About book How To Read Literature Like A Professor: A Lively And Entertaining Guide To Reading Between The Lines (2003)
Read literature like a Pro: A Cheat-SheetFoster comes across for the most part of the book as Captain Obvious, or rather Prof. Obvious and maybe even as Dr. Condescending, M.A., Ph.D., etc.But no matter how frustrated with the book I was at times, Foster does have a language that reminded me constantly of all my english professors and since I have always loved my literature classes and the teachers, it was easier to swallow. The book treats only very obvious and surface level things like 'if he almost drowns then he is symbolically reborn' etc. He takes us through a variety of such things ‘hidden’ in literature that we should be on the lookout for to truly enjoy any reading. The only problem is that he never goes deep enough to let help a reader think analytically of what can be considered challenging literature.But sometime obvious things are worth restating too and sometimes they help us develop a pattern of thinking that will eventually evolve by itself into what is really required. And that in the end might be the real goal of the book. In that case Foster can consider it a reasonable success.So here is a quick list of easy things to watch out for when you read literature:1) Every time a character in the book takes any journey/trip of any sort, start looking for tropes like gatekeepers, dragons, treasures etc. Chances are high that it is a mythic Quest of some sort.2) If you come across a scene involving the characters eating together, especially if a whole chapter is dedicated to it, possibly it is being used to explore their relations and it is an act of Communion with all that the word implies.3) Vampires exist, even when they don't. If it is not Twilight, chances are that it has literary significance. And if it does, the vampire figure is probably being used to hide a lot of sexual and societal undertones about chastity and selfishness. And even when a book has nothing to do with vampires, it would serve you well to identify vampires who suck others' blood to survive.4) Sonnet is the most used type of poetry? - Frankly I am not sure why this chapter came in and how it helps the readers in anyway except to recognize when they meet a sonnet - they look square.5) You will meet historical figures like Napoleon, Caesar and Gandhi in many guises even when the situation does not seem to indicate it. If you do recognize this hidden historical aspect of the character, then the story will acquire a new dimension6) References and quotations from Shakespeare and Bible, including situations and entire plots abound in literature. (Duh)7) Fairy tales form an important part of literature too and you might want to have a look-out for Hansel and Gretel's witch anytime people get lost in unfamiliar territory.8) Greek symbolism and myths crop up everywhere and be ready for your author being a Homer in disguise trying to tell a modern version. And most of western literature taps this well-spring9) Weather is always symbolic and Rain, Spring, etc. have deep rooted meaning which authors exploit consistently. If it is raining and things look gloomy, that might be irony or they might have heard of London (Foster doesn't seem to have).10) When violence is used in a text, it is probably a plot device. So start thinking about why did he have to hit him with a baseball bat and not with a table lamp and why the character had to climb that mountain to die.11) Almost everything that is repeated can be symbolic, even events and actions. There is no way to list them out so get in the habit of being paranoid.12) Politics of the day inevitably seeps into any work and knowing that helps in understanding any prejudices which might not be acceptable today and also in understanding the real motivations. Who can read and understand Hemingway without knowing of his history?13) Christ figures are everywhere and anytime anyone is even slightly noble be on the lookout for christ archetypes like disciples and sacrifice and betrayal.14) If anyone flies or falls for too long, Icarus and his imaginary cousins are probably being invoked.15) Lot of things can stand for sex and it is important to understand the meaning of tall buildings. If they write about sex when they mean strictly sex, we have another word for that - pornography.16) If anyone gets wet in a book, they might change their life after that. They might be baptized into another life in short17) Geography is probably the most important part of any novel. Geography and Season - think about why the author used that setting and the motifs of the novel will become clearer.18) There is only One Story - whatever that means.19) If any character has a scar (lightening?), it usually is a means to set him/her apart and the nature of the scar is symbolic. It could be scar/defect or ever a mild skin coloration - but it is a device to set up for greater things.20) If a character is blind, ask what he is blind to or what others are blind to. It certainly is not just about physical sight.21) Whenever any sort of illness comes in, it is usually a metaphor - especially if it is heart disease, TB (consumption), AIDS, Cancer or mysterious in some way. In literature disease is never caused by microscopic mundane things - it is caused by society and character. 22) Read any work from the time frame in which it was written. 23) Irony trumps everything else. If the author defeats your expectation with any symbol, he is so ironing you. This can work at many levels of course, he might defeat your expectation of being subject to irony by using the actual meaning and so on.So. Long list? Not if you read a lot. You can see all this in three days of light reading. In fact I am tending to be lenient in this review mostly due to that wonderful last chapter where he gives an example short story and analyses it. That one chapter makes the whole book worth reading. The reading list at the end is also useful and I have reproduced it here.But getting back to the means of analyses listed above.Were they too obvious? Or are you not confident that you will start spotting them from tomorrow? Either way, it might help us get into the habit as I said earlier and that is what really matters.The only way to catch on to all these devices and symbols is to be familiar with them. And the only way to do that? Read, of course. Read a hell lot.So you can see that you need to have read a lot. I mean a lot. And be very conversant with all the tropes and history of literature and myth to fully enjoy or critique serious works - that is, you need to have had a life dedicated to reading to enjoy reading. In other words, to read literature like a professor you need to be a professor of literature. Bingo. InsightPS. Of course the iterative growth in the pleasure of reading is known to every bookworm - we are addicted to books as it keeps getting better with every new book we read - the connections, the intertextuality and the by-lanes all become clearer and more and more FUN.PPS. Susan Sontag makes another arbitrary appearance, haunting my reading list.
Feeling like I needed to discover more insight and depth to my reading, I mentioned that fact to Goodreads friend Will Byrnes who suggested this book. (By the way, Will's reviews are very, very thoughful, popular and readable.) So I'm glad he did recommend it because it was such a great and painless way for me to understand the underlying thoughts and references of books I read. Broken into short chapters, it covers all areas that I could possibly think of although author and Professor Thomas C. Foster stated at the end (the chapter titled Envoi; (definition: the usually explanatory or commendatory concluding remarks to a poem, essay, or book)) that he could have written a book twice as long. Most of the readers I know who are not English majors, may not have known that term; I didn’t.Foster is a professor of English at the University Michigan at Flint, and teaches classic and contemporary fiction, drama, poetry creative writing and composition. With such credentials he certainly knows this subject and I can attest to that. Some chapter titles:•tNow, Where Have I Seen Her Before?•tWhen in Doubt, It’s from Shakespeare•tIt’s More Than Just Rain or snow•tIt’s All A bout Sex•t…Except Sex•tIs that a Symbol? Professor Foster appears to be a lighthearted individual and I would have loved to have been in one of his classes. He was able to break down into a layperson’s (or lay-reader) terms, difficult and complex thoughts many times with light, airy humor. In fact in the envoi he says “You’ve really been very good about all this, very sporting. You’ve borne my guff and my wisecracks and my annoying mannerisms much better than I have any right to expect.” The fact is that they didn’t annoy me one iota; they added to any tedium which I had initially expected. Prior to beginning the book I glanced at a number of reviews on Goodreads and Amazon and noticed more than one person say Professor Foster was condescending to the reader. I totally disagree with that opinion. Perhaps the reviewer attended many more English lit classes than I did and if so, perhaps they should have been reading something much more sophisticated, something more at their reading level, not the average reader, which I consider myself. Come to find out, this is required reading in our local high schools. That’s a good thing, reaching young readers. Wish I would have read this book years ago since my major was communications with poli-sci minor. Communications as a major covers writing for the masses, advertising, and well, you get the picture. And as we know, newspaper writing was and maybe still is, at the 8th grade level. Not many challenges at that level. Not berating my education, or related professions simply explaining why I didn’t take more English lit, composition or poetry classes and had never heard the word envoi that I can recall.A few, very few observations from the book that I took away: Trust your instincts; your conclusions cannot be wrong because they're based on your past experiences in life and your prior reading experience; at times the character names relate to the theme of the book so look at them carefully and if you read something in the names, you’re probably right; your past experience as a reader is related to your observation of what the author is saying (know I said that twice but it bears repeating); irony trumps all; ‘always’ and ‘never’ aren’t good words to use in literary studies; trust your gut; the real reason for a quest is always self-knowledge. I particularly love the last observation from Professor Foster, always about self-knowledge. The more you’ve read the more similarities you see and 'oh, I remember that; observations you can make. I have read some reviewers on other books criticize a book because they had to 'stop at the phone booth to make call' or the book was degrading to women or saying the book was 'dated." The reader must put themselves in the time in which the book was written. In Pride and Prejudice you wouldn’t expect a yellow cab to show at the door, would you? Think in the context of the period the book was writen, the societal mores of the time. Women didn’t always have the right to vote or to publicly voice their opinion. Books written in the early 1800’s would have women in a far different position within society and the written word. Become one in the era of the book. Professor Foster asks the question, “Okay, let’s say you’re right and there is a set of conventions, a key to reading literature. How do I get so I can recognize these? Same way you get to Carnegie hall. Practice.” Simple answer, practice, practice and more practice. My only regret which, of course, is no fault of the author, is that I have not read many of the books which he refers to as examples. Many of them were obscure and printed in the 1800’s and early 1900’s (or much earlier as Iliad and Odyssey) so I shouldn’t beat myself up over that. I was able to grasp his explanation though with his writing, enough for me to understand his explanation without reading the books. And I’m not and never will be an English lit major. Noticed on the back of the book, the author wrote How to Read Novels Like a Professor. I will definitely read that in the near future. Just started a Ross MacDonald, 1950’s hard-boiled fiction, The Drowning Pool. MacDonald is highly touted by many contemporary writers as being a writer who inspired them to pick up a pen and write (or sit in front of a computer like I’m doing now.) Although I've just read about a quarter of the book, can already see that reading this book has helped me to not "read with my eyes" which happens to be the name of a chapter. But noticed in the recesses of my mind, I'm understanding more as I read. I feel this book, did make me a better and more thoughtful reader so it accomplished its purpose. Thank you, Professor Foster. Enjoyed your class. Recommend it all my friends.
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A better subtitle to this book might be "Understanding Symbology," but then you would miss the "lively" and "entertaining" part of the current subtitle, and that shouldn't be thrown away. This is probably the best book I've ever read about the ugly task of decoding literature, and I would highly recommend it as a graduation present for any high school student who plans to attend college. It's that good. Foster is no dry academic, although his taste still runs to the rather mundane type of literature that doesn't do anything for me personally. What Foster is good about, though, is explaining exactly why he finds that type of literature exciting and how one can decipher it to understand what those darn professors find interesting about it, too.This is a nice companion piece to Jane Smiley's Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, especially her chapter on how novelists play games when writing. Smiley comes to the novel as a practioner; Foster looks at the novel as a cartographer. Smiley explains how to play the game, while Foster shows how to understand what the game was that the novelist was playing. Do all novelists play games? No, only the better ones. It's not that novels that have nothing going for them beyond the plot are bad per se, but like a movie that goes from one chase sequence to showdown, a plot-only novel is one-dimensional.The only thing missing in Foster's explication here is an understanding for novels of ideas, which often get short shrift from the academy, sometimes rightly (when the novel has no plot or characters and only presents the ideas) but often overlooked because the novelist eschews symbology for prognostication. It's only a slight misstep, and one easily forgiven for most college classes where this book will come in handy won't be covering those kinds of books anyway.
—Glen Engel-Cox
Alternate title: How To Talk About Literature Like You Have An Enormous Goddamn Stick Up Your Butt.I can't decide whether I like this book or not, so I suppose it's really a 2.5 star-er.While Mr. Foster does make some really good points, he also is handicapped by the fact that he is writing exclusively for an American audience- often the conversational style will reference something like the 'nation' to which 'we' belong, or at one point 'this great republic'. This, to a more... shall we say, sensitive reader... comes off as Anglocentrism of the worst kind, and even more- ethnocentrism. While he does mitigate this about halfway through the book by finally (FINALLY) mentioning that a reader's perspective will be different if they've been raised Muslim or Hindu, etc, it felt to me like too little too late. The clincher, though, came earlier, with his assertion that the sonnet was the only form of poetry the reader ever needed to be able to recognize. In one sentence, he managed a momentous thing: to dismiss the literary and poetic traditions of oh, about a HEMISPHERE. Actually, more than a hemisphere.On the other hand, some of the ideas he brings up are things I'd never thought of in terms of literature. (The chapter on food was of particular interest to me, and left me with the desire to re-read the entire Redwall series. Om nom feasts nom.)Conclusion: I read it for summer homework for AP Literature and Composition and have the uncomfortable feeling that my teacher will treat it as the Holy Writ of Analysis. This it is not. Foster himself admits the fallability of his book- that it doesn't cover nearly as many kinds of symbolism or topics as it needs to to be complete. More than that, it is flawed in that it addresses only Western literature. The reader who wants to understand the Mahabharata had best look elsewhere. BUT, with a good discussion that includes an admission of its faults, this book can become a useful tool in analysis and the teaching thereof.EDIT: I should mention a few things more. One, I would have liked this book better if Foster hadn't added his attempts at snappy one-liners at the end of each chapter. It felt... false, and it wasn't funny. Two, I generally detest analysis. I give this book credit in a job well done in that it not only has me seeing symbols everywhere (even in YA) but I have the urge to find someone to discuss these symbols with so that we can discover what they mean through cooperation. This feeling is wierd.
—Anila
So I was pretty excited upon starting this book. There's been a lot of good reviews about this, both on here and from people I know. It started out pretty good, but by the second chapter, I was getting irritated with the author. I continued on, since I have to read this for school, and it annoyingly got worse, then a little better in the middle, and finished okay at the end. I had three main problems with the Mr. Foster:1) He was very condescending to his readers. There were a lot of moments in the book that really irked me because he was talking to me like I was stupid.2) This probably wouldn't be that big of a deal to other people, but growing up in the South and also being Asian has taught me to respect my elders, so when I saw him disrespecting other authors and their works, that really pissed me off. But it was just tiny things, until near the end, when he tried summarising the story of Demeter, Hades, and Persephone, and totally degraded the story. I don't know if he was trying to make the story interesting for the readers by making it 'hip', but he could've just settled for just summing up the story without all those 'cool' terms.3) He was constantly saying things were 'Bible-related': OMG, someone went into the water, they must've been baptised! orWow, we just had a meal together so we must've had communion. orHm, that person is a leader, has a lot of followers, and someone betrayed him! He's a Christ figure!! Um, no. I don't consider myself a very religious person, but I definitely don't think you should be using those terms to describe such simple things. It was, like I said before, highly disrespectful. All in all, I didn't learn anything, but I will grudgingly say that whenever I start a film or book now, the first thing I think of is symbolism or where the original idea may have came from.
—Jenny
