Worth Books - Summary and Analysis of How to Read Literature Like a Professor: Based on the Book by Thomas C. Foster

Summary and Analysis of

How to Read Literature Like a Professor

A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines

Based on the Book by Thomas C. Foster

Contents

Context

First published in 2003 and rereleased in 2014, ThomasC. Fosters How to Read Literature Like a Professor isthe culmination of a literature professors life and work in the art of storytellingthat has sold more than one million copies. Over the course of decades of experiencewith his students at the University of MichiganFlint, Foster devised a method ofexplicating great literature in approachable ways that can also be useful to casualor avid readers. How to Read Literature Like aProfessor became the first of a series that includes How to Read Novels Like a Professor (2008) and How to Read Literature Like a Professor: For Kids (2013).

In a world overflowing with information, tweets, blog posts, and countless online articles, the joyor even the pointof slowly reading a good book is often lost. In Fosters original workpublished the year before Facebook was launched, but many years after the dawn of the cell phonereaders gain insight into the same tools and methods that great thinkers, writers, and readers have always found essential when it comes to understanding works of fiction. A single book can open innumerable doors to vistas in history, art, psychology, religion, science, human nature, and so much more.

Books are the original hypertext, with links to other ideas and other books all over the world. In the same way a beginner in golf, or a medical student, needs guidance from professionals before becoming an expert, readers can benefit from assistance, too. Fosters book was written to provide interested lay readers with a kind of portable educationan easy way for the average person to, over time, greatly improve his or her comprehension and enjoyment of the best books the language has to offer, as well as excellent ways to examine the latest summer blockbuster.

Overview

Are there things a reader absolutely needs to know before entering the world of a novel? According to Foster, the answer is both yes and no. No, because a great book is constructed as a stand-alone work of art, a discrete and self-contained piece of writing. Yet at the same time, novels dont exist in a vacuum. Nor do their authors. Good books are created in the context of all of the literature that came before them. So, will knowing something of the history of literary thought and symbols help you to better understand David Foster Wallaces Infinite Jest , Toni Morrisons Beloved , or even the Twilight series? Will it enhance your experience of a historical romance or a page-turner of a thriller to be familiar with Homer, Shakespeare, and the Old Testament? For Foster, the answer is absolutely . The symbolic archetypes contained in all of these works have meaning in culture, and so they have meaning in literature.

What Foster wants to impress upon readers is that knowing more of these kinds of symbols and allusionsthe kinds of constructs college professors examine and work withwill expand any average readers thinking about what a book means and produce new understandings with each rereading.

Foster breaks How to Read Literature Like a Professor into three sections. The first section presents the basics: the necessities for an improved, or professorial, understanding of great books. These include the essential symbolic languages of the following literary mainstays: Quest narrative, religious aspects (such as communion), Shakespeare, Bible stories, Homeric, and childrens folk tales. All of these symbolic languages are interrelated and feed off of one another.

In the second section, Foster moves into broader concepts of symbolism and potential meaning, analyzing general themes more broadly. These include themes such as sex, violence, religious imagery, geography, politics, and weather. The relevance of such themes has to be seen in context of what the writer is doing, what story he or she is telling. Yet often, great writers include ideas and themes that would appear to have no connection to the plot or story at all. These may involve the themes mentioned above, but can easily expand into more specific references to Freud, politics, ancient history, psychology, and theoretical science, to name a few. Thats because authors, aside from inventing characters and plunging them ahead through a plot, do a lot of what Foster calls lateral thinking. Although not often central to the story, keeping an eye on tangential aspects of a novel or play (say, when a story takes place in the autumn as opposed to the spring, or when a character picks up and moves south instead of north) can inform your understanding of the work.

In the concluding section of the book, Foster reveals his personal belief that in literature, there is only one story . What does that mean? Can Hamlet really be the same as Harry Potter? Well, no. And yes. Its all part of what Foster calls the ur-story, that is, the story of humanity, what were doing here, and how we cope with being in the world. Themes, symbols, influences, characters, and plots all vary, but the central question of how to live in the world remains the same.

Foster discusses universal themes of the body and health and how physical decay and disability affect us all. These symbols and metaphors, like the others, may be included in a work of literature so that the reader can gain a richer understanding of what the story means for his or her own life. That, according to Thomas C. Foster, is what reading is really all about.

Summary

Chapter 1. Every Trip Is a Quest (Except When Its Not)

Through the broad outline of an imagined story involving a young mans trip to a grocery store, the meaning and applicability of the quest narrative (including a knight, a dangerous road, a dragon, an evil knight, and a princess) is presented. Such a traditional narrative is present in works as varied as Thomas Pynchons The Crying of Lot 49 , Edmund Spensers The Faerie Queene , and Mark Twains Huckleberry Finn . Although a quest narrative can be interpreted in any number of ways, the central meaning of such a story is always the same: The heros journey is undertaken to obtain self-knowledge.

Chapter 2. Nice to Eat with You: Acts of Communion

When characters in a drama or story eat together, such as in Henry Fieldings Tom Jones or Raymond Carvers story Cathedral, its not simply an arbitrary event like the same people attending a party or a baseball game. The act of sharing a meal is meant to demonstrate their basic connection with one another. In many texts, when characters eat a meal together, it is highly symbolic, representing religious communion among people, whether for good or bad.

Chapter 3. Nice to Eat You: Acts of Vampires

The vampire, such as the one in Bram Stokers Dracula , is historically an untrustworthy fellow who is dangerous, alluring, attractive, and out to get something from the main character. In most cases, the vampire seeks to nourish himself on the youth or innocence of another. However, this idea does not always take the form of an actual vampire. In Robert Louis Stevensons The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde , Henry Jamess Daisy Miller, and Thomas Hardys Tess of the DUrbervilles, the specter of power and exploitation of the innocent can be seen in wholly humanalbeit, vampire-likecharacters.

When a reader comes across actual vampires, ghosts, and various otherworldly figures in literature, he or she should take a moment to think about what human forces they might representevil, power, death, loss of virility, seduction, selfishness, abuse, or some other harsh aspect of natural life.