Staff Pick - How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster

[Brian Bess]

Making the space between the lines less intimidating

Not often, but sometimes, I get nostalgic about my days as an English major when literary analysis was a very important priority that spilled over from my academic life into the rest of my life and how it colored the way I viewed people around me. Being a full-time student and living rent free at the parents’ house without a job or the need to worry about paying bills enabled me to devote as much of my psychic energy toward literary matters as I cared to. Although I’ve been away from that setting for 40 years now, the training in literary reading that I received then is built into the way I read books, watch movies and listen to music today.

When I spotted ‘How to Read Literature Like a Professor’ in a summer reading list for students I decided to revisit that world of literature. I admire Thomas Foster’s intent and I share it in my own approach toward literary discussions with people that might be intimidated by “serious” literature.

Foster sets his audience at ease immediately by adopting a relaxed, humorous, conversational tone. Nothing to get stressed about here, he’s saying. This can actually be fun, or close to it, if you follow some of the tips I’m going to present to you.

He covers such topics as quests, disease and death, sex and the absence of sex, violence, allusions to Shakespeare and the Bible, mythology, weather, geography, Christian symbology and many of the key elements that reside in literary works, past and present.

He cites American and British novelists, short story writers and poets primarily, which disappoints me personally because he excludes much of the rest of the world’s literature. This is exactly what most of the syllabi in my university English courses did as well. When I see those kinds of omissions I recoil a bit but then I have to step back and look. How many high school students, much less undergraduate university students are ever assigned Flaubert or Balzac or Mann or Dostoevsky or Chekhov? Foster’s examples will probably be more useful to the student who has not read extensively in any literature and will be more likely to encounter these American and British works than if he had cited several European or Asian authors that they will probably never be exposed to. He even neglects to mention many great American and British authors but I realize that in a book of 300 pages he can’t mention every major author.

I recommend this book for teachers as well as students and their parents or anyone that might be curious about learning more about literature without necessarily reading the often long and arduous works themselves. I believe that internalizing many of the approaches Foster presents will provide the prospective reader with ammunition for tackling major stories, poems, plays and novels with more assurance and confidence of having an enlightening aesthetic experience.
I can’t really state the intent of this book any better than Foster does himself, so here he is:
“What this book represents is not a database of all the cultural codes by which writers create and readers understand the products of that creation, but a template, a pattern, a grammar of sorts from which you can learn to look for those codes on your own. No one would include them all, and no reader would want to plow through the resulting encyclopedia.”

[Jessica]

Thanks for the suggestion! I studied engineering in college, and sometimes I wish that I had taken a couple more literature classes to study literature topics deeper.

[Brian Bess]

Thanks, Jessica!