Citation for How to Read Literature Like a Professor

Exercise you lot want to acquire to get more out of the novels yous read? Are you lot interested in learning how authors communicate through literary devices like symbols, archetypes, and allusions?

How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster is a crash course in the art of reading intelligently. In this volume, y'all'll learn how to place common literary conventions and gain the skills necessary to analyze them like a professor would.

In this volume, you'll discover why Goose had to die in Acme Gun and why sex scenes aren't e'er near sexual practice in literature.

1-Page Summary of How to Read Literature Like a Professor

What is the difference between reading similar a student and reading like a professor?

Students:

• Focus more often than not on the plot and characters in a story.
• Respond to the story commencement on an emotional level.

Professors:

• Focus mostly on memory, symbol, and pattern in the story.
• Accept the emotional response, but wait deeper to find the universal truth displayed.

The combination of using retentiveness, identifying symbols, and recognizing patterns allows a reader to analyze literature in a new light—the mode a professor would. If you ignore retentivity, symbols, and patterns in literature, you will not exist able to appreciate a book for everything that it says between the lines.

This book teaches y'all:

• The conventions of literature: Grapheme types, plot structures, themes, symbols, archetypes, and more than.
• The skills to detect and clarify them on your own.

Memory

When you read with a powerful memory, you actively look for how the text corresponds to other literary works. You mentally flip through the things you've read before and wait for similarities (or differences) to the structure, theme, or characters of what yous're reading now.

For example, as yous picket the movie Stake Passenger starring Clint Eastwood, y'all might be reminded of the movie Shane from 1953.

These similarities are what critics call intertextuality. Authors use references and parallels to draw connections to previous literary works.

Intertextuality in literature deepens the meaning of the text by drawing on the reader's expectations.

Example of Retention: Going Afterward Cacciato

A great case of intertextuality, an author referencing previous literature, occurs in Tim O'Brien'due south novel Going Afterwards Cacciato. The novel has three interwoven stories: one, the history of protagonist Paul Berlin's state of war experiences; ii, an imagined trip to Paris in search of their beau soldier Cacciato; three, the present nighttime in which Paul Berlin is remembering the first story and inventing the second.

In i role of Berlin's fantasy trip, he and his squad autumn down a hole in the road. They end upwardly in an otherworldly network of tunnels. 1 character even states that they demand to fall support. As a reader, yous are invited to relate this part of the story to when Alice falls down the rabbit hole in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.

Now that you take fabricated that connection, your reading of the story will exist nuanced by that sensation. You might expect that the tunnels the characters find themselves in will exist some kind of wonderland for them.

Memory: Sacred Texts

In society to truly read literature like a professor, you demand to exist on the lookout for intertextual references to "sacred texts," like Shakespeare, archetype fairy tales, aboriginal myths, and the Bible.

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Using recognizable themes or plots from these sacred texts gives the writer the hazard to apply the reader's associations to say more in their own work with fewer words. And for the reader, recognition of these references enhances the experience of reading current literature, because the mod stories share in the ability of the sacred text.

How authors apply the common sacred texts:

Shakespeare

Shakespeare's piece of work provides a source against which writers can challenge ideas and struggle through timeless questions.

For case, Athol Fugard'southward play "Principal Harold" … and the Boys uses Shakespeare's Henry Iv, Part II every bit a device. Fugard mimics Shakespeare's plot—in this version, Harry must turn away his blackness friends in an try to grow upwards and become responsible. Fugard invites his audition to question whether choosing to regress toward racism is actually the mark of growing upward. He challenges Shakespeare's values, and gives the audition the chance to do the same.

Fairy Tales

Fairy tales are popular choices for authors to reference considering they're an assumed body of knowledge. Nigh readers can chronicle to and recognize the classic fairy tales.

For example, an writer could conform the plot of "Hansel and Gretel" in their work. The story of children far away from home, lost in a forest, and captured by some evil witch in a strange place—you've probably seen a version of this in something yous've read.

Myth

References to mythology in literature show that the story goes beyond what is on the folio—information technology is really a story about humanity's noble yet fundamental motivations.

For example, Derek Walcott's Omeros uses parallels to The Iliad and The Odyssey to tell the story of a community of Caribbean fishermen. He knows this customs intimately and wants to tell their story in a way that highlights their struggles, every bit well as their triumphs. The narrative guide of the classic myths allows Walcott to show the nuances of the fishermen's condition by associating their story with an ancient epic.

The Bible

Many authors use the Bible to highlight the differences between religious tradition and modern life, or to enhance the reader's sensation that the story speaks to the tensions and struggles that accept existed since the beginning of man.

For instance, Ernest Hemingway used the title The Sun Also Rises, which alludes to a passage from the Bible that is about hope and life'southward countless cycle. Simply Hemingways' book is well-nigh hopelessness—it's virtually infertility and the feeling that the futurity will never come. Hemingway'due south ironic biblical reference is meant to highlight a key theme for the reader.

Symbol

When you read with a symbolic mind, you constantly look for metaphors and analogies. You non only see things for what they actually are, merely too what they might represent.

Common symbols and their associations:

• Vampires, ghosts, and monsters represent the darker side of reality.
• Flight represents freedom.
• Weather illustrates a novel's atmosphere and themes.
  • Pelting represents cleansing, regeneration, or misery.
  • Fog represents defoliation.
  • Snow represents inhospitality or coziness, depending on the story.
• Seasons are symbols for a graphic symbol's age, his place in the bike of life, or his emotional state.
  • Wintertime is the flavor of acrimony, unhappiness, old historic period, and decease.
  • Leap is the season of naivety, possibility, birth, and childhood.
  • Summer is the season of love, passion, and adulthood.
  • Fall is the season of tiredness, reflection, personal harvest, and center age.

Some symbols in literature are less commonly used, even unique to a particular novel or author. While it is more challenging to interpret the meaning of a symbol you've never seen before, you lot can nonetheless draw on your experiences with previous works of literature as a guide.

And symbols aren't always objects. Some deportment that are unremarkably used every bit symbols are:

• Violence: Acts of violence in literature are always a symbol for some greater kind of personal or societal suffering.
• Sexual practice: Authors include sex scenes in a novel when they are trying to illuminate other themes, such as submission, rebellion, or fertility.

When interpreting symbols in literature, call back of information technology equally an imaginative and intellectual exercise. In social club to read like a professor, you accept to be able to look beyond the symbol and draw conclusions most how the themes of the novel could be represented at that place.

Case of Symbol: Passage to Republic of india

In East. Yard. Forster's A Passage to India, a progressive woman named Adela is taken on an outing to the Marabar Caves by an Indian homo named Dr. Aziz. In the cave, Adela has a confusing experience. She runs out of the caves bruised and scared, feeling as though she'southward been assaulted. She afterwards discounts her own story, unable to exist sure of what transpired in those caves.

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The mysterious caves in the story are clearly symbols—but that's the just thing that's clear nigh them. Readers tin can infer a variety of meanings from the caves. Here are just a few:

• Because caves as the dwellings of our primeval ancestors, y'all might read the caves every bit a symbol of the near primitive elements of man nature. Peradventure Adela was scared when confronted with the well-nigh bones chemical element of her own nature.
• Perhaps Forster was implying that every person'due south cavern is unlike. Throughout the beginning of the novel, the caves are only described very vaguely, as though they must be seen to be understood. The reader could interpret the caves every bit standing for our own, individual fears.
• Adela'south cave could symbolize her fear of marriage and sexual activity. She is on the cusp of an arranged marriage and comes out of the cave feeling as though she has been assaulted. Peradventure this is a symbol of her feeling the marriage is being thrust on her.
• The caves could be a racial or cultural symbol in some way.

A Passage to India is a great piece of work of literature because of its networks of possible meanings and significance. The fact that every reader can bring his ain experience to the book and come away with a different interpretation of the caves speaks to the power of its symbols.

Pattern

When you lot read to find patterns, you recognize the similarities between life and books. Yous look across the plot to encounter how the drama and characters illustrate a truth of human experience.

One of the master benefits of the similarities and connections betwixt literary works is the emergence of archetypes. "Classic" really just ways "pattern," or the original on which that pattern was based.

Mutual archetypes and their associations:

• The Quest
  • Any time a graphic symbol goes on a trip and learns nigh herself along the way, that is a quest narrative.
• Meals
  • Whatever time characters come together to share a meal, that is an act of communion.
• Sacrifice of Secondary Characters
  • Many secondary characters or sidekicks die in the course of a story. This is a common pattern employed past authors to create the need for revenge.
• Political and Social Criticism
  • Any story that includes a consideration of the grade relations, ability structures, sex and race relations, or ethical dilemmas of its fourth dimension is a political criticism.
• Baptism
  • Any fourth dimension a grapheme emerges from water in which they nearly drowned, it is a symbolic baptism. That character has been reborn with a new identity.
• Injuries and Disabilities
  • Scars: Concrete deformities are given to characters to marking them as dissimilar.
  • Blindness: If yous encounter a blind grapheme in a story, know that the author is alerting you to the theme of sight and blindness—insight and ignorance.
  • Disease: Authors give characters illnesses that symbolically highlight their own moral or emotional shortcomings.

Instance of Pattern: The Crying of Lot 49

The Crying of Lot 49 past Thomas Pynchon follows the pattern of a quest narrative. In the novel, a young woman named Oedipa travels from San Francisco to Southern California to execute the will of her onetime lover. Along the way, Oedipa meets a lot of foreign and scary characters and ends upward in a lot of dangerous situations. By the stop, Oedipa has learned to rely on herself and trust her own self-knowledge.

In this novel, Thomas Pynchon presents an example of a classic quest narrative considering in that location is a young quester, a place to go, a stated reason to go there, and an alternative mission fulfilled: the quest for cocky-knowledge

.

Advice for Readers

Now that y'all have a sense of how to use retention, interpret symbols, and recognize archetypes in literature, you are almost ready to start reading similar a professor.

Some other advice for the intelligent reader:

• Irony changes everything.
  • When an writer turns your expectations of common literary devices upside down, that is called irony. In that case, forget everything yous've learned in this book. Irony makes information technology all irrelevant.
• Don't worry most the author's intentions.
  • Unless the author has spoken or written nearly their work, there is no way to know whether they purposely injected allusions, symbols, and archetypes into the story. Apply your instincts and trust what you discover in the text.
• At that place's no such affair as being right.
  • When discussing literature with others or simply analyzing it for yourself, you volition never be able to definitively prove your theories. All you can do is wait for evidence in the text.

Full Summary of How to Read Literature Like a Professor

What It Ways to Read Literature Like a Professor

A literature professor is ever looking for meaning and significance beyond the text of a novel, verse form, or play. Here'southward an instance:

In the play A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry, the protagonist, Walter Lee Younger, moves his African American family into an all-white community. A white man named Mr. Linder comes to Walter with an offer: He wants to buy the Younger family out of their claim on the business firm. Although the offer is insulting, Walter Lee is forced to consider information technology. This is i of the play's primary dramas.

Imagine you've simply read the play. Would you exist surprised to hear your literature professor say that Mr. Lindner is the devil? Would you take come to that conclusion on your own?

If not, that's okay. That means that you lot, the educatee, and your professor have read the aforementioned story, merely non in the same way. Your professor has had practice analyzing literature and finding its conventions and codes. She has the skills to remember instances of bargaining with the devil in other stories, and connect that pattern to Mr. Lindner through common plot devices and themes.

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Hither's what you'll detect in the full How to Read Literature Like a Professor summary:

• What Information technology Ways to Read Literature Like a Professor
• Memory: Compare Texts
• Exercise: Draw on Your Literary Memory
• Symbols, Part I: Recognize and Interpret Metaphor
• Symbols, Role II: The Symbolic Significance of Setting
• Exercise: Recognize and Interpret Symbols
• Symbols, Part III: Deportment as Symbols
• Blueprint, Part I: Know the Archetypes, Find Them Everywhere
• Practise: Place the Quest Classic
• Blueprint, Part 2: The Injured Character Archetype
• Advice for Readers
• Your Turn to Read Like a Professor

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