A review of “How To Read Literature Like A Professor” by Thomas C Foster (2014)
This book was recommended to me by my Canadian theatre buddy who teaches English literature in a high school in the United States. It was originally published in 2003 and became a classic guide, before it was thoroughly revised and updated for a new edition in 2014. It is written by an American (Foster was a professor of English at the University of Michigan-Flint) for American students (most of the references are to work by American authors), but it is immensely illuminating for any reader of English-language works.
It is primarily about literature, but the techniques he espouses work just as well for poetry, plays or – my favourite format for storytelling – films. The book has justifiably achieved long-term popularity because it is so informative and written in such an accessible style.
Foster suggests that essentially “there’s only one story”: the quest. This consists of five elements: a quester, a place to go, a stated reason to go there, challenges and trials en route, and the real reason to go there. He insists that the real reason for a quest is always self-knowledge. He argues that what separates the discerning reader from the casual one is memory (of other stories and works) and the recognition of symbol and pattern (devices for metaphor and analogy). He thinks that “we want strangeness in our stories but we want familiarity too”.
So he points out – in separate chapters – how many stories are inspired by, or allude to, Greek and Roman mythology, the Bible, fairy tales and Shakespeare and he underlines how all the choices of the writer are meaningful whether it is – again there are chapters for each topic – the location, the geography, the weather, the season, nature, animals, any disability, disfigurement or illness, eating and drinking together, travelling together, fighting together.
It seems that, in good literature, nothing is simply what it looks on the surface: “it is never just rain”, “ghosts and vampires are never only about ghosts and vampires”, “violence in literature while it is literal, is usually also about something else”, and “even when they write about sex, they’re really writing about something else”.
Foster explains that, “if we except lyric poetry, nearly all literature is character-based”, that “plot is character revealed in action”. and that “the most important thing that characters can do is change – grow, develop, learn, mature”. So we need to know: who is the hero (noting that he or she is often marked physically in some way), who is the hero’s best friend (noting that this character is often destined to die), what is the motivation of the protagonist, and what is the intention (both literal and metaphorical)?
There are many ways of interpreting literature and Foster looks especially – again in different chapters – at religious, political and sexual interpretations. Ultimately, though, he wants to reader to bring his or her own interpretation and be able to explain or justify it: “you need to take ownership of your reading”.
In the course of some 350 pages, we learn so many rules or conventions, or at least tropes or themes, but sometimes the writer breaks the rule or inverts the convention and Foster insists that “irony trumps everything”. So, as Americans would say, go figure.