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.

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.

History is story, too.

“resonance test.” If I hear something going on in a text that seems to be beyond the scope of the story’s or poem’s immediate dimensions, if it resonates outside itself, I start looking for allusions to older and bigger texts.

If you want topical resonance, current film or television may work fine, although the frame of reference as well as the staying power may be a little limited.

Plus, his quotes are like eligible persons of the other sex: all the good ones are taken. Maybe

Rain falls on the just and the unjust alike.

One of the paradoxes of rain is how clean it is coming down and how much mud it can make when it lands.

If something informed the author’s creation of the text but the evidence is not present in the text, that’s a matter for scholars concerned with motives, not with readers wrestling with meaning.

There are all kinds of sources of this next-man-over mayhem—cosmic spite, bad luck, the need for a whipping boy, you name it—but they nearly all come under the heading of plot exigency.

don’t know a soul who appreciates and enjoys literature as much as experts who can really take it apart. Why do you think we became experts in the first place? Because we loved reading this stuff. Intelligent readers can keep both these

Flat characters are easier to know in terms of their intent and narrative purpose, and we readers can use all the

we readers sometimes forget how long literary composition can take and how very much lateral thinking can go on in that amount of time.

If they can, it’s not symbolism, it’s allegory. Here’s

and the tyrant (Dame Van Winkle) is dead. Rip nearly gets attacked when he says

when writers send characters south, it’s so they can run amok.

We might add, if we’re being generous, that they run amok because they are having direct, raw encounters with the subconscious.

Wordsworth and the Romantic poets, the sublime landscape—the dramatic and breathtaking vista—has been idealized, sometimes to the point of

Auden argues for a humanity-friendly poetry, challenging certain inhuman ideas that have dominated poetic thinking for a goodly period before he came along.

So, amnesia. When the writer gets to work, she has to shut out the voices and write what she writes, say what she has to say. What the unremembering trick does is clear out this history from the front of her mind so her own poem can come in.

If we were headed to the theater to watch a play called Wounded Foot the King (which is what that title means), we’d already know something was up.

everyone, Durrell seems to be saying, is damaged in some way or other, and no matter how careful or fortunate we might seem to be, we don’t get through life without being marked by the experience.

The industrial revolution was just starting up, and this new world would threaten everything people had known during the Enlightenment; at the same time, the new science and the new faith in science—including anatomical research, of course—imperiled many religious and philosophical tenets of English society in the first decades of the nineteenth century.

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

if you want your audience to know something important about your character (or the work at large), introduce it early, before you need it.

excessive anything, including irony, is bad for you—but that’s not the point. But

The fever could represent the randomness of fate, the harshness of life, the unknowability of the mind of God, the playwright’s lack of imagination, any of a wide array of possibilities.

I also need to acknowledge here that there is a different model of professional reading, deconstruction, that pushes skepticism and doubt to its extreme, questioning nearly everything in the story or poem at hand, to deconstruct the work and show how the author is not really in charge of his materials.

For me, if it must rely on hatred in order to function, it has to go.

so they’re a little like Hegel’s or Marx’s dialectic, in which opposing forces clash together to create a new reality.

The real problem is that “inexperienced” readers tend to deny themselves credit for the experience they do have.

Compelled belief is no belief at all. The Gospels offer

society has not only failed to correct Alex but has committed a far worse crime against him by taking away his free will, which for Burgess is the hallmark of the human being.

irony doesn’t work for everyone. Because of the multivocal nature of irony—we hear those multiple voices simultaneously—readers who are inclined toward univocal utterances simply may not register that multiplicity.

“Mother, a man’s been killed,” began Laura. “Not in the garden?” interrupted her mother. “No, no!” “Oh, what a fright you gave me!”

don’t on any account—” “What, mother?” No, better not put such ideas into the child’s head! “Nothing!

This is, in fact, his point: the writer, he or she who writes, is just fine; the problem comes in with the author, the ultimate authority on the text.

Often, too often, I find students apologizing for the way they see a work: “It’s only my opinion, but” or “I’m probably wrong, but” or some other iteration of this lame act of contrition. Stop apologizing! It doesn’t help, and it sells the speaker short. Be intelligent, be bold, be assertive, be self-confident in your reading. It is your opinion (but not “just”) and you might be wrong, although that’s less likely than most students think.

You and I both know you’re capable and intelligent, so don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Trust the text and trust your instincts. You’ll rarely go far wrong.