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

by Thomas C. Foster

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.

Looks like this is a common theme in many books.

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.

There are a lot of components to writing good literature.

Memory. Symbol. Pattern. These are the three items that, more than any other, separate the professorial reader from the rest of the crowd.

Professors also read, and think, symbolically. Everything is a symbol of something, it seems, until proven otherwise.

What I get from this is that every element in a story is significant in that it furthers a theme or idea via symbolism.

Literature is full of patterns, and your reading experience will be much more rewarding when you can step back from the work, even while you’re reading it, and look for those patterns.

Literature is something to be looked at critically in finding greater details and themes in order for a conclusion that is all the more rewarding.

Wily veterans, on the other hand, will absorb those details, or possibly overlook them, to find the patterns, the routines, the archetypes at work in the background.

Is it ever possible the author didn’t intend for a certain pattern and the reader is just overthinking it? How do we know whether the book’s pattern was intentional or simply a coincidence?

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.

I will keep this list in mind when reading in the future as it seems to be a very clever and reasonable one.

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.

How come they usually don’t know? What about the stories of a traveler taking on a quest?

The real reason for a quest never involves the stated reason. In fact, more often than not, the quester fails at the stated task.

I think I’ve seen many of these “find a deeper reason for the journey” stories in that the protagonist finds a deeper, more meaningful conclusion from the struggles he endured to complete something.

The real reason for a quest is always self-knowledge. That’s why questers are so often young, inexperienced, immature, sheltered.

That said, when a character hits the road, we should start to pay attention, just to see if, you know, something’s going on there. Once you figure out quests, the rest is easy.

So when a character goes out on a quest, it doesn’t necessarily mean a journey of self-growth; regardless, every quest should be closely paid attention to.

whenever people eat or drink together, it’s communion. For some reasons, this is often met with a slightly scandalized look, communion having for many readers one and only one meaning. While that meaning is very important, it is not the only one. Nor, for that matter, does Christianity have a lock on the practice. Nearly every religion has some liturgical or social ritual involving the coming together of the faithful to share sustenance. So I have to explain that just as intercourse has meanings other than sexual, or at least did at one time, so not all communions are holy.

We may not, for instance, accept a dinner invitation from someone we don’t care for. The act of taking food into our bodies is so personal that we really only want to do it with people we’re very comfortable with.

I never really realized this but this is accurate. Though sometimes it may naturally happen if you eat with something you don’t like, say, at a party. But then again you’d be eating with someone you do like—the host of said party.

Carver’s problem, then, is how to get from the nasty, prejudiced, narrow-minded person of the opening page to the point where he can actually have a blind man’s hand on his own at the ending. The answer is food.

This is a good example as to how communion causes growth or some development otherwise in characters or the development of the story.

No writer ever took such care about food and drink, so marshaled his forces to create a military effect of armies drawn up as if for battle: ranks, files, “rival ends,” sentries, squads, sashes. Such a paragraph would not be created without having some purpose, some ulterior motive.

In a way the food has been personified to represent the tension amongst the guests who are about to all share the meal laid out on the table despite the meaning the act conveys: communion.

Oh, it is. It is. But it’s also about things other than literal vampirism: selfishness, exploitation, a refusal to respect the autonomy of other people, just for starters.

The acts that vampires commit contribute to these themes.

The essentials of the vampire story, as we discussed earlier: an older figure representing corrupt, outworn values; a young, preferably virginal female; a stripping away of her youth, energy, virtue; a continuance of the life force of the old male; the death or destruction of the young woman.

In those works that continue to haunt us, however, the figure of the cannibal, the vampire, the succubus, the spook announces itself again and again where someone grows in strength by weakening someone else.

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. That’s pretty much what the vampire does, after all.

Is the vampire a representation of these selfish traits? Is that the reason for their inclusion in a story?

the more connect-the-dot drawings you do, the more likely you are to recognize the design early on. Same with literature. Part of pattern recognition is talent, but a whole lot of it is practice: if you read enough and give what you read enough thought, you begin to see patterns, archetypes, recurrences.

This is definitely true with writing as well. Honestly, with every skill. You could say, for example, “__ isn’t a talent, it’s a practice” and I’d argue the sentence can apply to anything.

there’s no such thing as a wholly original work of literature.

Everything is somewhat an inspiration of another.

O’Brien plays here with the reader’s established knowledge of history, culture, and literature. He’s hoping that your mind will associate Sarkin Aung Wan consciously or unconsciously with Sacajawea, thereby not only creating her personality and impact but also establishing the nature and depth of Paul Berlin’s need. If you require a Sacajawea, you’re really lost.

So basically an author tries to create a character that is similar to a familiar character; the audience can therefore make assumptions as to why the character is present due to their knowledge on the similar character.

This dialogue between old texts and new is always going on at one level or another. Critics speak of this dialogue as intertextuality, the ongoing interaction between poems or stories.

We more or less expect the appearance of elements from Shakespeare’s plays, so we’re not surprised when a jilted young woman, Tiffany, walks onto a television show set distraught, muttering, bedraggled—in a word, mad—and then disappears shortly after departing, evidently having drowned.

What if someone isn’t familiar with Shakespeare? How are they going to be able to make those connections?

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.

Okay, my earlier question was answered. I completely get that references to other literary works, songs, poems, media and people deepens understanding as people are able to justify an event or character’s significance in a story.

I often tell my students that reading is an activity of the imagination, and the imagination in question is not the writer’s alone. Moreover, our understanding of both works becomes richer and deeper as we hear this dialogue playing out; we see the implications for the new work, while at the same time we reconfigure our thinking, if only slightly, about the earlier one.

The reader must also use their imagination in order to assist the author in creating a worthwhile, entertaining story.

Every story about the loss of innocence is really about someone’s private reenactment of the fall from grace, since we experience it not collectively but individually and subjectively.

So essentially “a fall from grace” is very personal and specific so it is experienced individually.

As we all know, there’s nothing like a flaming sword to separate you from something, and in this case, that something is a former innocence, whether of Eden or of childhood. The thing about loss-of-innocence stories, the reason they hit so hard, is that they’re so final. You can never go back. That’s why the boy’s eyes sting with blinding tears—it’s that flaming sword.

I never really thought of loss-of-innocence stories that way, but it’s definitely true. The experience marks a boundary you just crossed, but you’re unable to move backward, only able to keep your eyes and feet forward.

Moreover, our early literature in English is frequently about, and nearly always informed by, religion.

Is it really? I figured our first encounters with literature were fairytales and such. Are those influenced by religion?

Not all uses of religion are straight, of course. Many modern and postmodern texts are essentially ironic, in which the allusions to biblical sources are used not to heighten continuities between the religious tradition and the contemporary moment but to illustrate a disparity or disruption.

By this do they mean some modern books quote the Bible in a mocking, ironic way? I think this statement is overall true—nowadays people may quote the Bible but not in the intention of referencing someone solely for a religious purpose.

Is my reading greatly enhanced by this knowledge? Perhaps not greatly. Something subtle happens there, but no thunder and lightning. The meaning doesn’t move in the opposite direction or shift radically; if it did, that would be self-defeating, since so many readers would not get the allusion. I think it’s more that the ending picks up a little greater weight from the association with Isaiah, a greater impact, pathos even.

From this I understand that these little references and allusions don’t necessarily shift or make a story what it is but rather develops and deepens the story. It gives it greater character, clarity, and more of a lasting impact on the reader. It sticks—the mention of an outside source familiar to the reader, so they take a moment to marvel the fact.

Well, what elements do you want to emphasize in your story? What feature of the plight of these young people most resonates for you? It might be the sense of lostness. Children too far from home, in a crisis not of their own making. Maybe the temptation: one child’s gingerbread is another’s drugs. Maybe it’s having to fend for themselves, without their customary support network.

Alluding to a familiar story will give the audience the same kinds of ideas—alluding to Hansel and Gretel when focusing on a couple lost in the city illustrates those same feelings of despair and confusion.

Whenever fairy tales and their simplistic worldview crop up in connection with our complicated and morally ambiguous world, you can almost certainly plan on irony.

Here’s what I think we do: we want strangeness in our stories, but we want familiarity, too. We want a new novel to be not quite like anything we’ve read before. At the same time, we look for it to be sufficiently like other things we’ve read so that we can use those to make sense of it. If it manages both things at once, strangeness and familiarity, it sets up vibrations, harmonies to go with the melody of the main story line. And those harmonies are where a sense of depth, solidity, resonance comes from. Those harmonies may come from the Bible, from Shakespeare, from Dante or Milton, but also from humbler, more familiar texts.

This makes so much sense. You crave something new so it wholly captures your attention and interest, yet you want it to be somewhat familiar so that you are able to comprehend the story.

The late twentieth century witnessed a great surge of Native American writing, much of which went back to tribal myth for material, for imagery, for theme, as in the case of Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Yellow Woman,” Louise Erdrich’s Kashpaw/Nanapush novels, and Gerald Vizenor’s peculiar Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles.

I can confirm this. For my APUSH class, I read a book called Native American Testimony by Peter Nabokov, a book of many primary-source experiences as or with Native Americans. Most of the entries were from the 1900’s.

So that’s one way classical myth can work: overt subject matter for poems and paintings and operas and novels.

The need to protect one’s family: Hector. The need to maintain one’s dignity: Achilles. The determination to remain faithful and to have faith: Penelope. The struggle to return home: Odysseus. Homer gives us four great struggles of the human being: with nature, with the divine, with other humans, and with ourselves. What is there, after all, against which we need to prove ourselves but those four things?

And because writers and readers share knowledge of a big portion of this body of story, this mythology, when writers use it, we readers recognize it, sometimes to its full extent, sometimes only dimly or only because we know the Looney Tunes version. That recognition makes our experience of literature richer, deeper, more meaningful, so that our own modern stories also matter, also share in the power of myth.

I remember a question asked in English class this year: “Why is Greek Mythology still prominent today?” This is a great answer to that question.

So why does he bring rain into it? First of all, as a plot device. The rain forces these men together in very uncomfortable (for the condemned man and the brother) circumstances. I occasionally disparage plot, but we should never discount its importance in authorial decision-making. Second, atmospherics. Rain can be more mysterious, murkier, more isolating than most other weather conditions. Fog is good, too, of course. Then there is the misery factor. Given the choice between alternatives, Hardy will always go for making his characters more miserable, and rain has a higher wretchedness quotient than almost any other element of our environment. With a little rain and a bit of wind, you can die of hypothermia on the Fourth of July. Needless to say, Hardy loves rain. And finally there is the democratic element. Rain falls on the just and the unjust alike. Condemned man and hangman are thrown into a bond of sorts because rain has forced each of them to seek shelter. Rain can do other things as well, but these are the reasons, it seems to me, that Hardy has chosen a nice, malicious rainstorm for his story.

I definitely see how the weather plays into the story well—enough to be significant. The weather, I now acknowledge, is a huge factor in developing a story.

What other things? For one, it’s clean. One of the paradoxes of rain is how clean it is coming down and how much mud it can make when it lands. So if you want a character to be cleansed, symbolically, let him walk through the rain to get somewhere. He can be quite transformed when he gets there. He may also have a cold, but that’s another matter. He can be less angry, less confused, more repentant, whatever you want. The stain that was upon him—figuratively—can be removed. On the other hand, if he falls down, he’ll be covered in mud and therefore more stained than before. You can have it either way, or both ways if you’re really good.

In almost any case I can think of, authors use fog to suggest that people can’t see clearly, that matters under consideration are murky.

So we are sometimes able to assume the weather symbolizes a character’s inner conflict?

This will all come up again when we talk about seasons. There are many more possibilities for weather, of course, more than we could cover in a whole book. For now, though, one does well to remember, as one starts reading a poem or story, to check the weather.

Sometimes the small things become big. Sometimes the big things are smaller than they seem at first. No matter how large or small the actions, though, the most important thing that characters can do is change—grow, develop, learn, mature, call it what you will. As we know from our own lives, change can be difficult, painful, arduous, possibly dangerous. Sometimes even fatal. Just not to the main character.

I like this paragraph a lot. It’s very true.

You see, even epics work best if they are about not widespread events but single actions and their consequences—the hero returning home, the rescuer coming to the aid of a community plagued by a monster, the fall from grace of the original two humans.

And that’s the problem with being best pals with a hero. They have needs, or perhaps the narrative has needs on their behalf, but they cannot fulfill those requirements directly, not if the story is to continue.

Does this go to say that a story’s conclusion is based upon whether the conflict is solved?

The first, writerly, invention sketches out a figure, while the second, readerly, invention receives that figure and fills in the blank spaces.

This is true. Someone may be given a character but they will likely perceive them differently than others, hence why so many differing opinions coexist.

Round characters are what we could call three-dimensional, full of traits and strengths and weaknesses and contradictions, capable of change and growth. Flat characters, not so much. They lack full development in the narrative or drama, so they’re more two-dimensional, like cartoon cutouts. Some critics call these two types of literary personnel dynamic and static, but we’ll go with round and flat.

Aristotle suggested an intimate connection between the shape of the plot and the nature of the characters involved. His discussion is sometimes reduced to the formulation, “Plot is character revealed in action.”

Even assuming equal levels of knowledge about the subject, who probably has had the most ideas—you in five minutes of reading or me in five days of stumbling around? All I’m really saying is that we readers sometimes forget how long literary composition can take and how very much lateral thinking can go on in that amount of time.

I think everyone can answer the one who’s stumbled around for 5 days. Writing does take a lot of thought and it’s interesting to think books that took years to make can be read in mere days.

And lateral thinking is what we’re really discussing: the way writers can keep their eye on the target, whether it be the plot of the play or the ending of the novel or the argument of the poem, and at the same time bring in a great deal of at least tangentially related material.