Description:
Thomas C. Foster's classic guide--a lively and entertaining introduction to literature and literary basics, including symbols, themes, and contexts--shows you how to make your everyday reading experience more rewarding and enjoyable.
How to Read Literature Like a Professor helps readers discover the deeper meanings of novels, poems, and plays by looking at literature with the eyes--and literary codes--of the ultimate professional reader: the college professor. This revised and updated edition contains new chapters, new preface and epilogue, and updated teaching points developed over the last decade.
What does it mean when a literary hero travels along a dusty road? When he's drenched in a sudden rain shower? Ranging from major themes to literary models, narrative devices, and form, Foster provides us with a broad overview of literature--a world where a road leads to a quest and rain, whether cleansing or destructive, is never just a shower--and shows us how to make our reading experience more enriching, satisfying, and fun.
Brief description:
Thomas C. Foster is the author of How to Read Literature Like a Professor, How to Write Like a Writer, How to Read Nonfiction Like a Professor, and other works. He is professor emeritus of English at the University of Michigan, Flint, where he taught classes in contemporary fiction, drama, and poetry as well as creative writing and freelance writing. He is also the author of several books on twentieth-century British and Irish literature and poetry.
Review Quotes:
"By bringing his eminent scholarship to bear in doses measured for the common reader or occasional student, Professor Foster has done us all a generous turn. The trained eye, the tuned ear, the intellect possesed of simple cyphers brings the literary arts alive. For those who've ever wondered what Dr. Williams saw in a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water--here is an essential text." - Thomas Lynch, author of The Undertaking
"I know of no other book that so vividly conveys what it's like to study with a great literature professor. In a work that is both down-to-earth and rich in insight, Thomas Foster goes far towards breaking down the wall that has long divided the academic and the common reader." - James Shapiro, Columbia University, author of Shakespeare and the Jews
"A smart, accessible, and thoroughly satisfying examination of what it means to read a work of literature. Guess what? It isn't all that hard, not when you have a knowledgeable guide to show the way. Dante had his Virgil; for everyone else, there is Thomas Foster." - Nicholas A. Basbanes, author of A Gentle Madness, Patience & Fortitude, and Among the Gently Mad
"Tom Foster's casual, unpretentious, yet brilliant How To Read Literature Like a Professor is a painless introduction to crucial - and sophisticated--skills of reading. What a sense of the comic! What a knowledge of modern literature! What good stories!" - Linda Wagner-Martin, UNC-Chapel Hill, author of Sylvia Plath: A Life