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Zusammenfassung von How To Read Literature Like A Professor

Name: How To Read Literature Like A Professor
Rating: 4.1 (224 reviews)
Author: Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster

A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines

4.1 (224 Bewertungen)

15 Min.

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What’s in it for me? Learn how reading like a literature professor gives new depths to the experience.

Most of us read books and find enjoyment in things like the arc of the story, the portrayal of the characters or the author’s powers of description. Nothing wrong with that, but what if there is more to reading than just comprehending what is written on the page?

Turns out, there is often a deeper meaning to a text than we might at first realize. Novels, stories, poems – all are part of a larger literary world, where themes are developed and texts wink ironically at other, older texts. Some literary works have even had such an impact that their coinages have become embedded in language itself.

In these blinks, you will be introduced to this world. You’ll learn how to read like a literature professor and understand what knits one text to another. In the end, you might even get a new perspective on some of your favorite books.

In these blinks, you’ll also discover

that a young woman in a Thomas Pynchon book is really a knight;
why a flea can play a seductive and erotic role; and
how Ernest Hemingway used irony to create new meaning from a classic poem.

Literary analysis uses memory, symbols and patterns to enrich our reading experience.

What’s your favorite book? You’ve probably read it more than once. You may even know exactly how many times you’ve read it, but can you explain what it is about that book that keeps you coming back?

The truth is that not all readers are created equal. Some of us only focus on the basic level of the story. That is, we follow what happens to a character – the choices they make and how those choices affect other characters.

But it’s more than an exciting plotline and likeable characters that make a book our favorite. More experienced readers are able to tune into what happens on the emotional level of a book. They ask things like “Why did this passage make me feel that way?” or “Where have I seen this happen before?”

By using the codes and patterns of literature, we can uncover the elements beneath the surface of the books we love. From archetypal characters to plot devices, narrative styles to literary references, there are dozens of these elements at play. So if you’re determined to become an able and experienced reader, where should you start?

Well, it helps to group these elements into three major categories: memory, symbols and patterns.

Memory refers to the way in which clever readers seek to make connections between the book they're reading now and others they’ve read before. They’ll ask themselves: “How does this character compare to others I’ve encountered?”

A shrewd reader will also keep their eyes peeled for symbols – when an element in a story represents something other than itself. They’ll ask, “What does this event (or object, or place) stand for in the story?” Finally, the literary reader discerns patterns. An apparently trivial detail that crops up again and again in a story may speak volumes about the main character.

In the next blink, we’ll dig a little deeper into the different elements that help us explore memory, symbols and patterns in a novel.

The tale of a quest is the underlying structure for countless stories.

Why did you go to the supermarket this week? Probably for some humdrum reason, like a shortage of bread. But what if your grocery shopping was actually a knight’s quest for self-knowledge. Maybe that seems ridiculous, but authors do something similar all the time; they take a conventional structure and change the details.

In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a young knight journeys to a faraway land in search of the Holy Grail. On his journey, he fights dragons, overcomes obstacles and learns something entirely unexpected at the end. This story features the conventional structure of the quest, which comprises a quester, a destination, a stated reason to go, challenges along the journey and a revelation.

All books borrow ideas from other books, whether it’s obvious or not!

If you’ve ever read a book that reminded you of another one, you might have been disappointed by the author’s lack of originality. But, really, no literary work is completely original. Authors never stop borrowing ideas from one another, whether that borrowing is obvious or subtle, deliberate or inadvertent.

This interaction is called intertextuality, and it’s a literary element that can greatly deepen the reading experience. Let’s take a novella by D.H. Lawrence, for example – The Virgin and the Gypsy. During the narrative, a violent flood destroys a homestead. This flood is remarkably similar to Noah’s flood in the Bible, which suggests that the flood in Lawrence’s novel isn’t just a flood, but a comment on the cleansing powers of destruction.

Symbols help us detect hidden messages within a story.

Imagine you’re walking down the street and a woman about five yards away lifts her arm in the air and begins moving it around above her head. It would be rather strange if you didn’t realize that she is waving.

Waving is more than a mere movement of the hand, however; it’s a symbol. It signifies to another person that you recognize them, that you’re greeting them and that you want them to recognize you. In literature, anything can take on meaning when you read it as a symbol.

Setting shapes our perception of a story subtly, yet profoundly.

Suppose you read a story about suffering and hardship set in a harsh, icy landscape; now imagine reading the same story, but this time it is set in a lush, blooming landscape in the middle of spring. Would you respond to the story in same way?

Probably not. Surroundings play a role of incredible importance in literature. Edgar Allen Poe’s writing illustrates this particularly well. Take his novel The Fall of the House of Usher, for example. In the first lines of the book, descriptors such as “dreary,” “rank” and “vacant” stand out.

Irony subverts your expectations as a reader, communicating ideas in surprising and powerful ways.

With your solid understanding of the codes used by authors to engage their readers, it’s time to meet a literary wild card: irony, an element of texts that throws all the rules out the window.

Simply put, irony occurs when the opposite of what we expect to happen, happens. And in order to understand irony, we must distinguish between expectation and intention.

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Worum geht es in How To Read Literature Like A Professor?

How to Read Literature Like a Professor (2003) is an accessible and engaging introduction to literary analysis. With illuminating examples drawn from both classic and contemporary literature, these blinks provide readers with the tools they need to detect deeper meaning in any fictional text.

Bestes Zitat aus How To Read Literature Like A Professor

Theres only one story. Ever. One. Its always been going on and its everywhere around us.

—Thomas C. Foster

Wer How To Read Literature Like A Professor lesen sollte

Young readers who want to learn how to interpret literature
Anyone who wants to familiarize themselves with basic literary devices
Educators seeking support material for teaching literature

Über den Autor

Foster has been teaching literature since 1975. An English professor at the University of Michigan-Flint, his book has gained popularity among English teachers and students alike. Foster is also a speaker in many high schools across the United States, giving talks and workshops on how to teach and understand literature.

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