How to Read Novels Like a Professor Quotes

“The novels we read allow us to encounter possible persons, versions of ourselves hat we would never see, never permit ourselves to see, never permit ourselves to become, in places we can never go and might not care to, while assuring that we get to return home again”
― Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World's Favorite Literary Form

“The novels we read allow us to encounter possible persons, visions of ourselves that we would never see, never permit ourselves to become, in places we can never go and might not care to, while assuring that we get to return home again.”
― Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World's Favorite Literary Form

“When it's over, we may feel wooed, adored, appreciated, or abused, but it will have been an affair to remember.”
― Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World's Favorite Literary Form

“Every novel is brand-new. It’s never been written before in the history of the world. At the same time, it’s merely the latest in a long line of narratives—not just novels, but narratives generally—since humans began telling stories to themselves and each other.”
― Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World’s Favorite Literary Form

“We love the plays, the great characters, the fabulous speeches, the witty repartee even in times of duress. I hope never to be mortally stabbed, but if I am, I'd sure like to have the self-possession, when asked if it's bad, to answer, "No, 'tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door; but 'tis enough, 'twill serve," as Mercutio does in Romeo and Juliet. I mean, to be dying and clever at the same time, how can you not love that?”
― Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World's Favorite Literary Form

“characters as rich and complex as those we believe ourselves to be”
― Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World's Favorite Literary Form

“we accept fictions as fictions, as things that might be true in their world, if not quite in ours.”
― Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World’s Favorite Literary Form

“It isn’t always a matter, we should note, of identifying with the protagonist. No one I know, regardless of how much they love his novel, wants to be Humbert Humbert or Victor Frankenstein, although perhaps for different reasons. Or Heathcliff. Ever want to be Heathcliff? I didn’t think so. They are not the stuff of our fantasy lives, yet we may revel in their world, even while reviling their personalities. Consider Humbert. The narrative strategy Nabokov employs is very daring, since it demands that we identify with someone who is breaking what nearly everyone will consider the most absolute taboo. …Sympathy is out of the question. What the novel requires, however, is that we continue reading, something it audaciously gives us reason to do. The word games and intellectual brilliance helps, certainly; he’s detestable but charming and brilliant. The other element is that we watch him with a sort of appalled fascination: can he really intend that; does he really do this; would he really attempt even that; has he lost all sense of proportion? The answers are, in order, yes, yes, yes, and yes. Pretty clearly, then, there are pleasures in the text that are not inherent in the personality of the main character.”
― Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World's Favorite Literary Form

“Novels aren’t about heroes. They’re about us. The novel is a literary form that arose at the same time as the middle class in Europe, those people of small business and property who are neither peasant nor aristocrat, and it has always treated of the middle class. Both lyric and epic poetry grew out of a time that was elitist, a time that believed in the innate rate of royalty to rule and the rest of us to amount to not very much. Hardly surprising, then, that both forms lean toward the aristocratic in subject matter and treatment. The novel, on the other hand, isn’t about them; it’s about us.”
― Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World's Favorite Literary Form

“Films and television let us experience other lives vicariously, or perhaps voyeuristically, as we watch those lives play out. But in a novel, we can become those characters, we can identify from the inside with someone whose life is radically different from our own. Best of all, when it’s over … we get to be ourselves again, changed slightly or profoundly by the experience, possessed of new insights perhaps, but recognizably us once more.”
― Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World's Favorite Literary Form

“Where readers of Murdoch can begin a new novel with a quiet confidence, opening a Burgess book is an exercise in anxiety: what the devil is he up to this time?”
― Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World’s Favorite Literary Form

“I can’t go as far as Barthes in killing off the author, but I’m with him on the importance of the reader. We are the ones, after all, who exist long after the author (the real, physical being) is in the grave, choosing to read the book, deciding if it still has meaning, deciding what it means for us, feeling sympathy or contempt or amusement for its people and their problems. Take just the opening paragraph. If, having read that, we decide the book isn’t worth our time, then the book ceases to exist in any meaningful fashion. Someone else may cause it to live again another day in another reading, but for now, it’s dead. Did you have any idea you held so much power?”
― Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World's Favorite Literary Form

“I can’t go as far as Barthes in killing off the author, but I’m with him on the importance of the reader. We are the ones, after all, who exist long after the author (the real, physical being) is in the grave, choosing to read the book, deciding if it still has meaning, deciding what it means for us, feeling sympathy or contempt or amusement for its people and their problems. Take just the opening paragraph. If, having read that, we decide the book isn’t worth our time, then the book ceases to exist in any meaningful fashion. Someone else may cause it to live again another day in another reading, but for now, dead as Jacob Marley. Did you have any idea you held so much power?”
― Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World's Favorite Literary Form

“So how do we get from there to a pattern of experience that can stand for the whole of postcolonial Latin America? Ah, our para dox again. The solution, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars but in ourselves.”
― Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World’s Favorite Literary Form

“Characters live, dear reader, because we do.”
― Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World’s Favorite Literary Form

“There’s a reason Hemingway so rarely resorts to colons and semicolons: Faulkner took them all.”
― Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World’s Favorite Literary Form