How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster

Foster, Thomas C. How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines. New York: Quill, 2003.

Some associate learning and teaching literature with an English Lit requirement to read boring books they didn’t understand and being embarrassed by a teacher berating them for not seeing the significance of some obscure symbol. To top things off, the kid who seems to do best is someone they know to bullshit their way through everything (that kid is probably a professor now). So when Thomas Foster promises “a lively and entertaining guide” to reading literature (it says to right on the cover of the book), he faces a skeptical audience even among book lovers.

Foster delivers on the promise. His tone is light, sometimes humorous. His style is conversational. He resorts to only on technical term and it refers to a concept that runs through the whole book so the reader will have no trouble getting it.

What makes reading the book fun is that Foster has such fun reading and thinking about what he has read. He doesn’t want people to stop enjoying what they read to start analyzing. He wants them to keep enjoying novels, stories and poems for the interest, entertainment and beauty they way they always have. Keep the old fun and add to it the enjoyments of understanding a work in relation to the rest of literature.



This is the main point of the book (and that technical term, intertextuality): a book, story, poem, or play is part of the total body of literature and by asking ourselves how it relates to other things we’ve read, using both our intellect and our emotions, we can have a full understanding and enjoyment of it. Each chapter after the first discusses things that appear in literature, such as sex, violence, weather and allusions to other works.

The idea isn’t to give you a bunch of discrete things a reader should always be looking for and doing; Foster wants to enrich readers, not burden them. Instead, each is an example of different recurring themes in literature (intertextuality says it’s all connected) allowing a few concepts to be applied to many different things.

This conceptual focus makes the book easy to grasp. The reader doesn’t have to figure out how to read like a professor by wading through a bunch of dusty old books someone thinks is great. Foster shows how readers (and he as a professor) can get more out of reading whatever they want.

That kid who bullshitted his way to a high grade in your English Lit class is probably a professor now. Fortunately, Professor Foster isn’t he.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard