How To Read Literature Like A Professor Chapter Summary

In How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster, he outlines the five elements of a quest. The elements that are needed for a quest to occur is a quester, a place to go, reason to go, challenges and trials, and a real reason to go there. In The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins the main character, Katniss Everdeen, goes on a quest that tests her courage, bravery, and will to survive. The quester, Katniss Everdeen is a sixteen year old girl who has a younger sibling Primrose who is 12 years old. The government where Katniss lives is run from the capitol. Every year the capitol holds the hunger games which is a punishment placed on the districts after an uprising that failed. There is a public reaping

In How to Read Literature Like a Professor, Thomas C. Foster teaches readers about the most commonly used symbols and their meanings and the similarities between stories.

How to Read Literature Like a Professor is a book Thomas C. Foster uses to expose his thoughts and feelings of many literary terms and devices. Such ideas can be found in James Joyce’s short story, “The Dead”.

In Thomas Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor and John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, both authors demonstrate the use of violence between characters in multiple ways. In Chapter 12 of How to Read Literature Like a Professor, Foster describes two different ways that violence is used in literature, both of which can be found in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. In addition, both books also explore how each type of violence has a different effect on the plot and the characters. These two books are related because of their exploration of a deeper meaning of violence between two or more characters in literature and the different effects each type has.

In Thomas Foster’s book, “How to Read Literature Like a Professor,” readers learn how to look past the surface of a literary work to find a deeper or hidden meaning. Writers use devices, such as symbolism, imagery, foreshadowing, irony and allusion to reveal these meanings. If these are overlooked, important aspects of the story can be lost. One literary device that Foster emphasizes in his book is allusion. Every story has elements of another story, and Foster devotes Chapters Four through Seven explaining the meaning of allusion in works by Shakespeare, the Bible, and fairy tales.

Chapter 14 is about how almost everything, in some form, is a Christ figure. The chapter gives a list to relate characters to. The list is 1. crucified, wounds in the hands, feet, side, and head 2. in agony 3. self-sacrificing 4. good with children 5.good with loaves, fishes, water, wine 6. thirty-three years of age when last seen 7. employed as a carpenter 8. known to use humble modes of transportation, feet or donkeys preferred 9. believed to have walked on water 10. often portrayed with arms outstretched 11.

In the twelfth chapter of Thomas C. Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor, Foster provides various information on how to identify symbols throughout literature. The chapter stressed the individuality of identifying symbols, Foster mentions multiple times that “every reader’s experience of every work is unique, largely because each person will emphasize various elements to different degrees” (110). After learning this and also having read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, one thing that stood out was that the main character, Oskar, only has and only wears white clothes. Not only does Oskar often reference his various white clothes, including the white scarf that Grandma knitted

How do memory, symbol, and pattern affect the reading of literature? How does the recognition of patterns make it easier to read complicated literature? Discuss a time when your appreciation of a literary work was enhanced by understanding symbol or pattern.

-We have to carefully compare and contrast all parts of the sonnet in order to see the deeper meaning that all sonnets hold.

Foster discusses the idea that when two characters eat together, that moment acts as a bonding experience and causes the characters to come together. I had never noticed the significance of a meal between characters before. After reading this chapter, I can think of so many moments in stories when the characters share a meal together to form friendships or come to a peace. In one of my favorite novels, Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult, Picoult writes that “Emma Alexis- who was one of the cool, beautiful girls…she rolled her wheelchair right beside Justin. She’d asked him if she could have half of his donut” (367). Splitting the donut between one of the popular girls and one of the quieter, nerdier boys was a representation of the deformation of the high school social classes. After reading this chapter, I could recall the significance of meals together in so many novels and movies but I never noticed this pattern before.

Analysis: Compare chapter 20 :How to Read Literature Like a Professor-“…So Does Season” to part four (chapter 1) of The Fountainhead.

The recognition of patterns makes it much easier to read complicated literature because recognizing patterns will help you relate two or more pieces of literature together, therefore making it easier to understand and analyze the literature you are focused on. Patterns in literature can help the reader understand plots, settings, themes, and other literary elements. I greatly appreciated the novel, Brave New World because of how different the society in the novel was from the one I live in. Using the Signposts from Notice and Note, I was able to see contrast and contradictions that enhanced my understanding of the book. I noticed how I was expecting Bernard, in Brave New World to be just like everybody else in the novel but instead he was a “normal person” that felt normal human emotions, such as the longing for love, that the other characters just did not feel. He also felt isolated and alone. Bernard thinks in a way we were not expecting. Patterns such as this helped me, the reader, to better understand literary elements.

-Flight is freedom. When a character has the ability to fly they are free from the burdens of everyday life.

A significant part of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise describes the time that the main character, Amory Blaine, has spent at Princeton University. Through the portrayal of the several characters, the novel shows that the years spent at Princeton either turned the students into a homogenous mass or, on the contrary, prompted them to deviate from the crowd.

Though not much is known about J.D. Salinger’s childhood or family, a plethora of his works include overall themes of family and how different aspects of childhood can affect someone in the future (Wenke). In his novel, Franny and Zooey, this theme is an important part of the story (French). The story begins with Franny Glass’ story, told in third person by an unknown narrator. She’s taking a weekend off from college to meet her boyfriend, Lane Coutell, to eat lunch and spend the weekend with him for his college’s football weekend. At lunch, Franny has a mental breakdown and tells Lane about how she hates all of the fake people she encounters. She meets many poets and they all write about what will interest people and not about what they actually feel. She finds beauty in the things that actually have important value to people rather than something that means nothing. Lane also questions her on the little green book she always carries around. She avoids the question until she can’t and explains she got it in her college library, which she is obviously lying about. She proceeds to go to the bathroom and pass out. When she wakes up, Lane can tell something is wrong, but he no longer questions her. Then it switches to Zooey’s story. It is narrated by the second eldest Glass sibling, Buddy Glass. Zooey and his mother, Bessie, are struggling to get along. She continuously questions him, and she babies Franny and only speaks of Seymour, his brother who committed suicide, and