How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines

I might have picked an alternative title for this book, like "How To Read Literature," which takes the focus away from the academic sounding title and places it more in the works themselves. Once upon a time, people who were 'serious' about writing shared a particular set of 'texts in their heads.' They were usually the Bible, medieval literature, Greek tragedies, and so forth. This became a sort of 'code' that literary people could encode and decode through reading stories, poems, epics, and the like. The nice thing about the 'codes' (unlike the DaVinci Code) was that they were aesthetically pleasing, i.e., they were enjoyed for their imagery, character, setting, tone, development, ironies, and so forth. Thomas Foster provides a crash course in learning about these codes like the hero code, the saviour code, the sacrificial code, the morse code (only kidding), and so forth. The code was more thoroughly 'codified' by Northrup Frye back in the 50's & 60's, but getting people to read any of his major books instead of this one would be like giving most people a choice between reading War & Peace or watching an episode of the 'Sopranos'. So, sure you can learn to read like a particular type of college professor from the instructions in this book, but this partly misses the point. At one time, these ideas, principles, codes, etc., MEANT something to people. People really believed in them and considered them. Nowadays, such code catching has come down quite frequently to outdoing someone in coming up with the most decodings, or we should say "recoding" because you can't really decode something since you have to express it into another code, right? Otherwise, you'd just have silence or a blank page, and Sam Beckett even made those things into codes. The book has a light-hearted tone and intelligentlly written, but learning this stuff without finding meaning in it would be like wearing a crucifix around your neck because you thought it had nice symmetry. Hey, that's ok, but then all you end up with is an object. Now if you are--or your professors ar--into post-modernism b.s., you will probably learn that these codes are just a lot of obfuscation and arbitrary to boot, and, so, for example, Jesus on the Cross doesn't mean anything except that some guy is in deep sh_t, but that's probably covered in some other book.

A better subtitle to this book might be "Understanding Symbology," but then you would miss the "lively" and "entertaining" part of the current subtitle, and that shouldn't be thrown away. This is probably the best book I've ever read about the ugly task of decoding literature, and I would highly recommend it as a graduation present for any high school student who plans to attend college. It's that good. Foster is no dry academic, although his taste still runs to the rather mundane type of literature that doesn't do anything for me personally. What Foster is good about, though, is explaining exactly why he finds that type of literature exciting and how one can decipher it to understand what those darn professors find interesting about it, too.

This is a nice companion piece to Jane Smiley's Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, especially her chapter on how novelists play games when writing. Smiley comes to the novel as a practioner; Foster looks at the novel as a cartographer. Smiley explains how to play the game, while Foster shows how to understand what the game was that the novelist was playing. Do all novelists play games? No, only the better ones. It's not that novels that have nothing going for them beyond the plot are bad per se, but like a movie that goes from one chase sequence to showdown, a plot-only novel is one-dimensional.

The only thing missing in Foster's explication here is an understanding for novels of ideas, which often get short shrift from the academy, sometimes rightly (when the novel has no plot or characters and only presents the ideas) but often overlooked because the novelist eschews symbology for prognostication. It's only a slight misstep, and one easily forgiven for most college classes where this book will come in handy won't be covering those kinds of books anyway.

This book is full of great examples of how to interpret literature. Unfortunately, it falls short on imagination and coveniently slots themes, plots and characters into several well contrived but narrow definitions. It is a good read for those studying literature but does not hold the answers that it seems to promise from the title.

I saw the title of this book and thought, "Now why
would I want to read literature like a professor?"
which was probably a reflection of my professors
who sucked the passion for reading literature right
out of my veins. Too bad I didn't havev a
professor like the author if this book!

(I do have to mention the one section that upset
me, though - where he supposes that 45 year olds
are somehow to old to increase their self-knowledge
as a "Quester"...this was in his summary of
"Every trip is a quest." I beg to differ on this
one... and in fact, I wonder how many of this
books readers are over 45 years old and are
actually questing through reading this book
and applying the principles found therein?)

So now that this one opinion of "The Professiorial
Doubting Thomas C. Foster" set aside.... I will also
say that this book was eye-opening and evocative and
nearly each page had something wise that I could
immediately use and apply to my own learning
process and discovery as both a reader and a writer.

Writers would find a lot of gold here, too - so
I strongly suggest it be added to any writer's
library as well.

You will read smarter and write smarter after reading this book. A must for understanding the underpinnings of good literature. Foster's presents the material in a friendly, breezy, easy to understand and compelling way. I couldn't put it down, didn't want it to end.