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

“The real reason for a quest never involves the stated reason. In fact, more often than not, the quester fails at the stated task. So why do they go and why do we care? They go because of the stated task, mistakenly believing that it is their real mission. We know, however, that their quest is educational. They don’t know enough about the only subject that really matters: themselves. The real reason for a quest is always self-knowledge. That’s why questers are so often young, inexperienced, immature, sheltered.” 

Foster describes the format for the type of story known as a “quest.” It involves a trip of some sort, which can be long or short, actual or figurative. A challenge along the way causes the quester to grow and gain knowledge of him- or herself. This quest occurs frequently in literature, and Foster argues that once readers are aware of quests and know what to look for, they can readily identify it. The definition of a quest and its application is an example of a “grammar rule” to which Foster refers in the previous quotation.

“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 another. That’s pretty much what the vampire does, after all. He wakes up in the morning—actually the evening, now that I think about it—and says something like, ‘In order to remain undead, I must steal the life force of someone whose fate matters less to me than my own.’ I’ve always supposed that Wall Street traders utter essentially the same sentence. My guess is that as long as people act toward their fellows in exploitative and selfish ways, the vampire will be with us.” 

This passage appears in the chapter on vampires, ghosts, and other monsters. Such beings have been used in literature as metaphors to represent someone or something exploitative. Power differentials always exist between people, countries, and other entities; the older, experienced one is generally always in a position to take advantage of a younger innocent. Vampire and ghost stories often illustrate this phenomenon. In the Victorian era, sexual content of books was heavily censored, so these kinds of horror tales sometimes stand in for stories about sexual exploitation. 

“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. And as with those pictures among the dots, it’s a matter of learning to look. Not just to look but where to look, and how to look. Literature, as the great Canadian critic Northrop Frye observed, grows out of other literature; we should not be surprised to find, then, that it also looks like other literature. As you read, it may pay to remember this: there’s no such thing as a wholly original work of literature. Once you know that, you can go looking for old friends and asking the attendant question: ‘now where have I seen her before?’” 

Here Foster emphasizes one of his main themes—that only one big story exists and all of literature is part of that overarching narrative. All literature is more or less derivative, and once readers gain some experience and learn how to look for patterns, they will see more and more connections.

“Shakespeare also provides a figure against whom writers can struggle, a source of texts against which other texts can bounce ideas. Writers 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. Naturally, none of this is exclusive to Shakespeare, who just happens to be such a towering figure that a great many writers find themselves influenced by him.” 

This passage refers to both Shakespeare’s strong influence on Western literature, discussed in Chapter 5, and the idea of intertextuality, or connections between texts (see Index of Terms). Foster writes that because Shakespeare is so well-known and his work so wide-ranging, writers have long interacted with his work. Shakespeare’s work contains ideas and character types that inspire authors, which adds some familiarity and layers of depth for readers when they encounter new works. 

“This depth is what the biblical dimension adds to the story of Sonny and his brother. We no longer see merely the sad and sordid modern story of a jazz musician and his algebra-teaching brother. Instead the story resonates with the richness of distant antecedents, with the power of accumulated myth. The story ceases to be locked in the middle of the twentieth century and becomes timeless and archetypal, speaking of the tensions and difficulties that exist always and everywhere between brothers, with all their caring and pain and guilt and pride and love. And that story never grows old.” 

Foster applies his understanding of the Bible as a source of inspiration for writers as he discusses James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues.” The Bible is commonly used by writers, and its stories and characters are well-known to generations. The Bible addresses many human conditions, so references to it allow authors to invest their own works with archetypes, ageless themes, and familiar elements. 

“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. If it manages both things at once, strangeness and familiarity, it sets up vibrations, harmonies to go with the melody of the main story line. And those harmonies are where a sense of depth, solidity, resonance comes from. Those harmonies may come from the Bible, from Shakespeare, from Dante or Milton, but also from humbler, more familiar texts.”

In this quotation, the author explains why he thinks intertextuality (as described above with the examples of Shakespeare and the Bible) works so well. The “strangeness” he refers to is novelty; a story is not necessarily a complete repeat of an earlier one. The “familiarity” of a work consists of certain elements that are similar to an earlier work. These two elements work together in harmony to allow the reader to proceed down a new path without getting lost.

“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?” 

Foster explains how textual references to famous stories like Greek myths work in reality. He refers to two texts: Homer’s Odyssey and Derek Walcott’s Omeros. Though the two works are set in very different cultures and environments, two millennia apart, the patterns of human behavior match up, allowing readers to examine fundamental truths about what it is to be human.

“On the other hand, rain is also restorative. This is chiefly because of its association with spring, but Noah once again comes into play here. Rain can bring the world back to life, to new growth, to the return of the green world. Of course, novelists being what they are, they generally use this function ironically. In the ending of A Farewell to Arms (1929), Hemingway, having killed off Frederic Henry’s lover during childbirth, sends the grieving protagonist out of the hospital into, you guessed it, rain. It might be ironic enough to die during childbirth, which is also associated with spring, but the rain, which we might properly expect to be life-giving, further heightens the irony.” 

This passage comes from the chapter that discusses the symbolic meaning of rain and other kinds of weather. Foster first describes the straightforward connections between rain, springtime, and renewal. Then he shows how the use of irony can upend those connections. When the expected meaning does not match what actually happens, irony is at play. In this case, the events in Hemingway’s novel that are accompanied by rain are the opposite of what rain usually connotes.

“And that’s the problem with being best pals with a hero. They have needs, or perhaps the narrative has needs on their behalf, but they cannot fulfill those requirements directly, not if the story is to continue. Hey, guess what? That’s what friends are for. When Shakespeare needs a line to be crossed that cannot be uncrossed between the Capulets and the Montagues, does he kill Romeo? Of course not. Poor Mercutio, who is really a more engaging fellow than the hero, has to carry that freight.”

Here, Foster explains how characters work. Main characters have to live until the very end of the work, or the story is over. Protagonists are the ones who grow or learn something—that is, they are round characters. Literature is full of flat characters like Mercutio, however, who are there to serve the needs of the main character. Foster emphasizes that characters are not people, just representations of them. In real life, all people are considered “round,” but literature only works if some are round and some are flat.

“Violence is one of the most personal and even intimate acts between human beings, but it can also be cultural and societal in its implications. It can be symbolic, thematic, biblical, Shakespearean, Romantic, allegorical, transcendent. Violence in real life just is. If someone punches you in the nose in a supermarket parking lot, it’s simply aggression. It doesn’t contain meaning beyond the act itself. Violence in literature, though, while it is literal, is usually also something else. That same punch in the nose may be a metaphor.” 

Foster acknowledges that violence is a topic that presents a challenge to readers. Severe violence, especially violence depicted in detail, can be disturbing to readers, and neither the author nor the reader need condone violence. In literature, acts of violence usually serve a purpose, representing a deeper meaning that readers need to be on the lookout for.

“We tend to give writers all the credit, but reading is also an event of the imagination; our creativity, our inventiveness, encounters those of the writer, and in that meeting we puzzle out what she means, what we understand her to mean, what uses we can put her writing to. Imagination isn’t fantasy. That is to say, we can’t simply invent meaning without the writer, or if we can, we ought not to hold her to it. Rather, a reader’s imagination is the act of one creative intelligence engaging another.” 

Here, Foster lays out one of his main themes of the book: writers and readers, together, make meaning. Each reader has a unique reading experience based on his or her own background and life; thus, the conclusions they draw will not all be the same. The text serves as a canvas for a meeting of the minds between author and reader. 

“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.’” 

This passage explains the presence in literature of ideas that are considered political, even when the subject is not overtly so. As Foster’s list of examples shows, “political” topics are not limited to government and politics, but also to social structures, rights, and power differentials. These issues tend to interest authors. 

“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 Buddhist 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. Often those values will not be religious in nature but may show themselves in connection with the individual’s role within society, or humankind’s relation to nature, or the involvement of women in public life, although, as we have seen, just as often religion shows up in the form of allusions and analogues.”

Like political themes, religious themes are common in literature and their appearances need not be overtly about religion. However, religion has such a strong influence on culture that readers ought to be aware of the stories and ideas that identify a particular religion (even if readers are not followers of that religion themselves). Foster’s point about religion connects to the theme of literature as “one big story” about human existence: mythical stories become ingrained in a culture and constitute a repository of ideas and archetypal characters upon which writers can draw.

“So freedom, escape, return home, largeness of spirit, love. That’s a lot for just one work to do with flying. What about others? What about E.T.? When those bicycles leave the street in the Steven Spielberg classic, what’s the situation? The adults of the community, representing conformity, hostility to anything new, xenophobia, suspicion, a lack of imagination, are bearing down on our young heroes. They’ve even set up a roadblock. At just the moment when things look worst, the bicycles leave the earth and, with it, the earthbound grown-ups. Escape? Certainly. Freedom? You bet. Wonder, magic? Absolutely.

It’s really pretty straightforward: flight is freedom.” 

In the chapter where this quotation is located, Foster discusses the symbolic meaning of flying when it occurs in literature. The motif of flight has been identified in works as early as the Greek myths thanks to the ill-fated flight of Icarus. The first sentence in the passage lists some ideas that flight can represent, freedom being the most common. For example, Foster discusses instances of flying (or situations similar to flight, such as jumping) as it relates to freedom and the legacy of slavery.

“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.” 

While Chapter 9 deals with water in the form of rain, Chapter 18 deals with bodies of water and the potential meanings of events that involve people who have fallen into bodies of water. As the chapter title suggests, when a character is submerged in water and survives, this event often symbolizes baptism and cleansing. Here again, we see the strong influence of religious themes on literature with the concept of baptism. Similarly, heavy floods can suggest the story of Noah’s ark. As with all the elements discussed in the book, when readers encounter water, they should look to context clues elsewhere in the story to work out its exact meaning.

“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 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.” 

Foster urges the reader to consider the settings of stories as more than just the usual ideas of time and place. He indicates that setting can have all sorts of indirect effects on the plot and characters and, thus, the setting can have all sorts of meanings. A wide-open landscape, for example, could lead to a free-spiritedness among the people who live there. A harsh, remote location may influence how a society is ordered and the role of individuals in relation to the community.

“For about as long as anyone’s been writing anything, the seasons have stood for the same set of meanings. Maybe it’s hard-wired into 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 stop 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.” 

Another literary element Foster discusses consists of the four seasons and the implied meanings of each. Authors set their stories at specific times of the year to add a layer of meaning to the work. Something so deeply rooted in the collective human psyche has great potential for ironic treatment, as authors sometimes play against readers’ expectations, as when T. S. Eliot begins “The Wasteland” with the line “April is the cruellest month.”

“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 actually 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. I suspect that a wholly original work, one that owed nothing to previous writing, would so lack familiarity as to be quite unnerving to readers.” 

This passage echoes Foster’s earlier thoughts about narrative. Just as texts that reference other texts add familiarity and depth to the reading experience, so do characters with qualities similar to other characters in older stories. The new character can follow an archetypal pattern, which imbues the character with a known set of attributes or, conversely, can play against the type to surprise readers.

“Now, about that danger I mentioned earlier. Too much acceptance of the author’s viewpoint can lead to difficulties. Do we have to accept the values of a three-thousand-year-old blood culture as depicted in the Homeric epics? Absolutely not. I think we should frown on the wanton destruction of societies, on the enslavement of conquered peoples, on keeping concubines, on wholesale slaughter. At the same time, though, we need to understand that the Mycenaean Greeks did not.”

Here Foster advises readers to deal with disturbing material in literature from two points of view: ours and theirs. Readers need not accept the messages as norms, but they should be able to appreciate larger aspects of a work in context. He writes that we should not read solely from our own perspective but also from the perspective of the times from which the work emerges, as well as the location it is set in. A work might have many positive aspects overall though it is offensive in some ways, and Foster suggests that the right balance is key. If the positive aspects outweigh the offensive ones, the work may still be worth reading.

“In a situation where we encounter purely private symbols, there are some things we can fall back on. Most important, there’s context. Where in the poem does the image reside? (In this case, the final three stanzas, after he has discussed disappearances of a more permanent sort.) How does he use the image? What does he seem to mean by it? In other words, what are the words, read carefully, telling us? We also have another set of tools available: our own good sense and reading savvy. As we become expert readers through practice, we gain the ability to transfer knowledge from one area to another.”

After explaining ways to interpret some of the common symbols that appear in literature, Foster discusses how readers should approach symbols that are rarely used or even used by just one author. His advice is to follow the approach used for all symbols: look to the context. By noting how the author presents and treats other elements of a story, readers can usually discern the meaning of esoteric symbols. Through practice, readers can gain confidence and expertise in making meaning. 

“Irony—sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, sometimes wry or perplexing—provides additional richness to the literary dish. And it certainly keeps us readers on our toes, inviting us, compelling us, to dig through layers of possible meaning and competing signification. We must remember: irony trumps everything. In other words, every chapter in this book goes out the window when irony comes in the door.” 

The words “irony trumps everything” occupy the first sentence in Chapter 26, and the author repeats them at the end of the chapter in the quotation above. This repetition emphasizes the importance and the power of irony. As the quotation says, all 25 previous chapters are moot when irony is introduced. To identify irony, readers must compare their expectations regarding certain symbols with the symbol in a text as it is actually presented. When they don’t match, the intention is likely ironic. As always, context—all the elements of a text in relation to each other—is key. 

“The modernist poet Ezra Pound said that a poem has to work first of all on the level of the reader for whom ‘a hawk is simply a hawk.’ The same goes for stories. An understanding of the story in terms of what literally happens, if the story is as good as this one, is a great starting point. From there, if you consider the pattern of images and allusions, you’ll begin to see more going on. Your conclusions may not resemble mine or Diane’s, but if you’re observing carefully and meditating on the possibilities, you’ll reach valid conclusions of your own that will enrich and deepen your experience of the story.” 

This quotation explains the author’s approach to reading. After explaining how to look for various elements that add layers of meaning, he addresses the concern his students have often had: What if they miss something and neglect to figure out some hidden meaning of a work? Foster maintains that a story has to work as a narrative first; it may be full of meaning but if it doesn’t grasp a reader’s attention, it fails. The reading and enjoyment of a story at face value is primary; any understanding deeper than that just enriches the experience even more. (Diane is a former student of his whose answers he gives in the “test case” of the chapter.)

“Don’t cede control of your opinions to critics, teachers, famous writers, or know-it-all professors. Listen to them, but read confidently and assertively, and don’t be ashamed or apologetic about your reading. You and I both know you’re capable and intelligent, so don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Trust the text and trust your instincts. You’ll rarely go far wrong.” 

This quotation is Foster’s final advice to readers. His book serves the same function as his teaching method described in the Preface: after explaining the fundamentals, he then stands aside and lets students work things out for themselves (see page xiii). The same goes for readers in general. Foster touches here on his theme that authors and readers make meaning together. Readers should worry less about the one “true” meaning of a story and put more stock in their own interpretation based on what they get from the text.