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

Here the author examines blindness in literature, which suggests a focus on “other levels of sight and blindness beyond the physical” (210). Oedipus Rex is a classic work from ancient Greece that deals extensively with this issue of who “sees” (knows) and who doesn’t. One character, Tiresias, is a blind prophet who sees the truth in what will follow the birth of Oedipus. Oedipus, on the other hand, is blind to the fact that Jocasta is his mother; when he learns this fact, he gouges his eyes out, literally blinding himself. Other works, like Joyce’s “Araby,” use references to blindness figuratively to connote innocence and naïveté.

The heart indicates the center of life but also the center of emotions in humans. Thus, the heart has great potential for figurative use by authors. Humbert Humbert, the seducer of the underage girl in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, dies in jail of heart disease. Foster explains: “Throughout the whole novel he’s had a defective heart in the figurative sense, so how else could he die?” (219).

He then goes on to describe other common illnesses in literature. One that was a favorite of authors in the past was tuberculosis, formerly called consumption. The illness gave its sufferers an eerie beauty of translucent skin and dark circles around their eyes, both of which lent themselves well to written description. What’s more, before it became known that bacteria causes tuberculosis, its origin was mysterious and it could easily be used symbolically since its sufferers “wasted away” as they lost weight. Fevers and malaria (which literally means “bad air”) are also commonly used illnesses in literature.

Foster delivers clear advice in this chapter: do not view literature from today’s perspective. That is, readers should not judge the past by the present. Different times and places involve many aspects of life that are very different from life today; some attitudes that were acceptable back then may be considered offensive or inappropriate now, while other attitudes are different but innocuous. For instance, Foster describes the Christmas dinner in Joyce’s “The Dead” as a feast fit for a special occasion. Many readers may not give such abundance of food a second thought, but readers must remember that the non-local fruit and out-of-season vegetables described in the story would have been quite out of the ordinary in turn-of-the-century Ireland. Other times, readers may choose to avoid text that is too offensive, such as Ezra Pound’s work that contains anti-Semitism.

After all the previous chapters offer evidence for common symbols, Foster now addresses how to deal with obscure ones, even those used by only one author. Without the usual clues and connections to other stories, the search for patterns becomes more difficult, though not impossible, to discern meaning. As an example, he offers John Donne’s poem “The Flea,” in which the author uses the tiny insect metaphorically. Foster advises readers not to worry if something like a symbol slips by, reminding readers that a story first works on its obvious, more apparent level. More hidden meanings add depth and texture but are not necessary to a basic understanding of a work. Foster tells readers to trust themselves and that looking for clues and patterns within the context will often yield symbolic meaning and other elements: “every work teaches us how to read it as we go along” (248). 

Foster seems to save the most important advice for last. We know this from the first line of Chapter 26: “Now hear this: irony trumps everything” (252). Irony is the reversal of expectations (see Index of Terms), so the advice Foster dispenses in the previous chapters is upended if an author is being ironic. The level of irony of a work can be determined from the context and the author’s tone. Roads symbolize travel—leading, perhaps, to self-knowledge—but the characters sitting by a road in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot go nowhere. Rain in spring connotes new life, but Hemingway’s character Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms encounters rain at the end of winter just after his wife and child die in childbirth. That’s irony. To find it, readers should look for the clues and patterns that Foster notes in earlier chapters and then ask themselves if their expectations match what is presented in the story.

Here Foster provides a chance for readers to test what they have learned. The chapter opens with the short story “The Garden Party” by Katherine Mansfield and two questions to answer: “What does the story signify?” and “How does it signify?” Later, he gives his own responses to the questions, based on his understanding of the text, for readers to compare with their own.

In this short Postlude, the author addresses common student concerns. Students often wonder if all the information in the book gives too much credit to writers, especially new writers. Perhaps the author doesn’t mean something that readers intuit about the text. How would one know? Foster says that we can’t know what authors intend (especially if they are no longer living) beyond what’s written in the text—and that a reader’s response is necessarily part of the meaning. In that sense, the dialogue between reader and writer is what matters.

The final words in the book take the form of a three-page closing that Foster calls “Envoi,” based on the tradition of a short stanza to close a poem. First he notes that this book is merely an introduction to reading literature and is by no means comprehensive. Then he argues that it’s not necessary to study all other literary elements in addition to the ones in this book because readers can figure them out for themselves after reading Foster’s book. Finally, and above all, he encourages readers to read whatever they enjoy. Reading should be fun, not work, writes Foster, as he ends with a call to “play, Dear Reader, play” (305).