How To Read Literature Like A Professor by Thomas Foster

lizshine74by lizshine74

In Book Reviews!.

This book was an easy read. In fact, this is the easiest book on—and containing—literary analysis I’ve ever read. It was really rather refreshing. Foster makes cracking the code look easy and provides lot of tips to that end, including his most important word of advice—patterns. Pay attention, and look for patterns.

Here’s a taste of what he covers:
“What this book represents is not a database of all the cultural codes which writers create and readers understand the products of that creation, but a template, a pattern, a grammar of sorts from which you can learn to look for those codes on your own. No one could include them all, and no reader would want to plow through the resulting encyclopedia. I’m pretty sure I could have made this book, with not to much effort, twice as long. I’m also pretty sure neither of us wants that.” (281)

Some tips from Foster:
–The real reason for a quest is always self-knowledge.
–Whenever people eat or drink together, it’s communion.
–Ghost and vampires are never only about ghosts and vampires.
–There’s no such thing as wholly original work of literature [and I love that he sees that as a wonderful thing! ]
–There’s only one story.
–Myth is a body of story that matters.
–It’s never just rain.
–Flight is freedom.
–Irony trumps everything.
–When writers send characters south, it’s so they can run amok.
–Don’t read with your eyes.

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Some past posts to keep you making time: 
Adjust your pace accordingly.
It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine
There are things you will have to give up
See it to achieve it
Washing the dishes
Write slowly
A celebration of the pause
Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone

lizshine74

lizshine74

Liz Shine teaches high school English, writes, edits, and coaches other writers from her home in Olympia, WA. When she begins to feel overwhelmed by it all, she simply looks up at Mount Rainier in the distance and gets back to work. If that fails, she heads to the ocean. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press. Her Substack Make Time is her gift to writers, like her, trying to magic time in this crazy, busy world. All of those posts are cross-posted on the blog here. You can see more of her writing at lizshine.com and find her on Instagram {@lizshine.writer} cooking, traveling, and in other ways seeking moments of awe. She has been an active participant in communities of writers since the early 1990s. She’s learned that two things feel truly purpose-driven in life: writing and coaching other writers. In the in between (because one cannot be driving for a purpose every moment), she enjoys looking for wonder and connection. She is a lifelong yoga student, an enthusiastic walker along streets and trails, and an amateur gardener and vegetarian cook. She lives in Olympia, WA. She believes in the power of practice and has been practicing writing since some time in the early 90s when she became an adult in the rain-soaked city of Aberdeen. Writing began with journaling, as a way to understand a confusing, sometimes violent coming-of-age. She writes mostly fiction, some nonfiction, and poetry, and holds an MFA from Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writers Workshop. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press.