Summary and Analysis of How to Read Literature Like a Professor

Based on the Book by Thomas C. Foster

Worth Books

• Publisher: Worth Books
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781504043373
• Topic: Study Aids
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism History & Theory

So much to read, so little time? This brief overview of How to Read Literature Like a Professor tells you what you need to know—before or after you read Thomas C. Foster's book.
Crafted and edited with care, Worth Books set the standard for quality and give you the tools you need to be a well-informed reader. 
This summary of How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster includes:
 

• Historical context
• Chapter-by-chapter overviews
• Important quotes
• Fascinating trivia
• A glossary of terms
• Supporting material to enhance your understanding of the original work

 
About How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster:
 
Thomas C. Foster's How to Read Literature Like a Professor is a series of short essays that show readers how to "read between the lines" and make great books come alive.
 
Based on Professor Foster's years as a teacher of literature, Foster explains how authors use the English language to accomplish their goals and how we can recognize literary ideas in a wide range of works. The tools he offers can be applied to any book—from the classics to the latest blockbusters.
 
The summary and analysis in this ebook are intended to complement your reading experience and bring you closer to a great work of nonfiction.
 

Summary

Chapter 1. Every Trip Is a Quest (Except When It’s Not)

Through the broad outline of an imagined story involving a young man’s 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 Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and Mark Twain’s 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 hero’s 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 Fielding’s Tom Jones or Raymond Carver’s story “Cathedral,” it’s 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 Stoker’s 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 Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Henry James’s “Daisy Miller,” and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, the specter of power and exploitation of the innocent can be seen in wholly human—albeit, vampire-like—characters.

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 represent—evil, power, death, loss of virility, seduction, selfishness, abuse, or some other harsh aspect of natural life.

Chapter 4. Now, Where Have I Seen Her Before?

All works of literature are based on the concepts and books that came before them. There is no such thing as a work of dramatic art that does not have its roots in the ideas, symbols, and stories of other writers. True “originality,” in this sense, does not exist in literature.

In the novel Going After Cacciato, author Tim O’Brien tells a wonderfully original story about the journey of a squad of soldiers amidst the violence and alienation of wartime Vietnam in a way that would, at first glance, seem perfectly unlike any other story ever told. To the informed reader, however, the very reason O’Brien’s novel appears so unique is because of the variety of literary allusions and references contained therein. These range from Alice in Wonderland to Sacajawea, and from Hemingway to “Hansel and Gretel,” and a clear understanding of O’Brien’s novel depends upon the reader realizing this. Other books that demonstrate this “intertextuality”—the dialogue between various works—include T. C. Boyle’s story “The Overcoat II” (a reference to Nikolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat”) and William Trevor’s “Two More Gallants” (a reference to James Joyce’s “Two Gallants”).

Chapter 5. When in Doubt, It’s from Shakespeare …

Works based partially or completely on the plays of William Shakespeare are various and wide-ranging, including Moonlighting; Death Valley Days; Kiss Me, Kate; West Side Story; Woody Allen’s A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy; Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury; Huxley’s Brave New World; and countless other novels, plays, poems, and films. In a great deal of English fiction written between the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries, Shakespeare’s stories and characters, particularly those of Hamlet and Macbeth, are retold or reimagined in new ways.

Chapter 6. … Or the Bible

Works that demonstrate direct or indirect allusions to the Bible include Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Clint Eastwood’s Pale Rider, the fiction of James Joyce, much of William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Milton, and James Baldwin, Steinbeck’s East of Eden, Beowulf, The Faerie Queene, and Shakespeare himself, among many, many others.

Familiarity with the stories of the Old and New Testaments is second nature to some readers in America, but a deeper intimacy with the Bible can only improve one’s comprehension and apprecia...

Table of contents

• Title
• Contents
• Disclaimer
• Context
• Overview
• Summary
• Direct Quotes and Analysis
• Trivia
• What’s That Word?
• About Thomas C. Foster
• For Your Information
• Bibliography
• Copyright