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

Thomas C. Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines is a nonfiction book that aims to teach readers how to improve their reading skills. Foster, a longtime university professor, focuses on techniques that enable readers to puzzle out some of the deeper meanings of a story that exist below the surface level of the plot. Harper published the book in 2003, and the 2014 second edition, to which this guide refers, contains changes and updates to the text.

The book consists of short chapters that concern a wide range of elements found in fiction. The Preface contains acknowledgements and a description of what Foster learned from feedback to the first edition. After the Preface, Foster begins by explaining in the Introduction how literature employs its own “grammar.”

The first grammatical element concerns travel, as explained in Chapter 1, and the next two chapters involve acts of eating or consuming. Chapter 2 discusses how eating and drinking represents a kind of communion, or coming together while Chapter 3 is more figurative, explaining that vampire and other monster stories usually involve a person or a society that preys upon and consumes someone or something innocent. Chapter 4 examines the parallels that exist between many works of literature, thanks to the use of established characters or archetypes. Chapters 5 and 6 review the strong influence of Shakespeare and the Bible on Western literature, while Chapters 7 and 8 look at the influence of children’s literature and the Greek myths.

In Chapter 9, Foster explains some common meanings of various weather conditions and looks closely at characters in Chapter 10, especially the role that friends of the protagonist often play in narratives. Following this section is the first Interlude, in which Foster discusses a common question of students about whether authors really intend all the “hidden” meanings the book covers. (The answer is: probably.)

Chapter 11 deals with the meanings of violence while Chapter 12 looks at symbols, which include objects such as caves and rivers but also symbolic actions. Chapter 13 explains how stories can have a political bent to them, even when the presence of politics is not overt, such as in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Chapter 14 examines how characters can resemble Jesus Christ, as they represent resurrection or redemption. Foster discusses flight in Chapter 15, showing how it can symbolize freedom or escape. Chapters 16 and 17 examine sex in literature, paradoxically noting that it is often referred to indirectly by nonsexual things; at the same time, direct sexual references can represent nonsexual ideas. The meaning of characters immersed in water is the topic of Chapter 18; if they survive, it symbolizes cleansing or baptism. Chapters 19 and 20 discuss the various meanings that geography and seasons can have on a text.

Next, the author’s second Interlude appears, in which Foster argues that all works of literature encompass one huge story which covers all of human existence. That is, everything is related to everything else, and readers should apply all that they’ve learned from other stories, poems, songs, movies, etc. to the next text they encounter. The next three chapters, Chapters 21 to 23, discuss characters’ physical ailments—marks and deformities, blindness, and illness—and the figurative meanings these ailments can imply.

In Chapter 24, Foster urges readers to view any given work from the perspective of the time period in which it was produced. Ideas and norms change over time, and norms of the present cannot be applied to the past. The next chapter gives readers advice regarding the meaning of less common symbols. Foster ends the discussion of literary symbols and metaphors in Chapter 26 by asserting that the involvement of irony renders such discussion of representative elements moot. Foster provides readers with an opportunity to apply what they have learned to a short story. A Postlude and a brief note close the book, with Foster encouraging readers to have confidence in their analyses of literature and, above all, to have fun reading.