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

by Thomas C. Foster

Literary geography is typically about humans inhabiting spaces, and at the same time the spaces inhabiting humans. Who can say how much of us comes from our physical surroundings? Writers can, at least in their own works, for their own purposes.

Does this refer to nature vs. nurture? In which the environment you were raised in influences you, or, in this case, a character?

Geography in literature can also be more. It can be revelatory of virtually any element in the work. Theme? Sure. Symbol? No problem. Plot? Without a doubt.

Actually, the scariest thing Poe could do to us is to put a perfectly normal human specimen in that setting, where no one could remain safe. And that’s one thing landscape and place—geography—can do for a story.

Is the author by saying this suggest the setting can enhance the mood/tone? In this case, Poe's addition of a normal human being offsets an ominous atmosphere?

Greer. As you know by now, there’s rebirth when there’s a renaming, right? Out west she meets new people, encounters a completely alien but inviting landscape, becomes the de facto mother of a three-year-old Native American girl she calls Turtle, and finds herself involved in the shelter movement for Central American refugees. She wouldn’t have done any of these things in claustrophobic old Pittman, Kentucky. What she discovers in the West are big horizons, clear air, brilliant sunshine, and open possibilities. She goes, in other words, from a closed to an open environment, and she seizes the opportunities for growth and development.

Perfect example of how the setting can completely transform/influence someone.

What Lawrence does, really, is employ geography as a metaphor for the psyche—when his characters go south, they are really digging deep into their subconscious, delving into that region of darkest fears and desires.

Lawrence's physical journey---moving from one place to another, a change in geography---also represented his mental, emotional journey of facing his fears and wants. The change in location, both concretely and tangibly is definitely a cool metaphor a skilled author would employ.

So, high or low, near or far, north or south, east or west, the places of poems and fiction really matter. It isn’t just setting, that hoary old English class topic. It’s place and space and shape that bring us to ideas and psychology and history and dynamism. It’s enough to make you read a map.

Moral of the chapter: pay attention to the location. Pay attention to the journey---not just the footprints left behind in the dirt. Look for the change inside the character's head, too, look for a change in behavior, thoughts, mood. Journeys are never only a physical thing.

For about as long as anyone’s been writing anything, the seasons have stood for the same set of meanings. Maybe it’s hard-wired into us that spring has to do with childhood and youth, summer with adulthood and romance and fulfillment and passion, autumn with decline and middle age and tiredness but also harvest, winter with old age and resentment and death.

So harvest, and not only of apples, is one element of autumn. When our writers speak of harvests, we know it can refer not only to agricultural but also to personal harvests, the results of our endeavors, whether over the course of a growing season or a life.

So the season can also represent a character’s journey or internal thoughts—the harvest of crops, and the harvest of the reward borne of months of hard, strenuous work. The grim reaper touches down on Halloween night, but you may reap the quiz grade you studied for.

The notion is so logical, and has been with us so long, that it has become a largely unstated assumption: we reap the rewards and punishments of our conduct.

Frost’s crop is abundant, suggesting he has done something right, but the effort has worn him out. This, too, is part of autumn. As we gather in our harvest, we find we have used up a certain measure of our ene...

One story. Everywhere. Always. Wherever anyone puts pen to paper or hands to keyboard or fingers to lute string or quill to papyrus. They all take from and in return give to the same story, ever since Snorgg got back to the cave and told Ongk about the mastodon that got away.

I still don’t agree with this? Every story is the same story? Where’s the logic in such a statement?

I suppose what the one story, the ur-story, is about is ourselves, about what it means to be human. I mean, what else is there?

What if a book is in the perspective of an animal or alien? How would that still be about humans?

On one level, everyone who writes anything knows that pure originality is impossible. Everywhere you look, the ground is already camped on. So you sigh and pitch your tent where you can, knowing someone else has been there before.

As a creative writer yeah I can definitely agree with this. Even if you’ve never so much as encountered an idea, once you make it, you realize that someone else has thought of it first and already used it. You tread carefully so as to make your story as unique as possible. It’s a little tedious.

What happens, if the writer is good, is usually not that the work seems derivative or trivial but just the opposite: the work actually acquires depth and resonance from the echoes and chimes it sets up with prior texts, weight from the accumulated use of certain basic patterns and tendencies. Moreover, works are actually more comforting because we recognize elements in them from our prior reading. I suspect that a wholly original work, one that owed nothing to previous writing, would so lack familiarity as to be quite unnerving to readers. So that’s one answer.

I see the author’s point. There’s weight in knowing a work references another, especially if that other work is good. I think it makes you love the book even more knowing it appreciates and acknowledges another one of your beloved pieces of literature.

Mark Twain claimed never to have read a book, yet his personal library ran to something over three thousand volumes.

How would such a renowned author claim to have never read a book? Are you sure he wasn’t joking when he said that?

Think of intertextuality in terms of movie westerns. You’re writing your first western; good for you. What’s it about? A big showdown? High Noon. A gunslinger who retires? Shane. A lonely outpost during an uprising? Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon—the woods are full of ’em. Cattle drive? Red River. Does it involve, by any chance, a stagecoach?

I’m interested in Wild West books (since I am somewhat unfamiliar with them) so I will highlight this and add it to my “want to read” list haha.

Doesn’t matter. Your movie will. Here’s the thing: you can’t avoid them, since even avoidance is a form of interaction.

“Every avoidance is an interaction.” WOW I really like that. Even if you are steering yourself away from someone you are still consciously interacting with them by causing your actions to coordinate with theirs.

“Archetype” is a five-dollar word for “pattern,” or for the mythic original on which a pattern is based.

You’d think that these components, these archetypes, would wear out with use the way cliché wears out, but they actually work the other way: they take on power with repetition, finding strength in numbers. Here is the aha! factor again. When we hear or see or read one of these instances of archetype, we feel a little frisson of recognition and utter a little satisfied “aha!” And we get that chance with fair frequency, because writers keep employing them.

I do love seeing a familiar kind of archetype or trope, so. Valid statement.

First, the obvious but nonetheless necessary observation: in real life, when people have any physical mark or imperfection, it means nothing thematically, metaphorically, or spiritually.

Is there a chance a mark or scar on a character in a book means nothing? Like it’s literally there by happenstance? Or is that really rare?

Things have changed pretty dramatically in terms of equating scars or deformities with moral shortcomings or divine displeasure, but in literature we continue to understand physical imperfection in symbolic terms. It has to do with being different, really. Sameness doesn’t present us with metaphorical possibilities, whereas difference—from the average, the typical, the expected—is always rich with possibility.

Ohhh that’s true. So far this discussion reminds me of Tyrion Lannister, a character in Game of Thrones with achondroplasia. Tyrion naturally stands out and commonly makes it clear that he’s different, ironically referring to himself as a “dwarf.” Symbolically I think it represents his father’s disappointment in him, and how he’s the “black sheep” of the Lannister children.

When millions of young men die in war, they take with them not merely reproductive possibilities but also tremendous intellectual, creative, and artistic resources. The war was, in short, the death of culture, or at least of a very great chunk of it.

Ooooh I never thought of it that way. Nice.

The harelipped Nahfouz becomes a celebrated mystic and preacher, while Clea, the painter, reports late in the final novel that her prosthetic hand can paint. The gift lies not in her hand, in other words, but in her heart, her mind, her soul.

The monster represents, among other things, forbidden insights, a modern pact with the devil, the result of science without ethics.

Every time there’s an advance in the state of knowledge, a movement into a brave new world (another literary reference, of course), some commentator or other informs us that we’re closer to meeting a Frankenstein (meaning, of course, the monster).

There’s definitely ironic books who criticize or simply acknowledge the events that currently occur in their time. The Sea of Tranquility (amazing book, btw) was published in 2022. It acknowledges the pandemic by referencing an oncoming pandemic in the actual plot of the book itself. The pandemic in the book plays a rather large, integral role.

Beyond these cautionary elements, though, the real monster is Victor, the monster’s maker. Or at least a portion of him.

I believe we had another discussion like this in Honors English class in which we asked whether Victor, his monster’s creator, was worse as a being than his monster himself. I definitely agree that he was worse—he created something and then abandoned it, therefore being at fault for the pain and destruction it caused.

Romanticism gave us the notion, rampant throughout the nineteenth century and still with us in the twenty-first, of the dual nature of humanity, that in each of us, no matter how well made or socially groomed, a monstrous Other exists.

That’s a good definition of Romanticism.

In other words, the author has created a minor constellation of difficulties for himself by introducing a blind character into the work, so something important must be at stake when blindness pops up in a story. Clearly the author wants to emphasize other levels of sight and blindness beyond the physical. Moreover, such references are usually quite pervasive in a work where insight and blindness are at issue.

So usually the blind character is significant in that they convey a greater meaning?

The challenging thing about literature is finding answers, but equally important is recognizing what questions need to be asked, and if we pay attention, the text usually tells us.

In literature there is no better, no more lyrical, no more perfectly metaphorical illness than heart disease. In real life, heart disease is none of the above; it’s frightening, sudden, shattering, exhausting, but not lyrical or metaphorical. When the novelist or playwright employs it, however, we don’t complain that he’s being unrealistic or insensitive. Why? It’s fairly straightforward.

The afflicted character can have any number of problems for which heart disease provides a suitable emblem: bad love, loneliness, cruelty, pederasty, disloyalty, cowardice, lack of determination. Socially, it may stand for these matters on a larger scale, or for something seriously amiss at the heart of things.

The physical disease again reflects the mental disease---the character has heart disease, and the author's heart hurts (but not in the physical sense). I like that a lot. I also see that there's a pun at the end lol.

Now, about that irony. Remember Florence and Edward, the wayward spouses with heart trouble? Just what, you ask, is wrong with their hearts? Not a thing in the world. Physically, that is. Faithlessness, selfishness, cruelty—those things are wrong, and ultimately those things kill them. But physically, their hearts are completely sound. So why did I say earlier they suffer from heart disease? Haven’t I just violated the principle of this chapter? Not really. Their choice of illness is quite telling: each of them elects to employ a fragile heart as a device to deceive the respective spouse, to be able to construct an elaborate personal fiction based on heart disease, to announce to the world that he or she suffers from a “bad heart.”

Their "heart disease" refers to the ugliness of their hearts, their cruelty as people.

Anyone who has ever had to watch a loved one deteriorate after a massive stroke will no doubt look askance at the very idea of such frustration and misery being in some way intriguing, fascinating, or picturesque, and quite rightly. But as we’ve seen time and again, what we feel in real life and what we feel in our reading lives can be quite different.

Very true. My grandfather had a stroke this year---there's definitely a difference in his wellbeing. It's devastating watching a health problem deterioate a loved one. And it's definitely different seeing these problems in person versus through an image you've conjured based on the words you read on a page.

So these two, despite their widespread occurrence, were never A-list diseases.

So what I'm getting at is that a disease like syphilis isn't great to incorporate in literature because of its implications and symptons? Wouldn't that make an interesting and realistic subject to write about though? Or does it come down to personal preference and the author's individual style?

It should be picturesque. What, you don’t think illness is picturesque?

Soooo the illness has to be ... somewhat conventionally intriquing and vivid? Why is that? So people aren't disturbed by what other illnesses bring? But talking about these "non-picturesque" illnesses would shed light on them, bring awareness, and honestly just make a unique and vivid subject to write about. I don't really agree with the author's point here. Some subjects are hard to tackle but should be talked about nonetheless. If you're a skilled author you should be able to unearth some kind of odd, sublime quality to writing about such a thing anyway.

It should have strong symbolic or metaphorical possibilities. If there’s a metaphor connected with smallpox, I don’t want to know about it. Smallpox was hideous in both the way it presented and the disfigurement it left without really offering any constructive symbolic possibilities.

I do agree that illnesses in literature can have a symbolic or metaphorical value that can make them all the more valuable to include. That being said I don’t think you have to be particular to an illness in order to have said symbolic or metaphorical value. A good author will find a way to give something, anything meaning and importance.

So many characters contracted tuberculosis in part because so many writers either suffered from it themselves or watched friends, colleagues, and loved ones deteriorate in its grasp.

I find authors often project onto their characters. I remember someone saying “you can’t write a character smarter than yourself.” The same probably goes for other things—you can’t write a character sadder than yourself (at the very least, well).

For now, we’re less interested in all the implications she identifies, and more interested in recognizing that when a writer employs TB directly or indirectly, he’s making a statement about the victim of the disease. His choice, while no doubt carrying a strong element of verisimilitude, also very likely houses symbolic or metaphorical intentions.

bubonic. It comes to mean what we think of as plague, in fact, because it can lay waste to whole cities in short order, because it sweeps through populations as a visitation of divine wrath.

In examining how a person confronts the wholesale devastation wrought by disease, Camus can set his existentialist philosophy into motion in a fictional setting: the isolation and uncertainty caused by the disease, the absurdly random nature of infection, the despair felt by a doctor in the face of an unstoppable epidemic, the desire to act even while recognizing the pointlessness of action.

That’s really powerful.

Moreover, her own acceptance of the disease, of the inevitability of her mortality and suffering, mirrors her self-sacrificing nature: perhaps it is best for everyone else, Darley especially, if she dies. What’s best for her never seems to enter her mind.

When a person discovers they have something like an illness, they start to have thoughts that reveal things about them, such as what they think of themselves and their accomplishments (especially if the end of their life seems to be near). Nice example.

Real illnesses come with baggage, which can be useful or at least overcome in a novel. A made-up illness, though, can say whatever its maker wants it to say.

I hadn’t even really thought about making a disease for a character. That’s smart, actually, especially if you want to convey a certain point.

It’s too bad modern writers lost the generic “fever” and the mystery malady when modern medicine got so it could identify virtually any microbe and thereby diagnose virtually any disease. This strikes me as a case where the cure is definitely worse than the disease, at least for literature.

lol.

The reason he’s older is just the opposite of why the quester is typically younger: his possibilities for growth are limited and time is running out. In other words, there is a time imperative, a sort of urgency as the sands run out. And then the situation in which he finds himself needs to be compelling.

This connects back to one of the first chapters in which the author explains why usually a protagonist who is on a journey is young---so they have the room and time to grow and develop as a person. Older people don't really have that much room and time, or they've already developed.

Now here is where I envy you. If you are a professor, you have to deal with some pretty unsavory characters and some questionable works. If you only want to read like one, you can walk away whenever you want to.

By this does he mean a professor will continue to read the story even if it doesn't interest them? And reading like one will only be for personal enjoyment? It's a little confusing.

If enough writers use a given object or situation in enough works, we start to recognize and understand the range of possible meanings. They don’t have to say, “Hey, pay attention! It’s raining!” They can simply make it rain and we’ll do the rest. The writers don’t even have to think about it; it can rain because that’s what the plot demands. We can figure things out from there.

I think this translates to: authors can do whatever they want (bonus points if it's a recognizable event) and the readers have to figure it out.

NOW HEAR THIS: irony trumps everything.

This basically means that if irony takes place in a literary setting, then usually it lessens or overrides the value of something, causing the reader to have to reanalyze it.

That really was extravagant, for the little cottages were in a lane to themselves at the very bottom of a steep rise that led up to the house. A broad road ran between. True, they were far too near. They were the greatest possible eyesore, and they had no right to be in that neighbourhood at all. They were little mean dwellings painted a chocolate brown. In the garden patches there was nothing but cabbage stalks, sick hens and tomato cans. The very smoke coming out of their chimneys was poverty-stricken. Little rags and shreds of smoke, so unlike the great silvery plumes that uncurled from the Sheridans’ chimneys. Washerwomen lived in the lane and sweeps and a cobbler, and a man whose house-front was studded all over with minute bird-cages. Children swarmed.

The imagery is to die for here. So well depicted. I can really see the scene in front of me.

And again she began, “You’ll excuse her, miss, I’m sure,” and her face, swollen too, tried an oily smile.

What would an "oily" smile look like? Something that conveys reluctance, half-heartedness?

So what does the story signify, then? Many things. It offers a critique of the class system, a story of initiation into the adult world of sex and death, an amusing examination of family dynamics, and a touching portrait of a child struggling to establish herself as an independent entity in the face of nearly overwhelming parental influence.

Very deep themes here. These kinds of serious themes that affect a lot of people---coming of age, death, family issues, etc.---are very important to write about so that it sheds light on them and it makes people feel seen.