Unformatted text preview: Dedication For my sons, Robert and Nathan Contents
DEDICATION
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
How’d He Do That?
Every Trip Is a Quest
1. (Except When It’s Not)
2. Nice to Eat with You: Acts of Communion
3. Nice to Eat You: Acts of Vampires
4. Now, Where Have I Seen Her Before?
5. When in Doubt, It’s from Shakespeare . . .
6. . . . Or the Bible
7. Hanseldee and Greteldum
8. It’s Greek to Me
9. It’s More Than Just Rain or Snow
10. Never Stand Next to the Hero
INTERLUDE
Does He Mean That?
. . . More Than It’s Gonna Hurt You: Concerning
11. Violence
12. Is That a Symbol?
13. It’s All Political
14. Yes, She’s a Christ Figure, Too
15. Flights of Fancy
16. It’s All About Sex . . .
17. . . . Except Sex
18. If She Comes Up, It’s Baptism
19. Geography Matters . . .
20. . . . So Does Season
INTERLUDE
One Story
21. Marked for Greatness
22. He’s Blind for a Reason, You Know
It’s Never Just Heart Disease . . . And Rarely Just
23. Illness
24. Don’t Read with Your Eyes
25. It’s My Symbol and I’ll Cry If I Want To
26. Is He Serious? And Other Ironies
27. A Test Case
POSTLUDE:
Who’s in Charge Here?
ENVOI
APPENDIX:
Reading List ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX
About the Author
Praise for How to Read Literature Like a Professor
Also by Thomas C. Foster
Copyright
About the Publisher Preface THE AMAZING THING ABOUT BOOKS is how they have lives of their
own. Writers think they know their business when they sit
down to compose a new work, and I suppose they do, right
up to the moment when the last piece of punctuation gets
planted on the final sentence. More often than not, that
punctuation is a period. It should be a question mark,
though, because what occurs from then on is anybody’s
guess.
The classic example is the writer whose best book goes
thud upon release. Think Herman Melville or F. Scott
Fitzgerald. Melville must have thought, after finding large
readerships for earlier novels, that the crazed search for the
white whale would be a smash. It wasn’t. Nor was
Fitzgerald’s tale of a romantic dreamer trying to rewrite his
past. The Great Gatsby is so much subtler, so much more
insightful about human nature and its historical moment,
than his earlier books that it is almost inconceivable that his
huge audience turned away. On the other hand, maybe that
is why it turned away. Successfully predicting the coming
calamity looks a lot like an excess of gloominess—until the
disaster
arrives.
Humankind,
observed
Fitzgerald’s contemporary T. S. Eliot, cannot bear too much reality. In
any case, Fitzgerald lived only long enough to see his books
largely out of print, his royalties nonexistent. It would take
another generation for the world to discover how great
Gatsby truly is, three or four times that for Moby-Dick to be
recognized as a masterpiece.
There are also tales, of course, of unexpected bestsellers
that go on and on, as well as flashes in the pan that flare up
but then die out without a trace. But it’s the Moby-Gatsby
kind of story that compels our attention. If you want to know
what the world thinks about a writer and her work, check
back with us in, oh, two hundred years or so.
Not all stories of publication switchbacks are so stark. We
all hope to find an audience—any audience—and we believe
we have some idea who that will be. Sometimes we’re right,
sometimes we’re all wet. What follows is a confession of
sorts.
The customary acknowledgments and thanks are typically
placed at the back of the book. I wish, however, to
recognize one special debt of gratitude to a group whose
assistance has been monumental. Indeed, without them,
this revision would not have been possible. A dozen or so
years ago when I was drafting the original, I was pretty clear
on the audience for my book. She was a thirty-seven-yearold returning student, probably divorced, probably a nurse
forced back to coursework by changes in the licensure rules
of the profession. Faced with the prospect of obtaining a
bachelor’s degree, she chose to follow her heart this time
around and pursue a degree in English. She had always
been a serious reader, but she had felt that she was missing
something in her experience of literature, some deep secret
her teachers had known but not imparted to her. You think I’m kidding, right? I’m not. Teaching at a branch
campus of a famous university, I meet her, or her male
equivalent, the guy (usually, although there are women as
well) laid off from the assembly line at General Motors,
again and again. And again. One of the great things about
teaching at the University of Michigan–Flint, as opposed to
the University of Michigan, is ceaseless contact with adult
learners, many of whom hunger for more learning. I also
have plenty of the typical-college-student type, but the
nontraditional students have taught me a few things. First,
never assume anything about background experience. I’ve
had students who have read all of Joyce or Faulkner or
Hemingway, and one who had read more Czech novels than
I could ever hope to get through, as well as students who
had read pretty much only Stephen King or Danielle Steel.
There have been Hitchcock fanatics and devotees of
Bergman and Fellini, and others who thought Dallas was
high art. And you can never tell which will be which.
Second, explain yourself. They expect, and are sometimes
more vocal about it than their younger classmates, to see
how the trick is done. Whether they think I am the high
priest or the high charlatan, they want to know how the
magic works, how I arrive at my sometimes idiosyncratic
readings.
And third, teach precepts, then stand aside. Once I show
these older students how I work with texts, I get out of the
way. This is not because of the wonders of my approach or
my teaching; chiefly, what happens is that I validate
something about their own way of reading that gives them
permission to run free, and run they do. Younger students
do, too, but they are often more inhibited, having spent
their whole lives inside classrooms. There’s nothing like
being out on your own to make you intellectually self-reliant. Are these older students all geniuses? No, although a few
might be. Nor are they all closet intellectuals, although more
than a few are—you know, the sort who get nicknamed
“Professor” because they’re seen reading books on their
lunch break. But however smart they may be, they push me
and school me even as I do the same to them. So I figured
there must be others out there like them. And it was for that
group that I wrote this book.
Boy, was I wrong. I was right, too. I have heard from quite
a lot of mature readers, some of whom fit the above
descriptions, others who had been English majors in college
but who had been left with the feeling that something was
missing, that some key element of literary study had passed
them by. I would receive the occasional e-mail from such
readers. Then, about two years in, the nature of those
missives changed. I started hearing from English teachers.
Not often, but every once in a while. And about six months
after that, I started hearing from high school students. The
teachers were uniformly glowing in their praise, the
students mostly so. With just enough hate mail to make it
clear that this wasn’t a put-up job. One student said, in one
of the more printable messages, “I don’t know what the big
deal is. Everything in your book I learned in ninth grade.” I
told her I would like to shake her ninth-grade teacher’s
hand. And no refunds. It was also at about this time that I
heard indirectly that the book was being discussed on a site
for Advanced Placement English teachers.
In the years since, I have been blessed to have contact
with teachers and students from around the country. There
have been all sorts of inquiries, from “What did you mean
by X?” to “Can I apply this notion to that book that you
didn’t discuss?” to “Can you look over my thesis sentence
(or my whole paper)?” The first two are great, the latter less so, since it puts me in an awkward ethical position. Even so,
it is flattering that students trust a complete stranger
enough to ask such questions.
I have also had plenty of direct interaction. I go into
several classrooms a year to talk with classes about the
book and how they’re using it. These visits are a lot of fun
and almost always involve a great question or two. Needless
to say, the in-person visits are largely limited to places I can
drive in a few hours, although I did once go as far afield as
Fort Thomas, Kentucky. I have also, thanks to the wonders of
the digital age, been able to engage with students
electronically. Diane Burrowes, the queen of academic
marketing at HarperCollins, stays up nights thinking of new
and strange ways to get me, or at least a digital version
thereof, into classrooms from New Jersey and Virginia to
Flagstaff, Arizona. And of course the development of
platforms like Skype has made such visits almost
commonplace.
What has struck me most in the ensuing years is the
endless inventiveness of secondary English teachers in
general and AP teachers in particular. They have figured out
ways to use this book that would never have occurred to me
if I taught for a thousand years. In one class, each student is
assigned as the keeper of a chapter; if Sam is in charge of
rain and snow, he makes a poster explaining the significant
elements of the chapter, and whenever the reading involves
precipitation, Sam is prepared to discuss its implications. I
suspect Sam got a raw deal and has to work harder than
almost anyone else, but maybe he likes being busy. In
another class, students work in groups to make short
movies, and every movie must incorporate at least one
concept from the book. At the end of the year, they have a
mock-Oscar ceremony, complete with tuxedos and statuettes (used sports trophies, I’m told). Now that’s just
brilliant. What I like best about many of the schemes is the
degree of student autonomy built into them. I suspect that
one of the appealing elements of the book is that it lacks
the apparatus of a textbook, which allows teachers to make
of it what they will—and they make many different things of
it. In turn, many of them pass that open-endedness along to
their students, permitting them to be creative with the text
and their own insights.
Is that the key to the book’s popularity among teachers? I
don’t know. I was amazed when I first heard that it was
being adopted for courses, my thoughts revolving around
the utter absence of academic trappings (things like notes,
glosses, and questions at the end of chapters, which, by the
way, I’ve always hated) and the scattershot organization. I
grouped the discussions in a way that felt right to me, but
that’s not the same as making sense for classroom use.
Indeed, I am not sure what would make sense in a
classroom setting, since I have never, and would never, use
the book in a course. How’s that for a confession? It is not
an excess of modesty, a thing of which I have never been
accused, that prevents my using it. The reason is more
practical. This book contains most of my literary insights
and all my jokes. If I assigned it, I would have nothing left to
do. The goal of education, as I see it, is to bring students to
the point where they no longer need you—in essence, to put
yourself out of a job . . . but that retirement would be a little
more sudden than I’d prefer.
So when I heard that teachers were assigning the book as
summer reading, I was more than a little astonished. That it
has found a home in high schools is testament to the
creativity and intelligence of secondary teachers of English.
They’re working at a time when, we’re told, no one reads anymore, yet they somehow manage to inspire a love of
reading among their students. They work incredibly hard,
grading work by as many as 150 students at a time, a load
that just thinking about would make most university
professors woozy. They get far too little respect and not
nearly enough pay for doing a remarkable job. One of my
more waggish colleagues, noting my frequent visits to
secondary classes, says that I could have my pick of any
high school teaching job in America. He’s wrong, of course. I
couldn’t keep up with the people already there.
To the English teachers who have made How to Read
Literature Like a Professor a success, I can offer only my
profound gratitude. That this book is even in print, much
less in the process of being revised, is all your fault. I can’t
thank each of you individually, but I would like to thank
some representative members of the tribe: Joyce Haner
(now retired) of Okemos High School (Michigan), for many
late-night discussions at, of all places, softball team parties,
as well as for being my first welcomer among Michigan
teachers; Amy Anderson and Bill Spruytte of Lapeer East
High School (Michigan); Stacey Turczyn of Powers Catholic
High School in Flint; and Gini Wozny of Academy of the
Redwoods in Eureka, California, all of whom sent their—and
their students’—recommendations and suggestions for the
new edition. Literally dozens of others have offered
suggestions in person or via e-mail over the years, and to
each of you, many, many thanks. What you do is far more
important than any book.
The changes to this edition are modest but, I hope,
significant. Most significant, to my troubled mind, is that I
was able to remove or correct two or three howling
blunders. No, I won’t tell you what they were. It’s bad
enough I’ve had to live with them, so I certainly won’t broadcast my folly. And there are quite a few fit-and-finish
issues I was able to resolve, little matters of grammar and
orthography—needless repetitions of words or phrases, an
unhappy word choice here or there, the usual niggling
matters that make it so hard to read one’s own work and
that make one think, “Surely I could have done better than
that.” But there are also matters of substance. The chapter
on sonnet shape was generally deemed not to fit the rest of
the volume. It’s about form and structure, really, when the
rest of the book is about figurative meaning and the way
meaning deflects from one object or action or event at the
surface level to something else on another. If, like me, you
always liked that chapter, fear not. I’m planning a discussion
of poetry, quite possibly in e-book form, so that chapter may
reappear in a couple of years. The chapters on illness, heart
and otherwise, have been shortened and run together; it felt
as if the text was straining for length there.
In their place, I added a chapter on characterization and
on why being buddies with protagonists is so bad for the
health of second fiddles. There’s also a new discussion on
public versus private symbols. One of the central precepts
of the book is that there is a universal grammar of figurative
imagery, that in fact images and symbols gain much of their
power from repetition and reinterpretation. Naturally,
however, writers are always inventing new metaphors and
symbols that sometimes recur throughout their work, or that
show up once and are never heard from again. In either
case, we need a strategy for dealing with these anomalies,
so I try to oblige.
I have also included, as a path toward increased analytical
confidence, a meditation on taking charge of one’s own
reading experience, of understanding the reader’s
importance in the creation of literary meaning. It’s surprising to me how, even as they actively create readings
of their own, students and other readers can still maintain
an essentially passive view of experiencing texts. It’s high
time they gave themselves more credit.
Of course, literature is a moving target, and thousands
upon thousands of books have been published in the decade
or so since the book appeared. While there is no need to
overhaul the references and examples from edition to
edition, I have used a few illustrations from more recent
publications. There have been some terrific developments in
poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction in the last few years,
even for those of us who are not enthralled by teenage
vampires or Jane Austen’s novels beset by monsters and
parasitic adaptations. Mr. Darcy’s Second Cousin’s Wife Gets
a Hangnail. That sort of thing. Against those trends,
however, we can set the appearance of talented newcomers
as well as work by established masters in the various
genres, writers as diverse and interesting as Zadie Smith,
Monica Ali, Jess Walter, Colum McCann, Colm Tóibín,
Margaret Atwood, Thomas Pynchon, Emma Donoghue, Lloyd
Jones, Adam Foulds, Orhan Pamuk, Téa Obreht, and Audrey
Niffenegger. And that’s just the fiction writers. There have
been startling new finds and painful losses. We sometimes
hear of the death of literature or of this or that genre (the
novel is a favorite whipping boy), but literature doesn’t die,
just as it doesn’t “progress” or “decay.” It expands, it
increases. When we feel that it has become stagnant or
stale, that usually just means we ourselves are not paying
sufficient attention. Whether it’s the untold story of a
famous writer’s wife or the racial newcomers to a changing
Britain or America or a boy in a lifeboat with a tiger or a
tiger in a Balkan village or a man on a wire between the
Twin Towers, new tales, as well as old tales with new wrinkles, continue to be told. Makes you want to keep
getting up in the morning just to see what happens next.
While we’re on the subject of thanksgiving, I would like to
express my gratitude to a critically important population.
Every time I meet with students, I am inspired. In the course
of my work, naturally I deal with college students, both
undergraduate and graduate, on a frequent basis, and those
interactions have been rich, full, frustrating, uplifting,
disappointing, and sometimes downright miraculous.
English majors form a large portion of that group, but thanks
to the wonders of general education requirements, I have
had a great deal of contact with majors in other fields
(biologists are a special favorite), and they inevitably bring
different skill sets, different attitudes, and different
questions to the table. They make me pay attention.
I have also, for the last ten years or so, had frequent
contact with high school students, an experience I wish
everyone could have—not merely high-school-age young
people, but teenagers in their capacity as students. A great
deal has been written and said about this group, most of it
negative—they don’t read, can’t write, don’t care about the
world around them, don’t know anything about history or
science or politics or, well, you name it. In other words, the
same things that have been said about teenagers since I
was one. And for a long time before that. I’m pretty sure
that one day we will unearth a clay tablet or a papyrus scroll
with those exact sentiments expressed. I’m sure some of it
is true, that some of it has always been true. But here’s
what I know, from my dealings in person and via e-mail,
about high school students. They are thoughtful, interested
and interesting, curious, rebellious, forward-looking,
ambitious, and hardworking. When faced with the choice,
many opt for the heavier workload and higher demands of AP classes, even though they could slide through something
easier. They are readers. Many read—and some read a huge
amount—beyond the syllabus. They write. More than a few
aspire to write professionally. When told that it is nearly
impossible to make a living as a writer and likely to get even
harder, they still aspire to be writers. I know this from all the
questions I field and the conversations we have together.
And as long as there are young people who are interested in
language, in story, in poetry, in writing, there will be
literature. It may move into digital realms, it may return to
handmade manuscripts, it may take form in graphic novels
or on screens, but it will continue to be created. And read.
A couple of years ago, I gave a talk and reading in Grand
Rapids. Students from a local district came to the event to
get me to sign books. Not the book that had just been
published, but the one they had been ass...
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