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The book could have easily been part of the series of "Idiot's Guide to...". It is an introductory course in literary analysis and examines major myths, themes, symbols, motifs and intertextuality in literature. It's good and entertaining, as promised, but makes it sound like everything ever written neatly follows a pattern, or patterns and we should be analyzing everything accordingly. Consequently, he oversimplifies the issues a tad too much.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Now that I've read this book, you may as well not bother trying to read my book reviews; yes, that's right, I will now be examining themes and motifs and character motivation and other things like that and I'll probably be writing such amazing stuff that no one else will be able to understand me. Like a professor, right? No, my days of "Uh, I liked it" or "Well, I don't know" are over; I'll be finding things like water imagery and mother archetypes and references to obscure lines from Ulysses. So if you want to try to understand even a glimmer of what I'm writing about, you may need to read this book, too. ;->
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Liked some points - The real reason for a quest is always self-knowledge.That's pretty much what a vampire does, after all. He wakes up in the morning - actually the evening, now that I think about it - and says something like, "In order to remain undead, I must steal the life force of someone whose fate matters less to me than my own."Why writer turn to ShakespeareIt makes them sound smarter?Smarter than what?Than quoting Rocky and Bullwinkle, for instance.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A book about finding common themes in literature may sound extremely boring, but this book is anything but that.The author approaches the topic in an interesting, and often hilarious way that made me look forward to each new chapter.From meals to water to sex, all sorts of themes are covered with examples, explanations, and humor.If you want to have a deeper understanding of everything from required reading to your own "just for fun" books, this is a must-read - highly recommended!
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Funny, insightful, concise, easy to read, this book is quite complete - and modest. I thought I was a very good reader until I started this book and realized how far my university days are! This was a great refresher - the concrete examples, the short chapters and variety in themes also made it an agreeable read. I've already noticed how it's made me change my habits and although I don't pretend to be a professor, I feel I'm certainly getting more out of my readings.Critics beware: yes, the choices are anglo-Western centric - but the precepts apply to all sorts of literature.
Book preview
How to Read Literature Like a Professor Revised - Thomas C. Foster
How to Read Literature Like a Professor
A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines
THOMAS C. FOSTER
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Dedication
For my sons, Robert and Nathan
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Preface
Introduction: How’d He Do That?
1. Every Trip Is a Quest (Except When It’s Not)
2. Nice to Eat with You: Acts of Communion
3. Nice to Eat You: Acts of Vampires
4. Now, Where Have I Seen Her Before?
5. When in Doubt, It’s from Shakespeare . . .
6. . . . Or the Bible
7. Hanseldee and Greteldum
8. It’s Greek to Me
9. It’s More Than Just Rain or Snow
10. Never Stand Next to the Hero
Interlude: Does He Mean That?
11. . . . More Than It’s Gonna Hurt You: Concerning Violence
12. Is That a Symbol?
13. It’s All Political
14. Yes, She’s a Christ Figure, Too
15. Flights of Fancy
16. It’s All About Sex . . .
17. . . . Except Sex
18. If She Comes Up, It’s Baptism
19. Geography Matters . . .
20. . . . So Does Season
Interlude: One Story
21. Marked for Greatness
22. He’s Blind for a Reason, You Know
23. It’s Never Just Heart Disease . . . And Rarely Just Illness
24. Don’t Read with Your Eyes
25. It’s My Symbol and I’ll Cry If I Want To
26. Is He Serious? And Other Ironies
27. A Test Case
Postlude: Who’s in Charge Here?
Envoi
Acknowledgments
Appendix: Reading List
Index
About the Author
Praise
Also by Thomas C. Foster
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Copyright
About the Publisher
Preface
THE AMAZING THING ABOUT BOOKS is how they have lives of their own. Writers think they know their business when they sit down to compose a new work, and I suppose they do, right up to the moment when the last piece of punctuation gets planted on the final sentence. More often than not, that punctuation is a period. It should be a question mark, though, because what occurs from then on is anybody’s guess.
The classic example is the writer whose best book goes thud upon release. Think Herman Melville or F. Scott Fitzgerald. Melville must have thought, after finding large readerships for earlier novels, that the crazed search for the white whale would be a smash. It wasn’t. Nor was Fitzgerald’s tale of a romantic dreamer trying to rewrite his past. The Great Gatsby is so much subtler, so much more insightful about human nature and its historical moment, than his earlier books that it is almost inconceivable that his huge audience turned away. On the other hand, maybe that is why it turned away. Successfully predicting the coming calamity looks a lot like an excess of gloominess—until the disaster arrives. Humankind, observed Fitzgerald’s contemporary T. S. Eliot, cannot bear too much reality. In any case, Fitzgerald lived only long enough to see his books largely out of print, his royalties nonexistent. It would take another generation for the world to discover how great Gatsby truly is, three or four times that for Moby-Dick to be recognized as a masterpiece.
There are also tales, of course, of unexpected bestsellers that go on and on, as well as flashes in the pan that flare up but then die out without a trace. But it’s the Moby-Gatsby kind of story that compels our attention. If you want to know what the world thinks about a writer and her work, check back with us in, oh, two hundred years or so.
Not all stories of publication switchbacks are so stark. We all hope to find an audience—any audience—and we believe we have some idea who that will be. Sometimes we’re right, sometimes we’re all wet. What follows is a confession of sorts.
The customary acknowledgments and thanks are typically placed at the back of the book. I wish, however, to recognize one special debt of gratitude to a group whose assistance has been monumental. Indeed, without them, this revision would not have been possible. A dozen or so years ago when I was drafting the original, I was pretty clear on the audience for my book. She was a thirty-seven-year-old returning student, probably divorced, probably a nurse forced back to coursework by changes in the licensure rules of the profession. Faced with the prospect of obtaining a bachelor’s degree, she chose to follow her heart this time around and pursue a degree in English. She had always been a serious reader, but she had felt that she was missing something in her experience of literature, some deep secret her teachers had known but not imparted to her.
You think I’m kidding, right? I’m not. Teaching at a branch campus of a famous university, I meet her, or her male equivalent, the guy (usually, although there are women as well) laid off from the assembly line at General Motors, again and again. And again. One of the great things about teaching at the University of Michigan–Flint, as opposed to the University of Michigan, is ceaseless contact with adult learners, many of whom hunger for more learning. I also have plenty of the typical-college-student type, but the nontraditional students have taught me a few things. First, never assume anything about background experience. I’ve had students who have read all of Joyce or Faulkner or Hemingway, and one who had read more Czech novels than I could ever hope to get through, as well as students who had read pretty much only Stephen King or Danielle Steel. There have been Hitchcock fanatics and devotees of Bergman and Fellini, and others who thought Dallas was high art. And you can never tell which will be which.
Second, explain yourself. They expect, and are sometimes more vocal about it than their younger classmates, to see how the trick is done. Whether they think I am the high priest or the high charlatan, they want to know how the magic works, how I arrive at my sometimes idiosyncratic readings.
And third, teach precepts, then stand aside. Once I show these older students how I work with texts, I get out of the way. This is not because of the wonders of my approach or my teaching; chiefly, what happens is that I validate something about their own way of reading that gives them permission to run free, and run they do. Younger students do, too, but they are often more inhibited, having spent their whole lives inside classrooms. There’s nothing like being out on your own to make you intellectually self-reliant.
Are these older students all geniuses? No, although a few might be. Nor are they all closet intellectuals, although more than a few are—you know, the sort who get nicknamed Professor
because they’re seen reading books on their lunch break. But however smart they may be, they push me and school me even as I do the same to them. So I figured there must be others out there like them. And it was for that group that I wrote this book.
Boy, was I wrong. I was right, too. I have heard from quite a lot of mature readers, some of whom fit the above descriptions, others who had been English majors in college but who had been left with the feeling that something was missing, that some key element of literary study had passed them by. I would receive the occasional e-mail from such readers. Then, about two years in, the nature of those missives changed. I started hearing from English teachers. Not often, but every once in a while. And about six months after that, I started hearing from high school students. The teachers were uniformly glowing in their praise, the students mostly so. With just enough hate mail to make it clear that this wasn’t a put-up job. One student said, in one of the more printable messages, I don’t know what the big deal is. Everything in your book I learned in ninth grade.
I told her I would like to shake her ninth-grade teacher’s hand. And no refunds. It was also at about this time that I heard indirectly that the book was being discussed on a site for Advanced Placement English teachers.
In the years since, I have been blessed to have contact with teachers and students from around the country. There have been all sorts of inquiries, from "What did you mean by X? to
Can I apply this notion to that book that you didn’t discuss? to
Can you look over my thesis sentence (or my whole paper)?" The first two are great, the latter less so, since it puts me in an awkward ethical position. Even so, it is flattering that students trust a complete stranger enough to ask such questions.
I have also had plenty of direct interaction. I go into several classrooms a year to talk with classes about the book and how they’re using it. These visits are a lot of fun and almost always involve a great question or two. Needless to say, the in-person visits are largely limited to places I can drive in a few hours, although I did once go as far afield as Fort Thomas, Kentucky. I have also, thanks to the wonders of the digital age, been able to engage with students electronically. Diane Burrowes, the queen of academic marketing at HarperCollins, stays up nights thinking of new and strange ways to get me, or at least a digital version thereof, into classrooms from New Jersey and Virginia to Flagstaff, Arizona. And of course the development of platforms like Skype has made such visits almost commonplace.
What has struck me most in the ensuing years is the endless inventiveness of secondary English teachers in general and AP teachers in particular. They have figured out ways to use this book that would never have occurred to me if I taught for a thousand years. In one class, each student is assigned as the keeper of a chapter; if Sam is in charge of rain and snow, he makes a poster explaining the significant elements of the chapter, and whenever the reading involves precipitation, Sam is prepared to discuss its implications. I suspect Sam got a raw deal and has to work harder than almost anyone else, but maybe he likes being busy. In another class, students work in groups to make short movies, and every movie must incorporate at least one concept from the book. At the end of the year, they have a mock-Oscar ceremony, complete with tuxedos and statuettes (used sports trophies, I’m told). Now that’s just brilliant. What I like best about many of the schemes is the degree of student autonomy built into them. I suspect that one of the appealing elements of the book is that it lacks the apparatus of a textbook, which allows teachers to make of it what they will—and they make many different things of it. In turn, many of them pass that open-endedness along to their students, permitting them to be creative with the text and their own insights.
Is that the key to the book’s popularity among teachers? I don’t know. I was amazed when I first heard that it was being adopted for courses, my thoughts revolving around the utter absence of academic trappings (things like notes, glosses, and questions at the end of chapters, which, by the way, I’ve always hated) and the scattershot organization. I grouped the discussions in a way that felt right to me, but that’s not the same as making sense for classroom use. Indeed, I am not sure what would make sense in a classroom setting, since I have never, and would never, use the book in a course. How’s that for a confession? It is not an excess of modesty, a thing of which I have never been accused, that prevents my using it. The reason is more practical. This book contains most of my literary insights and all my jokes. If I assigned it, I would have nothing left to do. The goal of education, as I see it, is to bring students to the point where they no longer need you—in essence, to put yourself out of a job . . . but that retirement would be a little more sudden than I’d prefer.
So when I heard that teachers were assigning the book as summer reading, I was more than a little astonished. That it has found a home in high schools is testament to the creativity and intelligence of secondary teachers of English. They’re working at a time when, we’re told, no one reads anymore, yet they somehow manage to inspire a love of reading among their students. They work incredibly hard, grading work by as many as 150 students at a time, a load that just thinking about would make most university professors woozy. They get far too little respect and not nearly enough pay for doing a remarkable job. One of my more waggish colleagues, noting my frequent visits to secondary classes, says that I could have my pick of any high school teaching job in America. He’s wrong, of course. I couldn’t keep up with the people already there.
To the English teachers who have made How to Read Literature Like a Professor a success, I can offer only my profound gratitude. That this book is even in print, much less in the process of being revised, is all your fault. I can’t thank each of you individually, but I would like to thank some representative members of the tribe: Joyce Haner (now retired) of Okemos High School (Michigan), for many late-night discussions at, of all places, softball team parties, as well as for being my first welcomer among Michigan teachers; Amy Anderson and Bill Spruytte of Lapeer East High School (Michigan); Stacey Turczyn of Powers Catholic High School in Flint; and Gini Wozny of Academy of the Redwoods in Eureka, California, all of whom sent their—and their students’—recommendations and suggestions for the new edition. Literally dozens of others have offered suggestions in person or via e-mail over the years, and to each of you, many, many thanks. What you do is far more important than any book.
The changes to this edition are modest but, I hope, significant. Most significant, to my troubled mind, is that I was able to remove or correct two or three howling blunders. No, I won’t tell you what they were. It’s bad enough I’ve had to live with them, so I certainly won’t broadcast my folly. And there are quite a few fit-and-finish issues I was able to resolve, little matters of grammar and orthography—needless repetitions of words or phrases, an unhappy word choice here or there, the usual niggling matters that make it so hard to read one’s own work and that make one think, "Surely I could have done better than that." But there are also matters of substance. The chapter on sonnet shape was generally deemed not to fit the rest of the volume. It’s about form and structure, really, when the rest of the book is about figurative meaning and the way meaning deflects from one object or action or event at the surface level to something else on another. If, like me, you always liked that chapter, fear not. I’m planning a discussion of poetry, quite possibly in e-book form, so that chapter may reappear in a couple of years. The chapters on illness, heart and otherwise, have been shortened and run together; it felt as if the text was straining for length there.
In their place, I added a chapter on characterization and on why being buddies with protagonists is so bad for the health of second fiddles. There’s also a new discussion on public versus private symbols. One of the central precepts of the book is that there is a universal grammar of figurative imagery, that in fact images and symbols gain much of their power from repetition and reinterpretation. Naturally, however, writers are always inventing new metaphors and symbols that sometimes recur throughout their work, or that show up once and are never heard from again. In either case, we need a strategy for dealing with these anomalies, so I try to oblige.
I have also included, as a path toward increased analytical confidence, a meditation on taking charge of one’s own reading experience, of understanding the reader’s importance in the creation of literary meaning. It’s surprising to me how, even as they actively create readings of their own, students and other readers can still maintain an essentially passive view of experiencing texts. It’s high time they gave themselves more credit.
Of course, literature is a moving target, and thousands upon thousands of books have been published in the decade or so since the book appeared. While there is no need to overhaul the references and examples from edition to edition, I have used a few illustrations from more recent publications. There have been some terrific developments in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction in the last few years, even for those of us who are not enthralled by teenage vampires or Jane Austen’s novels beset by monsters and parasitic adaptations. Mr. Darcy’s Second Cousin’s Wife Gets a Hangnail. That sort of thing. Against those trends, however, we can set the appearance of talented newcomers as well as work by established masters in the various genres, writers as diverse and interesting as Zadie Smith, Monica Ali, Jess Walter, Colum McCann, Colm Tóibín, Margaret Atwood, Thomas Pynchon, Emma Donoghue, Lloyd Jones, Adam Foulds, Orhan Pamuk, Téa Obreht, and Audrey Niffenegger. And that’s just the fiction writers. There have been startling new finds and painful losses. We sometimes hear of the death of literature or of this or that genre (the novel is a favorite whipping boy), but literature doesn’t die, just as it doesn’t progress
or decay.
It expands, it increases. When we feel that it has become stagnant or stale, that usually just means we ourselves are not paying sufficient attention. Whether it’s the untold story of a famous writer’s wife or the racial newcomers to a changing Britain or America or a boy in a lifeboat with a tiger or a tiger in a Balkan village or a man on a wire between the Twin Towers, new tales, as well as old tales with new wrinkles, continue to be told. Makes you want to keep getting up in the morning just to see what happens next.
While we’re on the subject of thanksgiving, I would like to express my gratitude to a critically important population. Every time I meet with students, I am inspired. In the course of my work, naturally I deal with college students, both undergraduate and graduate, on a frequent basis, and those interactions have been rich, full, frustrating, uplifting, disappointing, and sometimes downright miraculous. English majors form a large portion of that group, but thanks to the wonders of general education requirements, I have had a great deal of contact with majors in other fields (biologists are a special favorite), and they inevitably bring different skill sets, different attitudes, and different questions to the table. They make me pay attention.
I have also, for the last ten years or so, had frequent contact with high school students, an experience I wish everyone could have—not merely high-school-age young people, but teenagers in their capacity as students. A great deal has been written and said about this group, most of it negative—they don’t read, can’t write, don’t care about the world around them, don’t know anything about history or science or politics or, well, you name it. In other words, the same things that have been said about teenagers since I was one. And for a long time before that. I’m pretty sure that one day we will unearth a clay tablet or a papyrus scroll with those exact sentiments expressed. I’m sure some of it is true, that some of it has always been true. But here’s what I know, from my dealings in person and via e-mail, about high school students. They are thoughtful, interested and interesting, curious, rebellious, forward-looking, ambitious, and hardworking. When faced with the choice, many opt for the heavier workload and higher demands of AP classes, even though they could slide through something easier. They are readers. Many read—and some read a huge amount—beyond the syllabus. They write. More than a few aspire to write professionally. When told that it is nearly impossible to make a living as a writer and likely to get even harder, they still aspire to be writers. I know this from all the questions I field and the conversations we have together. And as long as there are young people who are interested in language, in story, in poetry, in writing, there will be literature. It may move into digital realms, it may return to handmade manuscripts, it may take form in graphic novels or on screens, but it will continue to be created. And read.
A couple of years ago, I gave a talk and reading in Grand Rapids. Students from a local district came to the event to get me to sign books. Not the book that had just been published, but the one they had been assigned the previous year in tenth grade. This book. Now, lest you misunderstand, this event was after the school year, so there was no extra credit on offer. They were there because they loved their English class, which really means they loved the teacher who made the class great, and because the book was written by someone who was (a) in Michigan, (b) coming to their town, and (c) not dead. That last part made me a rarity in their school reading. The books were used. Hard used, lots of underlinings and broken spines and dog-eared covers. A couple seemed to have met a bulldozer. Several of the kids said a variation of the following statement, which I get with some frequency, My heart sank when I saw that a book on reading was assigned, but it turned out to be pretty cool/not so bad/all right.
And they thanked me. They thanked me. I nearly wept.
Faced with all that, how could I be anything but grateful?
Introduction
How’d He Do That?
MR. LINDER? THAT MILQUETOAST?
Right. Mr. Lindner the milquetoast. So what did you think the devil would look like? If he were red with a tail, horns, and cloven hooves, any fool could say no.
The class and I are discussing Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959), one of the great plays of the American theater. The incredulous questions have come, as they often do, in response to my innocent suggestion that Mr. Lindner is the devil. The Youngers, an African American family in Chicago, have made a down payment on a house in an all-white neighborhood. Mr. Lindner, a meekly apologetic little man, has been dispatched from the neighborhood association, check in hand, to buy out the family’s claim on the house. At first, Walter Lee Younger, the protagonist, confidently turns down the offer, believing that the family’s money (in the form of a life insurance payment after his father’s recent death) is secure. Shortly afterward, however, he discovers that two-thirds of that money has been stolen. All of a sudden the previously insulting offer comes to look like his financial salvation.
Bargains with the devil go back a long way in Western culture. In all the versions of the Faust legend, which is the dominant form of this type of story, the hero is offered something he desperately wants—power or knowledge or a fastball that will beat the Yankees—and all he has to give up is his soul. This pattern holds from the Elizabethan Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus through the nineteenth-century Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust to the twentieth century’s Stephen Vincent Benét’s The Devil and Daniel Webster
and Damn Yankees. In Hansberry’s version, when Mr. Lindner makes his offer, he doesn’t demand Walter Lee’s soul; in fact, he doesn’t even know that he’s demanding it. He is, though. Walter Lee can be rescued from the monetary crisis he has brought upon the family; all he has to do is admit that he’s not the equal of the white residents who don’t want him moving in, that his pride and self-respect, his identity, can be bought. If that’s not selling your soul, then what is it?
The chief difference between Hansberry’s version of the Faustian bargain and others is that Walter Lee ultimately resists the satanic temptation. Previous versions have been either tragic or comic depending on whether the devil successfully collects the soul at the end of the work. Here, the protagonist psychologically makes the deal but then looks at himself and at the true cost and recovers in time to reject the devil’s—Mr. Lindner’s—offer. The resulting play, for all its tears and anguish, is structurally comic—the tragic downfall threatened but avoided—and Walter Lee grows to heroic stature in wrestling with his own demons as well as the external one, Lindner, and coming through without falling.
A moment occurs in this exchange between professor and student when each of us adopts a look. My look says, What, you don’t get it?
Theirs says, We don’t get it. And we think you’re making it up.
We’re having a communication problem. Basically, we’ve all read the same story, but we haven’t used the same analytical apparatus. If you’ve ever spent time in a literature classroom as a student or a professor, you know this moment. It may seem at times as if the professor is either inventing interpretations out of thin air or else performing parlor tricks, a sort of analytical sleight of hand.
Actually, neither of these is the case; rather, the professor, as the slightly more experienced reader, has acquired over the years the use of a certain language of reading,
something to which the students are only beginning to be introduced. What I’m talking about is a grammar of literature, a set of conventions and patterns, codes and rules, that we learn to employ in dealing with a piece of writing. Every language has a grammar, a set of rules that govern usage and meaning, and literary language is no different. It’s all more or less arbitrary, of course, just like language itself. Take the word arbitrary
as an example: it doesn’t mean anything inherently; rather, at some point in our past we agreed that it would mean what it does, and it does so only in English (those sounds would be so much gibberish in Japanese or Finnish). So too with art: we decided to agree that perspective—the set of tricks artists use to provide the illusion of depth—was a good thing and vital to painting. This occurred during the Renaissance in Europe, but when Western and Oriental art encountered each other in the 1700s, Japanese artists and their audiences were serenely untroubled by the lack of perspective in their painting. No one felt it particularly essential to the experience of pictorial art.
Literature has its grammar, too. You knew that, of course. Even if you didn’t know that, you knew from the structure of the preceding paragraph that it was coming. How? The grammar of the essay. You can read, and part of reading is knowing the conventions, recognizing them, and anticipating the results. When someone introduces a topic (the grammar of literature), then digresses to show other topics (language, art, music, dog training—it doesn’t matter what examples; as soon as you see a couple of them, you recognize the pattern), you know he’s coming back with an application of those examples to the main topic (voilà!). And he did. So now we’re all happy, because the convention has been used, observed, noted, anticipated, and fulfilled. What more can you want from a paragraph?
Well, as I was saying before I so rudely digressed, so too in literature. Stories and novels have a very large set of conventions: types of characters, plot rhythms, chapter structures, point-of-view limitations. Poems have a great many of their own, involving form, structure, rhythm, rhyme. Plays, too. And then there are conventions that cross genre lines. Spring is largely universal. So is snow. So is darkness. And sleep. When spring is mentioned in a story, a poem, or a play, a veritable constellation of associations rises in our imaginative sky: youth, promise, new life, young lambs, children skipping . . . on and on. And if we associate even further, that constellation may lead us to more abstract concepts such as rebirth, fertility, renewal.
Okay, let’s say you’re right and there is a set of conventions, a key to reading literature. How do I get so I can recognize these?
Same way you get to Carnegie Hall. Practice.
When lay readers encounter a fictive text, they focus, as they should, on the story and the characters: who are these people, what are they doing, and what wonderful or terrible things are happening to them? Such readers respond first of all, and sometimes only, to their reading on an emotional level; the work affects them, producing joy or revulsion, laughter or tears, anxiety or elation. In other words, they are emotionally and instinctively involved in the work. This is the response level that virtually every writer who has ever set pen to paper or fingertip to keyboard has hoped for when sending the novel, along with a prayer, to the publisher. When an English professor reads, on the other hand, he will accept the affective response level of the story (we don’t mind a good cry when Little Nell dies), but a lot of his attention will be engaged by other elements of the novel. Where did that effect come from? Whom does this character resemble? Where have I seen this situation before? Didn’t Dante (or Chaucer, or Merle Haggard) say that? If you learn to ask these questions, to see literary texts through these glasses, you will read and understand literature in a new light, and it’ll become more rewarding and fun.
Memory. Symbol. Pattern. These are the three items that, more than any other, separate the professorial reader from the rest of the crowd. English professors, as a class, are cursed with memory. Whenever I read a new work, I spin the mental Rolodex looking for correspondences and corollaries—where have I seen his face, don’t I know that theme? I can’t not do it, although there are plenty of times when that ability is not something I want to exercise. Thirty minutes into Clint Eastwood’s Pale Rider (1985), for instance, I thought, Okay, this is Shane (1953), and from there I didn’t watch another frame of the movie without seeing Alan Ladd’s face. This does not necessarily improve the experience of popular entertainment.
Professors also read, and think, symbolically. Everything is a symbol of something, it seems, until proven otherwise. We ask, Is this a metaphor? Is that an analogy? What does the thing over there signify? The kind of mind that works its way through undergraduate and then graduate classes in literature and criticism has a predisposition to see things as existing in themselves while simultaneously also representing something else. Grendel, the monster in the medieval epic Beowulf (eighth century A.D.), is an actual monster, but he can also symbolize (a) the hostility of the universe to human existence (a hostility that medieval Anglo-Saxons would have felt acutely) and (b) a darkness in human nature that only some higher aspect of ourselves (as symbolized by the title hero) can conquer. This predisposition to understand the world in symbolic terms is reinforced, of course, by years of training that encourages and rewards the symbolic imagination.
A related phenomenon in professorial reading is pattern recognition. Most professional students of literature learn to take in the foreground detail while seeing the patterns that the detail reveals. Like the symbolic imagination, this is a function of being able to distance oneself from the story, to look beyond the purely affective level of plot, drama, characters. Experience has proved to them that life and books fall into similar patterns. Nor is this skill exclusive to English professors. Good mechanics, the kind who used to fix cars before computerized diagnostics, use pattern recognition to diagnose engine troubles: