How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines
 | Average Customer Rating: Recommend What does it mean when a fictional hero takes a journey?. Shares a meal? Gets drenched in a sudden rain shower? Often, there is much more going on in a novel or poem than is readily visible on the surface -- a symbol, maybe, that remains elusive, or an unexpected twist on a character -- and there's that sneaking suspicion that the deeper meaning of a literary text keeps escaping you.In this practical and amusing guide to literature, Thomas C. Foster shows how easy… Product details and pricing info |
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64 Customer Reviews Posted
- I Wish This Book Was Available When I was in High School and College
- Back in the day when I was in high school and college, Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren's classic tome HOW TO READ A BOOK was suggested reading for anyone who was studying literature, philosophy, or any of the other subjects of a traditional classical education. I recall one professor suggesting someone write a book called HOW TO READ MORTIMER ADLER AND CHARLES VAN DOREN'S HOW TO READ A BOOK. As I recall the book was helpful but I'm wondering if a book such as Thomas Foster's HOW TO READ LITERATURE LIKE A PROFESSOR would have a bit more helpful and perhaps would have given Adler and Van Doren a bit of competition.
I first saw the title a few months back when bookstores began displaying books that were required summer reading in area high schools. The selections amazed me. Staples such as HUCKLEBERRY FINN, THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV and A TALE OF TWO CITIES were still included in the stacks along with authors such as Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, John Updike, and Marilynne Robinson. Summer reading lists have expanded and in many cases are more challenging. I also saw HOW TO READ LITERATURE LIKE A PROFESSOR in the same displays. I'm not sure if teachers are requiring this book as a companion or whether the booksellers are hoping that students will buy this guide that's bound to be useful in reading and writing about literature.
The book is set up into a number of small chapters that deals with understanding literature. Each chapter has illustrations from the wide worlds of literature and Foster makes sure he includes everything from antiquity to the present day. It also includes a good bibliography as well as film suggestions (much of what Foster says can be applied to film studies as well).
Students are the obvious target audience for this book with English teachers not that far behind. My guess is that this book will be a godsend in the classroom. It will enable actual discussions about literature to start. I purchased it as a guide for a book club I belong to, and since I love to write, I've been using it to help me shape portions of my novel in progress. People who are involve din Bible Study may also find this book helpful. The Bible does contain so many universal themes in literature and like good literature, shows humanity at its bets and worst. I'm also thinking another audience will enjoy it. I know a number of people who are rereading classics or picking up books that were supposed to be read in high school and college but instead got the "Cliffs Notes" treatment. People are also reading more challenging books for personal pleasure. This book is like having an answer machine nearby and is bound to make reading more meaningful. - 2006-07-02, 6 of 6 people found this review helpful, Rated:
- A Teacher's Guide to Lit.
- This tongue-in-cheek volume was written by an English professor of fiction, drama and poetry (as my husband was); also creative writing and composition (as son Zach does). If you really want to read English lit. like a professor, you do as I did: find a "professional copy" of a course text with annotations and leverage for the teacher. The students think he knows what he's talking about, when actually it is really from his faculty/teacher's manual.
You might get lucky and find such an intensive book of Literature at the closest Goodwill store. If not, get this one and take it with a grain of salt. No one can read lit. like a prof. unless he is or ever was one. I know for a fact as I married my college teacher who taught English and American literature classes. I had to take the English, he said, because it was the hardest. In poetry, according to my guide, words are the building blocks while imagery is the poem's link to the senses. Prosody is the sound, rhythm, and rhyme in poetry and form is the shape of the poem. Myth is the symbolism allusions in poetry. Theme includes the idea and meaning in poetry. Some English poems were written by Christopher Marlowe, Sir Walter Raleigh, Thomas Gray, William Wordsworth, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, Thomas Hardy, and my favorite, Leigh Hunt ("Abou Ben Adhem"). Drama included Shakespeare's Hamlet, Prince of Denmark which Zach used for his master's dissertation, "The religious aspects of Hamlet."
In Lit. there are realistic and nonrealistic plays, like Ibsen's "A Doll's House" and Albee's "The Sandbox." Comedies such as Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "Love is the Doctor" by Moliere fit the bill.
Anyone can read literature like a professor if they should be fortunate enough to find such a treasure in used books. Or, this practice in reading lit. by an expert may be essential -- if you've never been married to an English Prof. or had one for a son. - 2006-06-09, 1 of 29 people found this review helpful, Rated:
- A Cram Course in how to read literature
- I might have picked an alternative title for this book, like "How To Read Literature," which takes the focus away from the academic sounding title and places it more in the works themselves. Once upon a time, people who were 'serious' about writing shared a particular set of 'texts in their heads.' They were usually the Bible, medieval literature, Greek tragedies, and so forth. This became a sort of 'code' that literary people could encode and decode through reading stories, poems, epics, and the like. The nice thing about the 'codes' (unlike the DaVinci Code) was that they were aesthetically pleasing, i.e., they were enjoyed for their imagery, character, setting, tone, development, ironies, and so forth. Thomas Foster provides a crash course in learning about these codes like the hero code, the saviour code, the sacrificial code, the morse code (only kidding), and so forth. The code was more thoroughly 'codified' by Northrup Frye back in the 50's & 60's, but getting people to read any of his major books instead of this one would be like giving most people a choice between reading War & Peace or watching an episode of the 'Sopranos'. So, sure you can learn to read like a particular type of college professor from the instructions in this book, but this partly misses the point. At one time, these ideas, principles, codes, etc., MEANT something to people. People really believed in them and considered them. Nowadays, such code catching has come down quite frequently to outdoing someone in coming up with the most decodings, or we should say "recoding" because you can't really decode something since you have to express it into another code, right? Otherwise, you'd just have silence or a blank page, and Sam Beckett even made those things into codes. The book has a light-hearted tone and intelligentlly written, but learning this stuff without finding meaning in it would be like wearing a crucifix around your neck because you thought it had nice symmetry. Hey, that's ok, but then all you end up with is an object. Now if you are--or your professors ar--into post-modernism b.s., you will probably learn that these codes are just a lot of obfuscation and arbitrary to boot, and, so, for example, Jesus on the Cross doesn't mean anything except that some guy is in deep sh_t, but that's probably covered in some other book.
- 2006-05-13, 7 of 7 people found this review helpful, Rated:
- Could be quite useful to an incoming Freshman in college
- 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. - 2006-03-06, 10 of 10 people found this review helpful, Rated:
- How one professor looks at literature
- This book is full of great examples of how to interpret literature. Unfortunately, it falls short on imagination and coveniently slots themes, plots and characters into several well contrived but narrow definitions. It is a good read for those studying literature but does not hold the answers that it seems to promise from the title.
- 2006-01-29, 6 of 11 people found this review helpful, Rated:
