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

by Thomas C. Foster

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

quester: a young woman, not very happy in her

A place to go: in

A stated reason to go there:

Challenges and trials:

The real reason to go:

whose real calamity is that he doesn’t know who he is.

the conventions of a quest tale. So does Huck Finn. The Lord of the Rings. North by Northwest. Star Wars

“Always” and “never” are not words that have much meaning in literary study.

Sometimes the quest fails or is not taken up by the protagonist. Moreover, is every trip really a quest? It depends. Some days I just drive to work—no adventures, no growth. I’m sure that the same is true in writing. Sometimes plot requires that a writer get a character from home to work and back again. 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.

whenever people eat or drink together, it’s communion

not all communions are holy. In fact, literary versions of communion can interpret the word in quite a variety of ways.

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

Generally, eating with another is a way of saying, “I’m with you, I like you, we form a community together.” And that is a form of communion.

writing a meal scene is so difficult, and so inherently uninteresting, that there really needs to be some compelling reason to include one in the story. And that reason has to do with how characters are getting along. Or not getting along. Come on, food is food. What can you say about fried chicken that you haven’t already heard, said, seen, thought? And eating is eating, with some slight variations of table manners. To put characters, then, in this mundane, overused, fairly boring situation, something more has to be happening than simply beef, forks, and goblets.

Harry Potter Feast

The late Raymond Carver wrote a story, “Cathedral” (1981), about a guy with real hang-ups: included among the many things the narrator is bigoted against are people with disabilities, minorities, those different from himself, and all parts of his wife’s past in which he does not share. Now the only reason to give a character a serious hang-up is to give him the chance to get over it. He may fail, but he gets the chance. It’s the Code of the West. When our unnamed narrator reveals to us from the first moment that a blind man, a friend of his wife’s, is coming to visit, we’re not surprised that he doesn’t like the prospect at all. We know immediately that our man has to overcome disliking everyone who is different. And by the end he does, when he and the blind man sit together to draw a cathedral so the blind man can get a sense of what one looks like. To do that, they have to touch, hold hands even, and there’s no way the narrator would have been able to do that at the start of the story. 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.

Or in Carver’s story, cube steak. When the narrator

watches the blind man eating—competent, busy, hungry, and, well, normal—he begins to gain a new respect for him. The three of them, husband, wife, and visitor, ravenously consume the cube steak, potatoes, and vegetables, and in the course of that experience our narrator finds his antipathy toward the blind man beginning to break down. He discovers he has something in common with this stranger—eating as a fundamental element of life—that there is a bond between them.

What about the dope they smok...

But thinking symbolically,

Once again, the act says, “I’m with you, I share this moment with you, I feel a bond of community with you.”

(which, incidentally, is a place of communion).

What about when they don’t? What if dinner turns ugly or doesn’t happen at all?

This wonderful story is centered around a dinner party on the Feast of the Epiphany, the twelfth day of Christmas.

The table and dishes of food themselves are lavishly described as Joyce lures us into the atmosphere:

We’re already prepared, having shared in the communion meal Joyce has laid out for us, a communion not of death, but of what comes before. Of life.

So vampirism isn’t about vampires?

selfishness, exploitation, a refusal to respect the autonomy of other people, just for starters.

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

Marley’s ghost in A Christmas Carol (1843), who is really a walking, clanking, moaning lesson in ethics for Scrooge.

Dr. Jekyll’s other half. The hideous Edward Hyde exists to demonstrate to readers that even a respectable man has a dark side; like many Victorians, Robert Louis Stevenson believed in the dual nature of humans, and in more than one work he finds ways of showing that duality quite literally. In The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)

You’ll notice, by the way, that many of these examples come from Victorian writers: Stevenson, Dickens, Stoker, J. S. Le Fanu, Henry James. Why? 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. The Victorians were masters of sublimation. But even today, when there are no limits on subject matter or treatment,

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. Here’s where it gets a little tricky, though: the ghosts

Sometimes the really scary bloodsuckers are entirely human.

It just so happens that James has another famous story, “Daisy Miller” (1878), in which there are no ghosts, no demonic possession, and nothing more mysterious than a midnight trip to the Colosseum in Rome. Daisy is a young American woman who does as she pleases, thus upsetting the rigid social customs of the European society she desperately wants to approve of her. Winterbourne, the man whose attention she desires, while both attracted to and repulsed by her, ultimately proves too fearful of the disapproval of his established expatriate American community to pursue her further. After numerous

misadventures, Daisy dies, ostensibly by contracting malaria on her midnight jaunt. But you know what really kills her? Vampires. No, really. Vampires. I know

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. Okay, let’s see now. Winterbourne and Daisy carry associations of winter—death, cold—and spring—life, flowers, renewal—that ultimately come into conflict (we’ll talk about seasonal implications in a later chapter), with winter’s frost destroying the delicate young flower. He is considerably older than she, closely associated with the stifling Euro-Anglo-American society. She is fresh and innocent—and here is James’s

“A Hunger Artist” (1924), where, in a nifty reversal of the traditional vampire narrative, crowds of onlookers watch as the artist’s

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.

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

O’Brien has his characters fall through a hole in the road. Not only that, one of the characters subsequently says that the way to get out is to fall back up. When it’s stated this baldly, you automatically think of Lewis Carroll. Falling through a hole is like Alice in Wonderland (1865).

You say stories grow

there’s only one story

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.

deepens and enriches the reading experience,

bringing multiple layers of meaning to the text, some of which readers may not even consciously notice. The more we become aware of the possibility that our text is speaking to other texts, the more similarities and corresponde...