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

by Thomas C. Foster

new tales, as well as old tales with new wrinkles, continue to be told. Makes you want to keep getting up in the morning just to see what happens next.

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

real reason for a quest is always self-knowledge.

(and we’ve been given a head start by the title, whereas Gabriel doesn’t know his evening has a title),

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.

As you read, it may pay to remember this: there’s no such thing as a wholly original work of literature. Once you know that, you can go looking for old friends and asking the attendant question: “now where have I seen her before?”

a big part of that process is that you can’t create stories in a vacuum. Instead the mind flashes bits and pieces of childhood experiences, past reading, every movie the writer/creator has ever seen, last week’s argument with a phone solicitor—in short, everything that lurks in the recesses of the mind.

Although the story would go in different directions with a change of literary model, in either case it gains a kind of resonance from these different levels of narrative that begin to emerge; the story is no longer all on the surface but begins to have depth.

Here it is: there’s only one story. There, I said it and I can’t very well take it back. There is only one story. Ever. One. It’s always been going on and it’s everywhere around us and every story you’ve ever read or heard or watched is

part of it.

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.

So let’s consider why writers turn to our man. It makes them sound smarter? Smarter than what? Than quoting Rocky and Bullwinkle, for instance.

I often tell my students that reading is an activity of the imagination, and the imagination in question is not the writer’s alone.

Dorothy Richardson, Mina Loy, Stevie Smith, Edith Sitwell,

Because fairy tales, like Shakespeare, the Bible, mythology, and all other writing and telling, belong to the one big story, and because, since we were old enough to be read to or propped up in front of a television, we’ve been living on that story, and on its fairy variants. Once you’ve seen Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck in a version of one of the classics, you pretty much own it as part of your consciousness. In fact, it will be hard to read the Brothers Grimm and not think Brothers Warner.

T. S. Eliot

If you’re approached by some guy to drive his chariot, ask his name. If he says, “Hector,” do not consent. Do not stand still. Do not walk away. Run.

even epics work best if they are about not widespread events but single actions and their consequences—the

if Patroclus doesn’t die, Achilles doesn’t need new armor. That’s true, but the fact is that wonderful though it may be, his old armor just isn’t cool enough for him to be the greatest Greek hero,

Literature has its own logic; it is not life.

Yorick doesn’t count. In order to be a character, you have to be more than a skull.

trace, that points to something lying behind the text. It’s useful to keep in mind that any aspiring writer is probably also a hungry, aggressive reader and will have absorbed a tremendous amount of literary history and literary culture. By the time she writes her books, she has access to that tradition in ways that need not be conscious.

If they can, it’s not symbolism, it’s allegory. Here’s how allegory works: things stand for other things on a one-for-one basis.

A Passage to India (1924), E. M. Forster

Every reader’s experience of every work is unique, largely because each person will emphasize various elements to differing degrees, and those differences will cause certain features of the text to become more or less pronounced.

I watched Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946), where Claude Rains and Ingrid Bergman have twin beds. The man has never been born who, finding himself married to Ingrid Bergman, would assent to sleeping in twin beds.

Anthony Burgess has a novel about the Russian winter defeating the French emperor, Napoleon Symphony (1974),

We want to get to the titular house, of course, to meet the last, appalling members of the Usher clan, but Poe doesn’t want us there before he’s prepared us.

Heart of Darkness (1899), the

So cares and joys abound, as seasons fleet.”

The Greeks held their dramatic festivals, which featured almost entirely tragedy, at the beginning of spring. The idea was to purge all the built-up bad feeling of winter from the populace (and to instruct it in right conduct toward the gods) so that no negativity would attach to the growing season

Comedy was the genre of fall, once the harvest was in and celebrations and laughter were appropriate.

The Crucifixion and Resurrection come very near the spring equinox, the death of winter and beginning of renewed life. There is evidence in the Bible that the Crucifixion did in fact take place at that point in the calendar, although not that the birth took place anywhere near December 25.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889)

Your novel may contain echoes or refutations of novels or poems you’ve never read.

The movies you have seen were created by men and women who had seen others, and so on, until every movie connects with every other movie ever made.

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.

I think I had to read the story two more times before I got hooked into North Richmond Street being “blind.” The significance of that adjective isn’t immediately evident or relevant in itself. What it does, though, is set up a pattern of reference and suggestion

masterpiece Waiting for Godot

Ford Madox Ford called The Good Soldier (1915).

Despite this nearly constant use over at least twenty-eight hundred years, the figure of the heart never overstays its welcome, because it always is welcome. Writers use it because we feel it.

The Remorseful Day (1999),

Nathaniel Hawthorne

If you’re like me, you were told over and over again as a child to button your coat or put on a hat lest you catch your death of cold. We’ve never really accepted microbes into our lives. Even knowing how disease is transmitted, we remain largely superstitious.

Henry James

Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours (1998)

Yeats

There are layers and layers of possible meanings here, and we take what we can find, what we are prepared to deal with at the moment of our reading.

for Mrs. Dalloway or The Waste Land or As I Lay Dying or The French Lieutenant’s Woman