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

by Thomas C. Foster

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

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.

The real reason for a quest is always self-knowledge.

whenever people eat or drink together, it’s communion.

the coming together of the faithful to share sustenance.

not all communions are holy.

in the real world, breaking bread together is an act of sharing and peace, since if you’re breaking bread you’re not breaking heads.

Evil has had to do with sex since the serpent seduced Eve.

We can take it almost as an act of faith that ghosts are about something besides themselves.

Because there was so much the Victorians couldn’t write about directly, chiefly sex and sexuality, they found ways of transforming those taboo subjects and issues into other forms.

writers still use ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and all manner of scary things to symbolize various aspects of our more common reality.

ghosts and vampires are never only about ghosts and vampires.

the ghosts and vampires don’t always have to appear in visible forms.

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.

exploitation in its many forms.

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

there’s only one story.

What typically takes place is that we recognize elements from some prior text and begin drawing comparisons and parallels that may be fantastic, parodic, tragic, anything. Once that happens, our reading of the text changes from the reading governed by what’s overtly on the page.

intertextuality,

the ongoing interaction between poems or stories.

deepens and enriches the reading experience, bringing multiple layers of meaning to the text, some of which readers...

newer works are having a dialogue with older ones, and they often indicate the presence of this conversation by invoking the older texts with anything from oblique references to extensive quotations.

every age and every writer reinvents its own Shakespeare.

Shakespeare also provides a figure against whom writers can struggle, a source of texts against which other texts can bounce ideas.

Fugard relies on our awareness of the Shakespearean text as he constructs his play, and that reliance allows him to say more with fewer direct statements.

One of the problems with the diversification of the canon is that modern writers can’t assume a common body of knowledge on the part of their readers.

What readers know varies so much more than it once did. So what can the writer use for parallels, analogies, plot structures, references, that most of his readers will know? Kiddie lit.

“Hansel and Gretel.”

the story of children lost and far from home has a universal appeal.

we’re trying to make use of details or patterns, portions of some prior story (or, once you really start thinking like a professor, “prior text,” since everything is a text) to add depth and texture to your story, to bring out a theme, to lend irony to a statement, to play with readers’ deeply ingrained knowledge of fairy tales. So use as much or as little as you want. In fact, you may invoke the whole story simply by a single small reference.

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.

Greek and Roman myth is so much a part of the fabric of our consciousness, of our unconscious really, that we scarcely notice.

weather is never just weather. It’s never just rain.

So what’s special about rain? Ever since we crawled up on the land, the water, it seems to us, has been trying to reclaim us.

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.

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.

rain is also restorative. This is chiefly because of its association with spring, but Noah once again comes into play here.

another, less literary set of associations for rain: the source of chills, colds, pneumonia, death.

Rain is the principal element of spring. April showers do in fact bring May flowers. Spring is the season not only of renewal but of hope, of new awakenings.

Fog,

almost always signals some sort of confusion.

authors use fog to suggest that people can’t see clearly, that matters under consideration are murky.

And snow? It can mean as much as rain. Different things, though. Snow is clean, stark, severe, warm (as an insulating blanket, paradoxically), inhospitable, inviting, playful, suffocating, filthy (after enough time has elapsed). You can do just about anything you want with snow.

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. Hey, guess what? That’s what friends are for.

there is generally no more persuasive reason for revenge, outrage, or prompting to action than the killing of the best friend (or his progeny). It really doesn’t pay to get too close to hero-types.

characters are not people.

Characters are products of writers’ imaginations—and readers’ imaginations.

In fictive works, some characters are more equal than other characters. A lot more equal.

Aristotle