How to Read Literature Like a Professor

Thomas Foster

“Memory. Symbol. Pattern. These are the three items that, more than any other, separate the professional reader from the rest of the crowd” (xv).

1. Every Trip Is a Quest (Except When It’s Not)
1. The Quest begins consists of five things

• A questor
• A place to go
• A stated reason to go there
• Challenges and trials en route
• A real reason to go there (is always self-knowledge)

2. See Joseph Campbell, A Hero with a Thousand Faces

 

2. Nice to Eat with You: Acts of Communion
1. Whenever people eat or drink together, it’s communion.
2. “Here’s the thing to remember about communions of all kinds: in the real world, breaking bread together is an act of sharing and peace, since if you’re breaking bread, you’re not breaking heads” (8).
3. “Think of all those movies where a soldier share his C rations with a comrade, or a boy his sandwich with a stray dog; from the overwhelming message of loyalty, kinship, and generosity, you get a sense of how strong a value we place on the comradeship of the table” (11).

3. Nice to Eat You: Acts of Vampires
1. Ghosts and vampires are never only about ghosts and vampires.
2. “The essentials of the vampire story, as we discussed earlier: an older figure representing corrupt, outworn values; a young, preferably virginal female; a stripping away of her youth, energy, virtue; a continuance of the life force of the old male; the death or destruction of the young woman” (19).
3. That’s what this figure really comes down to, whether in Elizabethan, Victorian, or more modern incarnations: exploitation in its many forms. Using other people to get what we want. Denying someone else’s right to live in the face of our overwhelming demands. Placing our desires, particularly our uglier ones, above the needs of others” (21).

 

4. If It’s Square, It’s a Sonnet
1. “The miracle of the sonnet, you see, is that it is fourteen lines long and written almost always in iambic pentameter” (23).
2. Essentially, the basic pattern is 8 / 6.
3. “Lines and stanzas are necessities in poetry, but if the poem is any good, its basic unit of meaning is the sentence, just as in all other writing” (26).
4. “Sonnets are like that [have form], short poems that take far more time, because everything has to be perfect, than long ones” (27).

5. Now, Where Have I seen Her Before?
1. “Part of pattern recognition is talent, but a whole lot of it is practice: if you read enough and give what you read enough thought, you begin to see patterns, archetypes, recurrences” (29).
2. As you read, it may pay to remember this: there’s no such thing as a wholly original work of literature” (29).
3. History is story, too. You don’t encounter her [Sacajawea] directly, you’ve only heard of her through narrative of one sort or another” (32).
4. “Here it is: there’s only one story.  There I said it and I can’t very well take it back. There is only one story. Ever. One. It’s always been going on and it’s everywhere around us and every story you’ve ever read or heard or watched is part of it” (32).
5. “Critics speak of this dialogue as intertextuality, the ongoing interaction between poems or stories. This intertextual dialogue deepens and enriches the reading experience, bringing multiple layers of meaning to the text, some of which readers may not even consciously notice” (34).
6. If the story is good and the characters work but you don’t catch allusions and references and parallels, then you’ve done nothing worse than read a good story with memorable characters” (36).

 

6. When in Doubt, It’s from Shakespeare…
1. Shakespeare is familiar. Read p. 40
2. “Shakespeare also provides a figure against whom writers can struggle, a source of texts against which other texts can bounce ideas. Writers can find themselves engaged in a relationship with older writers; of course, that relationship plays itself out through the texts, the new one emerging in part through earlier texts that exert influence on the writer in one way or another. This relationship contains considerable potential for struggle, which as we mentioned in the previous chapter is called intertextuality” (43).
3. “…when we recognize the interplay between these dramas, we become partners with the new dramatist in creating meaning” (46).

7. …Or the Bible
1. “Connect the dots: garden serpent, plagues, flood, parting of waters, loaves, fishes, forty days, betrayal, denial, slavery and escape, fatted calves, milk and honey.  Ever read a book with all these things in them?” (47).
2. “Every story about the loss of innocence is really about someone’s private reenactment of the fall from grace, since we experience it not collectively but individually and subjectively” (49).
3. “Suffice it to say that every writer prior to sometime in the middle of the twentieth century was solidly instructed in religion” (52).
4. “If I hear something going on in a text that seems to be beyond the scope of the story’s or poem’s immediate dimensions, if it resonates outside itself, I start looking for allusions to older and bigger texts’ (54).

 

8. Hanseldee and Greteldum
1. Fairy tales references are highly prevalent in literature because of their familiarity.
2. “Of all the fairy tales available to the writer, there’s one that has more drawing power than any other, at least in the late twentieth century: “Hansel and Gretel” (59).
3. “Here’s the good deal for you as a writer: You don’t have to use the whole story. Sure, it has X, Y, and B, but not A, C, and Z.  So what? We’re not trying to re-create the fairy tale here. Rather, we are trying to make use of details or patterns, portions of some prior story (text) to add depth and texture to your story, to bring out a theme, to lend irony to a statement, to play with readers’ deeply ingrained knowledge of fairy tales” (61-62).
4. “Why? Because fairy tales, like Shakespeare, the Bible, mythology, and all other writing and telling, belong to the one big story, and because, since we were old enough to be read to or propped up in front of a television, we’ve been living on that story, and on its fairy variants” (62).
5. “Here’s what I think we do: we want strangeness in our stories, but we want familiarity, too.  We want a new novel to be not quite like anything we’ve read before. At the same time, we look for it to be sufficiently like other things we’ve read so that we can use those to make sense of it” (63).

9. It’s Greek to Me
1. “Here, in this activity of reading and understanding literature, we’re chiefly concerned with how that story functions as material for literary creators, the way in which it can inform a story or poem, and how it is perceived by the reader” (64).
2. “What we mean in speaking of “myth” in general is story, the ability of story to explain ourselves to ourselves in ways that physics, philosophy, mathematics, chemistry—all very highly useful and informative in their own right—can’t.  That explanation takes the shape of stories that are deeply ingrained in our group memory, that shape our culture and are in turn shaped by it, that constitute a way of seeing by which we read the world and, ultimately, ourselves.  Let’s say it this way: myth is a body of story that matters” (65).
3. “What he can do, though, is place them in situations where their nobility and their courage are put to the test, while reminding us that they are acting out some of the most basic, most primal patterns known to humans, exactly as Homer did all those centuries before.  The need to protect one’s family: Hector. The need to maintain one’s dignity: Achilles. The determination to remain faithful and to have faith: Penelope. The struggle to return home: Odysseus.  Homer gives us four great struggles of the human being: with nature, with the divine, with other humans, and with ourselves. What is there, after all, against which we need to prove ourselves but those four things?” (71).
4. “Sophocles’s plays of Oedipus and his doomed clan show up over and over again in all sorts of variations. There is, in fact, no form of dysfunctional family or no personal disintegration of character for which there is not a Greek or Roman model.  Not for nothing do the names of Greek tragic characters figure in Freud’s theories.  The wronged woman gone violent in her grief and madness?  Would you like Aeneas and Dido or Jason and Medea? And as in every good early religion, they had an explanation for natural phenomena, from the change of seasons (Demeter and Persephone and Hades) to why the nightingale sounds the way it does (Philomena and Tereus).  Happily for us, most of it got written down, often in several versions, so that we have access to this wonderful body of story. And because writers and readers share knowledge of a big portion of this body of story, this mythology, when writers use it, we readers recognize it, sometimes to its full extent, sometimes only dimly or only because we know the Looney Tunes version.  That recognition makes our experience of literature richer, deeper, more meaningful, so that our own modern stories also matter, also share in the power of myth” (72-73).

 

10. It’s More Than Just Rain or Snow     
1. “It’s never just rain. And that goes for snow, sun, warmth, cold, and probably sleet, although the incidence of sleet in my reading is too rare to generalize” (75).
2. “Drowning is one of our deepest fears (being land creatures, after all), and the drowning of everything and everybody just magnifies that fear” (75).

• Plot device – uncomfortable
• Atmosphere – misery and democracy
• It’s clean (and it makes everything muddy)
• It’s restorative.
• Rainbows…

3. “Rain falls on the just and unjust alike. Condemned man and hangman are thrown into a bond of sorts because rain has forced each of them to seek shelter” (76).
4. Arthur & The Fisher King – “The central figure in this set of myths—the Fisher King figure—represents the hero as fixer: something in society is broken, perhaps beyond repair, but a hero emerges to put things right” (79).

• Fertility must be returned to the land, the people, the relationship, etc..

5. “Fog, for instance. It almost always signals some sort of confusion…In each case, the fog is mental and ethical as well as physical. In almost any case I can think of, authors use fog to suggest that people cant see clearly, that matters under consideration are murky” (80).

Does he mean that?

• Yes, and no…only the author knows for sure, but we can make educated guesses based on our experiences with the manifold texts we have experienced in our lives.  “Since proof is nearly impossible, discussions of the writer’s intentions are not especially profitable. Instead let’s restrict ourselves to what he did do and, more important, what we readers can discover in his work” (84).

11. …More Than It’s Gonna Hurt You: Concerning Violence
1. “Violence in literature, though, while it is literal, is usually also something else” (88).
2. Death is death, but consider, “writers kill off characters for the same set of reasons—make action happen, cause plot complications, end plot complications, put other characters under stress” (90).

 

12. Is That a Symbol?
1. YES.
2. “Here’s the problem with symbols: people expect them to mean something. Not just any something, but one something in particular. Exactly. Maximum. You know what? It doesn’t work like that” (97-98).
3. Allegories have one mission to accomplish—convey a certain message” (98).
4. “Every reader’s experience of every work is unique, largely because each person will emphasize various elements to differing degrees, and those differences will cause certain features of the text to become more or less pronounced” (103).
5. “One of the pleasures of literary scholarship lies in encountering different and even conflicting interpretations, since the great work allows for a considerable range of possible interpretations. Under no circumstances, in other words, should you take my pronouncements on these works as definitive” (105).
6. The other problem with symbols is that many readers expect them to be objects and images rather than events or actions” (105).
7. “Associate freely, brainstorm, take notes. Then you can organize your thoughts, grouping them together under headings, rejecting or accepting different ideas or meanings as they seem to apply. Ask questions of the text: what’s the writer doing with this image, this object, this act; what possibilities are suggested by the movement of the narrative or lyric; and most important, what does it feel like it’s doing?” (106).

13. It’s All Political
1. Nearly all writing is political on some level
2. “Let’s say this: writers tend to be men and women who are interested in the world around them. That world contains many things, and on the level of society, part of what it contains is the political reality of the time—power structures, relations among classes, issues of justice and rights, interactions between the sexes and among various racial and ethnic constituencies. That’s why political and social considerations often find their way onto the page in some guise, even when the result doesn’t look terribly ‘political’” (115).

 

14. Yes, She’s a Christ Figure, Too
1. “This may surprise some of you, but we live in a Christian culture” (117). (though not everyone is Christian!)
2. “Still, no matter what your religious beliefs, to get the most out of your reading of European and American literatures, knowing something about the Old and New Testaments is essential.  Similarly, if you undertake to read literature from an Islamic or a Buddist or a Hindu culture, you’re going to need knowledge of other religious traditions.  Culture is so influenced by its dominant religious systems that whether a writer adheres to the beliefs or not, the values and principles of those religions will inevitably inform the literary work” (118).
3. Characteristics of Christ (119-120)

• Crucified, wounds in the hands, feet, side, and head
• In Agony
• Self-sacrificing
• Good with children
• Good with loaves, fishes, water, wine
• Thirty-three years of age when last seen
• Employed as a carpenter
• Known to use humble modes of transportation, feet or donkeys preferred
• Believed to have walked on water
• Often portrayed with arms outstretched
• Known to have spent time alone in the wilderness
• Believed to have had a confrontation with the devil, possibly tempted
• Last seen in the company of thieves
• Creator of many aphorisms and parables
• Buried, but arose on the third day
• Had disciples, twelve at first, although not all equally devoted
• Very forgiving
• Came to redeem an unworthy world

4. “You may not subscribe to this list, may find it too glib, but if you want to read like a literature professor, you need to put aside your belief system, at least for the period during which you read, so you can see what the writer is trying to say. As you’re reading that story or poem, religious knowledge is helpful, although religious belief, if too tightly held, can be a problem” (120).
5. “We have to bring our imaginations to bear on a story if we are to see all its possibilities; otherwise it’s just about somebody who did something.  Whatever we take away from stories in the way of significance, symbolism, them, meaning, pretty much anything except character and plot, we discover because our imagination engages with that of the author” (123).

15. Flights of Fancy
1. Human beings cannot fly
2. Whenever “we see a person suspended in the air, even briefly, he is one or more of the following:

• A superhero
• A ski jumper
• Crazy (redundant if also #2)
• Fictional
• A circus act, departing a cannon
• Suspended on wires
• An angel
• Heavily symbolic

3. “It’s pretty straightforward: flight is freedom” (128).
4. As an aside, two things for consideration:

• Irony trumps everything
• What does it mean to survive certain death, and how does such survival alter one’s relationship to the world?

 

 

18. If She Comes Up, It’s Baptism
1. A young man sails away from his known world, dies out of one existence, and comes back a new person, hence is reborn. Symbolically, that’s the same pattern we see in Baptism: death and rebirth through the medium of water” (155).
2. If a character chooses to enter the water and dies…”The characters’ deaths are a form of choosing, of exerting control in a society that has taken control from them [a symbolic action]” (156).
3. “It has always seemed to me that the whole business probably ties in with some cultural memory of Noah’s flood, of the whole world drowning and then this small remnant being set down on dry land to restore life to earth, cleansed of the sin and pollution that had marked human life right before the flood. Seen this way, baptism is a sort of reenactment on a very small scale of that drowning and restoration of life” (159).
4. “It’s a little like Tolstoy says at the beginning of Anna Karenina about families: All happy families are the same, but every unhappy family has its own story. The rebirths/baptisms have a lot of common threads, but every drowning is serving its own purpose: character revelation, thematic development of violence or failure or guilt, plot complication or denouement” (161).

19. Geography Matters…
1. “In a sense, every story or poem is a vacation, and every writer has to ask, every time, Where is this one taking place?” (163-164).
2. “Geography is setting, but it’s also (or can be) psychology, attitude, finance, industry—anything that place can forge in the people who live there” (166).
3. “Geography can also define or even develop character” (167).
4. “It’s not too much to say, I think, that geography can be character” (168).
5. “Geography can also, and frequently does, play quite a specific plot role in a literary work” (169).
6. “Okay, so here’s the general rule: whether it’s Italy or Greece or Africa or Malaysia or Vietnam, when writers send characters south, it’s so they can run amok. The effects can be tragic or comic, but they generally follow the same pattern. We might add, if we’re being generous, that they run amok because they are having direct, raw encounters with the subconscious” (171).
7. “First, think about what there is down low or up high. Low: swamps, crowds, fog, darkness, fields, heat, unpleasantness, people, life, death. High: snow, ice, purity, thin air, clear views, isolation, life, death. Some of these, you will notice, appear on both lists, and you can make either environment work for you if you’re a real writer” (173).
8. “So, high or low, near or far, north or south, east or west, the places of poems and fiction really matter. It isn’t just setting, that hoary old English class topic. It’s a place and space and shape that bring us to ideas and psychology and history and dynamism. It’s enough to make you read a map” (174).

 

20. …So Does Season
1. “For about as long as anyone’s been writing anything, the seasons have stood for the same set of meanings. Maybe it’s hardwired in to us that spring has to do with childhood and youth, summer with adulthood and romance and fulfillment and passion, autumn with decline and middle age and tiredness but also harvest, winter with old age and resentment and death. This pattern is so deeply ingrained in our cultural experience that we don’t even have to sop and think about it. Think about it we should, though, since once we know the pattern is in play, we can start looking at variation and nuance” (178).
2. (Read 182-182)
3. “Death and rebirth, growth and harvest and death, year after year” (182).

ONE STORY – revisited.

• Once again: there is only ONE story. What’s it about? (good question). “It’s not about anything. It’s about everything” (186).  “I suppose what the one story, the ur-story, is about is ourselves, about what it means to be human. I mean, what else is there?” (186).
• “On one level, everyone who writes anything knows that pure originality is impossible…writers notice all the time that their characters resemble somebody—Persephone, Pip, Long John Silver, La Belle Dame sans Merci—and they go with it.  What happens if the writer is good is usually not that the work seems derivative or trivial but just the opposite: the work acquires depth and resonance from the echoes and chimes it sets up with prior texts, weight from the accumulated use of certain basic patterns and tendencies. Moreover, works are actually more comforting because we recognize elements in them from our prior reading” (187).
• “When the writer gets to work, she has to shut out the voices and write what she writes, say what she has to say. What the unremembering trick does is clear out this history from the front of her mind so her own poem can come in…In other words, the history of poetry never leaves her. It’s always present, a gigantic subconscious database fo poetry (and fiction, since she’s read that, too)” (188).
• “…intertextuality. This highly ungainly word denoting a most useful notion comes to us from the great Russian formalist critic Mikhail Bakhtin, who limits it pretty much to fiction, but I think I’ll follow the example of T.S. Eliot, who, being a poet, saw that it operates throughout the realms of literature. The basic premise of intertextuality is really pretty simple: everything’s connected. In other words, anything you write is connected to other written things” (189).
• “…archetype. The late great Canadian critic Northrop Frye took the notion of archetypes from C. G. Jung’s psychoanalytical writings and showed that whatever Jung can tell us about our heads, he can tell us a great deal more about our books. ‘Archetype’ is a five-dollar word for ‘pattern,’ or for the mythic original on which a pattern is based….You’d think that these components, these archetypes, would wear out with use the way cliché wears out, but they actually work the other way: they take on power with repetition, finding strength in numbers” (191).
• “We—as readers or writers, tellers or listeners—understand each other, we share knowledge of the structures of our myths, we comprehend the logic of symbols, largely because we have access to the same swirl of story. We have only to reach out into the air and pluck a piece of it” (192).

21. Marked for Greatness
1.  

 

22. He’s Blind for a Reason, You Know
1.  

23. It’s Never Just Heart Disease…
1.  

 

24. …And Rarely Just Illness
1.  

25. Don’t Read with Your Eyes
1.  

 

26. Is He Serious? And Other Ironies
1.