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

by Thomas C. Foster

and I suppose they do,

More often than not, that punctuation is a period. It should be a question mark, though, because what occurs from then on is anybody’s guess.

but the nontraditional students have taught me a few things.

First, never assume anything about background experience.

Second, explain yourself.

And third, teach precepts, then stand aside.

A Raisin in the Sun (1959),

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

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

the Oedipal complex.

(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.

whenever people eat or drink together, it’s communion. For some reasons, this is often met with a slightly scandalized look, communion having for many readers one and only one meaning. While that meaning is very important, it is not the only one. Nor, for that matter, does Christianity have a lock on the practice. Nearly every religion has some liturgical or social ritual involving the coming together of the faithful to share sustenance. So I have to explain that just as intercourse has meanings other than sexual, or at least did at one time, so not all communions are holy.

ghosts and vampires are never only about ghosts and vampires.

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.

the figure of the cannibal, the vampire, the succubus, the spook announces itself again and again where someone grows in strength by weakening someone else.

Not just to look but where to look, and how to look.

there’s no such thing as a wholly original work of literature.

intertextuality.

the big eraser that destroys but also allows a brand-new start.

Characters are products of writers’ imaginations—and readers’ imaginations.

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

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

conceit,

rain-life-birth-promise-restoration-fertility-continuity.

Own the books you read.