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

by Thomas C. Foster

subtler,

inconceivable

milquetoast.

incredulous

sleight

Every language has a grammar, a set of rules that govern usage and meaning, and literary language is no different.

arbitrary,

inherently;

digressed,

Stories and novels have a very large set of conventions: types of characters, plot rhythms, chapter structures, point-of-view limitations.

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

corollaries—where

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

predisposition

Like the symbolic imagination, this is a function of being able to distance oneself from the story, to look beyond the purely affective level of plot, drama, characters.

nonliterary

the Oedipal complex.

psychoanalytical

demonic

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.

patriarchal,