How to Read Literature Like a Professor Revised: a lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines
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| Dedication For my sons, Robert and Nathan Contents D EDICATION P REFACE I NTRODUCTION How’d He Do That? 1. Every Trip Is a Quest (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 I NTERLUDE Does He Mean That? 11. . . . More Than It’s Gonna Hurt You: Concerning 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 I NTERLUDE One Story 21. Marked for Greatness 22. He’s Blind for a Reason, You Know 23. It’s Never Just Heart Disease . . . And Rarely Just 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 P OSTLUDE: Who’s in Charge Here? E NVOI A PPENDIX: Reading List A CKNOWLEDGMENTS I NDEX About the Author Praise for How to Read Literature Like a Professor Also by Thomas C. Foster Copyright About the Publisher Preface T HE 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-year-old 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 Yüklə 4,8 Kb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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