How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines (Revised Edition)

by Thomas C. Foster

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

If you’ve ever wanted to read deeper, look no further. Beneath the pleasant words on the page lies a world of thematic and emotional resonance. And while Foster promises to help you read like a professor, there is nothing academic about his writing. It’s as fun as it is enlightening.

A thoroughly revised and updated edition of Thomas C. Foster s classic guide a lively and entertaining introduction to literature and literary basics, including symbols, themes and contexts, that shows you how to make your everyday reading experience more rewarding and enjoyable.

While many books can be enjoyed for their basic stories, there are often deeper literary meanings interwoven in these texts. How to Read Literature Like a Professor helps us to discover those hidden truths by looking at literature with the eyes and the literary codes-of the ultimate professional reader, the college professor.

What does it mean when a literary hero is traveling along a dusty road? When he hands a drink to his companion? When he s drenched in a sudden rain shower?

Ranging from major themes to literary models, narrative devices and form, Thomas C. Foster provides us with 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-and shows us how to make our reading experience more enriching, satisfying, and fun.

This revised edition includes new chapters, a new preface and epilogue, and incorporates updated teaching points that Foster has developed over the past decade."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062301673
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	02/25/2014
Edition description:	Revised
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.00(d)
Lexile:	1150L (what's this?)

About the Author

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.

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How to Read Literature Like a Professor
A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines

Chapter One

Every Trip Is a Quest

(Except When It's Not)

Okay, so here's the deal: let's say, purely hypothetically, you're reading a book about an average sixteen-year-old kid in the summer of 1968. The kid—let's call him Kip—who hopes his acne clears up before he gets drafted, is on his way to the A&P. His bike is a one-speed with a coaster brake and therefore deeply humiliating, and riding it to run an errand for his mother makes it even worse. Along the way he has a couple of disturbing experiences, including a minorly unpleasant encounter with a German shepherd, topped off in the supermarket parking lot where he sees the girl of his dreams, Karen, laughing and horsing around in Tony Vauxhall's brand-new Barracuda. Now Kip hates Tony already because he has a name like Vauxhall and not like Smith, which Kip thinks is pretty lame as a name to follow Kip, and because the 'Cuda is bright green and goes approximately the speed of light, and also because Tony has never had to work a day in his life. So Karen, who is laughing and having a great time, turns and sees Kip, who has recently asked her out, and she keeps laughing. (She could stop laughing and it wouldn't matter to us, since we're considering this structurally. In the story we're inventing here, though, she keeps laughing.) Kip goes on into the store to buy the loaf of Wonder Bread that his mother told him to pick up, and as he reaches for the bread, he decides right then and there to lie about his age to the Marine recruiter even though it meansgoing to Vietnam, because nothing will ever happen for him in this one-horse burg where the only thing that matters is how much money your old man has. Either that or Kip has a vision of St. Abillard (any saint will do, but our imaginary author picked a comparatively obscure one), whose face appears on one of the red, yellow, or blue balloons. For our purposes, the nature of the decision doesn't matter any more than whether Karen keeps laughing or which color balloon manifests the saint. What just happened here?

If you were an English professor, and not even a particularly weird English professor, you'd know that you'd just watched a knight have a not very suitable encounter with his nemesis. In other words, a quest just happened.

But it just looked like a trip to the store for some white bread. True. But consider the quest. Of what does it consist? A knight, a dangerous road, a Holy Grail (whatever one of those may be), at least one dragon, one evil knight, one princess. Sound about right? That's a list I can live with: a knight (named Kip), a dangerous road (nasty German shepherds), a Holy Grail (one form of which is a loaf of Wonder Bread), at least one dragon (trust me, a '68 'Cuda could definitely breathe fire), one evil knight (Tony), one princess (who can either keep laughing or stop). Seems like a bit of a stretch.

On the surface, sure. But let's think structurally. The quest consists of five things: (a) a quester, (b) a place to go, (c) a stated reason to go there, (d) challenges and trials en route, and (e) a real reason to go there. Item (a) is easy; a quester is just a person who goes on a quest, whether or not he knows it's a quest. In fact, usually he doesn't know. Items (b) and (c) should be considered together: someone tells our protagonist, our hero, who need not look very heroic, to go somewhere and do something. Go in search of the Holy Grail. Go to the store for bread. Go to Vegas and whack a guy. Tasks of varying nobility, to be sure, but structurally all the same. Go there, do that. Note that I said the stated reason for the quest. That's because of item (e).

The real reason for a quest never involves the stated reason. In fact, more often than not, the quester fails at the stated task. So why do they go and why do we care? They go because of the stated task, mistakenly believing that it is their real mis-sion. We know, however, that their quest is educational. They don't know enough about the only subject that really matters: themselves. The real reason for a quest is always self-knowledge. That's why questers are so often young, inexperienced, immature, sheltered. Forty-five-year-old men either have self-knowledge or they're never going to get it, while your average sixteen-to-seventeen-year-old kid is likely to have a long way to go in the self-knowledge department.

Let's look at a real example. When I teach the late-twentieth-century novel, I always begin with the greatest quest novel of the last century: Thomas Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49 (1965). Beginning readers can find the novel mystifying, irritating, and highly peculiar. True enough, there is a good bit of cartoonish strangeness in the novel, which can mask the basic quest structure. On the other hand, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late fourteenth century) and Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queen (1596), two of the great quest narratives from early English literature, also have what modern readers must consider cartoonish elements. It's really only a matter of whether we're talking Classics Illustrated or Zap Comics. So here's the setup in The Crying of Lot 49:

1) Our quester: a young woman, not very happy in her marriage or her life, not too old to learn, not too assertive where men are concerned.

2) A place to go: in order to carry out her duties, she must drive to Southern California from her home near San Francisco. Eventually she will travel back and forth between the two, and between her past (a husband with a disintegrating personality and a fondness for LSD, an insane ex-Nazi psychotherapist) and her future (highly unclear).

How to Read Literature Like a Professor
A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines. Copyright © by Thomas Foster. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Table of Contents

Preface xi

Introduction: How'd He Do That? xxvii

1 Every Trip Is a Quest (Except When It's Not) 1

2 Nice to Eat with You: Acts of Communion 9

3 Nice to Eat You: Acts of Vampires 20

4 Now, Where Have I Seen Her Before? 31

5 When in Doubt, It's from Shakespeare … 44

6 … Or the Bible 58

7 Hanseldee and Greteldum 72

8 It's Greek to Me 82

9 It's More Than Just Rain or Snow 97

10 Never Stand Next to the Hero 107

Interlude: Does He Mean That? 127

11 More Than It's Gonna Hurt You: Concerning Violence 133

12 Is That a Symbol? 148

13 It's All Political 163

14 Yes, She's a Christ Figure, Too 176

15 Flights of Fancy 189

16 It's All About Sex… 203

17 … Except Sex 214

18 If She Comes Up, It's Baptism 227

19 Geography Matters… 242

20 … So Does Season 259

Interlude One Story 273

21 Marked for Greatness 285

22 He's Blind for a Reason, You Know 297

23 It's Never Just Heart Disease … And Rarely Just Illness 305

24 Don't Read with Your Eyes 329

25 It's My Symbol and I'll Cry If I Want To 341

26 Is He Serious? And Other Ironies 358

27 A Test Case 373

Postlude: Who's in Charge Here? 420

Envoi 430

Appendix: Reading List 435

Acknowledgments 458

Editorial Reviews

In this valuable handbook for English literature students and enthusiasts alike, Foster (English, Univ. of Michigan) shares his love of the subject, encouraging readers to explore multiple meanings when reading literary works rather than be daunted by strict or limiting interpretations. The text is broken down into manageable chapters that focus on literary sources such as the Bible, themes and symbols ranging from vampires to rain, and literary forms (e.g., the sonnet). An amazing breadth of literature is covered, from Greek myths to Shakespeare to modern literature and even contemporary screenplays. Foster's key strength is his ability to tackle such a vast and weighty topic in an informal and conversational manner, making fairly complex literary theories such as intertextuality and Northrop Frye's notion of literary archetypes accessible through clear illustrations. Written in plain English with plenty of humorous anecdotes, this book certainly lives up to its description as "lively and entertaining." A worthy addition to academic and large public libraries.-Rebecca Bollen, North Bergen, NJ Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

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