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

by Thomas C. Foster

every work teaches us how to read it as we go along.

The arrow itself is stable; arrows are arrows.

The uses to which arrows can be put and the meanings we attach to them, however, are not so stable.

A Passage to India and Howards End (1910),

Those other aspects are a bit of ironic window dressing the author embeds in his text as cues for how to understand Alex’s story and the message he unwittingly conveys.

If you stopped to notice, was the air always like this?

Plus, writers do things sometimes because they “just feel right”; that is, not every choice is made consciously, although that doesn’t mean there’s no reason behind it.

Be intelligent, be bold, be assertive, be self-confident in your reading.

What I really mean is that you need to take ownership of your reading. It’s yours. It’s special. It is exactly like nobody else’s in the whole world.

Education is mostly about institutions and getting tickets stamped; learning is what we do for ourselves.

If a novel seems like an ordeal, quit; you’re not getting paid to read it, are you?

T. Coraghessan Boyle, Water Music (1981), “The Overcoat II” (1985), World’s End (1987).

Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac (1984).

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales

Hart Crane, The Bridge (1930). A great American poem sequence,

Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), A Christmas Carol (1843), David Copperfield (1850), Bleak House (1853), Great Expectations (1861).

E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime

William Faulkner, The Sound and The Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Absalom, Absalom! (1936).

Henry Fielding, Tom Jones

E. M. Forster, A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910), A Passage to India (1924).

John Fowles, The Magus (1966), The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969).

Henry Green, Blindness (1926), Living (1929), Party Going (1939), Loving (1945).

Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (1929).

Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891).

The Sun Also Rises (1926), “Hills Like White Elephants” (1927), A Farewell to Arms (1929), “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), The Old Man and the Sea

Homer, The Iliad, The Odyssey

Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur (late fifteenth century).

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

Edgar Allan Poe,

William Shakespeare

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late fourteenth century). Not for beginners, I think. At least it wasn’t for me when

Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (1883), The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), The Master of Ballantrae (1889).

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885).

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927).

William Butler Yeats,

M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms (1957).

E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel.

Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism

Edward Hirsch, How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations