How Does Read Literature Like A Professor

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.

The five aspects of a quest are ( A.) a quester, ( B.) a place to go, ( C.) a started reason to go there, ( D.) challenges and trials en route, ( E.) and a real reason to do there. “Once you figure out quest, the rest is easy”. The started goal fades away throughout the story line and a new one is created. In the movie The Wizard of Oz the ( A.) Quester is a young, naive Dorothy, who is from Kansas. Dorothy is caught in a tornado and lands in the Land of Oz. ( B.) A Place To Go: When Dorothy arrives in Oz she finds out the only person the can get her back home is The Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz, who lives in the Emerald City, and the only way to get there is to follow the Yellow Brick Road. ( C.) As Stated Reason To Go There: Dorothy wants

In Chapter 1 the author explains the symbolic reasoning of why a character takes a trip. They don't just take a trip they take a quest. Structurally a quest has a quester, a place to go, a stated reason to go there, challenges and trials en route, and a reason to go there. Quests usually involve characters such as a knight, a dangerous road, a Holy Grail, a dragon, an evil knight, and a princess. The quest also involves the character to gain self-knowledge out of taking the adventure to the stated place where he or she is going.

In the book “How To Read Literature Like A Professor” by Thomas C. Foster, many elements are brought to the reader’s attention. Three of these elements, happen to connect with the novel, “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time” written by Mark Haddon.

-There are always five parts of a quest: the quester, an end goal, a purpose, obstacles in the path, the deeper lesson learned from the quest.

Foster breaks down the aspects of a journey to describe the quester, the destination, the stated reason, the challenges, and the real reason. The character who embarks on the journey, also known as the quester, has a defined reason to do so, whether it is to obtain an object, save one from the lurking dangers, or acquire life-saving knowledge. Along their way to reach their destination, they may encounter various challenges such as a physical barrier, a challenger/defender, or a personal obstacle they must face. Through whatever form it takes, these barriers force the quester to challenge their abilities and beliefs, which ultimately leads to them discovering personal knowledge previously unknown about themselves. Though the quester may have accomplished their stated goal of their journey, they return from their voyage often as a changed person as the real reason for their quest was to gain self-knowledge. After they finish their conquest, the quester realizes that the journey was more important than the destination whether they built upon their relationships with another, conquered a personal fear, or gained new found knowledge about themselves, altering their personality and their identity. Foster believes that every trip is a quest, and the quest is a revelation about one’s

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.

a quest has five elements: a quester, a place to go, a stated reason to go there, challenges and trials during the quest, and a real reason to go there

In the second chapter of Thomas C. Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor, Foster discusses the intimacy of eating throughout literature and how readers should draw important information from a scene at the table. This chapter quickly establishes that “whenever people eat or drink together, it’s communion” (8). While the word communion is often associated with religious practices, Foster determines that in literary context, communion frequently refers to the close exchanging of intimate thoughts, feelings or actions. As the chapter progresses Foster begins to provide several reasons for why readers should pay attention to meal scenes, such as, “writing a meal scene is so difficult, and so inherently uninteresting that there really

Aspects from chapters “or the Bible”, “Is it a symbol”, “Geography matters” from the book How to read literature like a professor can be seen in The Martian ranging from, biblical references, to symbols, to location. These aspects of the story greatly influence the story in a number of ways. " Or the Bible" in How to Read Literature like a Professor connects to The Martian because Mark Watney represents a Christ character by coming "back to life" and being willing to give his life to save the others. Everyone thinks that Mark is dead, much like in the bible when Jesus died on the cross.

Thomas C. Foster’s book, How To Read Literature Like a Professor, represents many varying aspects of literature. Foster’s book discusses multiple topics of American Literature, specifically the topic of symbolism. His book provides you with a substantial amount of information regarding the various types of symbolism and how to recognize them. Foster’s book prepares a reader to think similarly to a professor, meaning the reader would analyze every line, sentence, or paragraph, to discover a hidden meanings behind the author’s text. Several examples of symbolism are found in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

Different individuals read literature for various facts and purposes, and I realized that I mostly read because I like to lose myself in new stories, and for me it doesn’t matter if something isn’t true.Different individuals read literature for various facts and purposes, and I realized that I mostly read because I like to lose myself in new stories, and for me it doesn’t matter if something isn’t true.Different individuals read literature for various facts and purposes, and I realized that I mostly read because I like to lose myself in new stories, and for me it doesn’t matter if something isn’t true.

The five aspects of the QUEST are a quester, a place to go, a stated reason to go there, challenges and trials en route, and a real reason to go there. I believe these aspects have been shown in the popular movie Shrek. Shrek fulfills the title of a quester because he is an ogre living alone in a swamp until one day Lord Farquaad takes away his home. The destination for Shrek and his partner Donkey is the Dragon’s Castle to rescue Princess Fiona. The stated reason to travel there is that if Shrek is capable of rescuing Princess Fiona and bringing her back to Lord Farquaad, he would be allowed to return to his swamp and move on with his lonely life. There are many challenges throughout Shrek’s journey. When Shrek and Donkey arrive at the large

Intertextuality is the interrelationship between texts. “The idea that all texts contain traces of other texts and there can be no text that does not draw on some ideas from some other

he five aspects of QUEST are a) the quester, b) a place to go, c) the stated reason to go, d) the challenges and trials along the way, and e) the real reason to go. Many literary works follow this pattern, though some vary. The literary work I chose is Arthur Golden’s novel Memoirs of a Geisha. Though the connection to a quest may be harder to find in this novel, it is very much there.