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.

English professors, as a class, are cursed with memory. Whenever I read a new work, I spin the mental Rolodex looking for correspondences and corollaries—where have I seen his face, don’t I know that theme?

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

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. That’s why questers are so often young, inexperienced, immature, sheltered. Forty-five-year-old men either have self-knowledge or they’re never going to get it, while your average sixteen-to-seventeen-year-old kid is likely to have a long way to go in the self-knowledge department.

whenever people eat or drink together, it’s communion.

He discovers he has something in common with this stranger—eating as a fundamental element of life—that there is a bond between them.

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

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.

That’s pretty much what the vampire does, after all. He wakes up in the morning—actually the evening, now that I think about it—and says something like, “In order to remain undead, I must steal the life force of someone whose fate matters less to me than my own.” I’ve always supposed that Wall Street traders utter essentially the same sentence.

It’s worth remembering that comparatively few writers slavishly copy bits of Shakespeare’s work into their own. More commonly there is this kind of dialogue going on in which the new work, while taking bits from the older, is also having its say.