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

by Thomas C. Foster

The grammar of the essay. You can read, and part of reading is knowing the conventions, recognizing them, and anticipating the results.

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.

This predisposition to understand the world in symbolic terms is reinforced, of course, by years of training that encourages and rewards the symbolic imagination.

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.

(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. Item (a)