How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines (Revised Edition)
496How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines (Revised Edition)
496Paperback(Large Print)
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Overview
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.
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.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780062326522 |
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Publisher: | HarperCollins |
Publication date: | 03/11/2014 |
Edition description: | Large Print |
Pages: | 496 |
Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.20(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
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 ProfessorA 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