How To Read Novels Like A Professor Sparknotes

Video How to Read Novels Like a Sparkling Professor Thomas C. Foster’s excellent book How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Guide to Reading Between Lively and Entertaining Streams shed new light on literary analysis I had never read. It clarifies sometimes difficult tasks to explain and makes sense. It has a great recommended reading list, and it is indispensable for English teachers. I absolutely love it. I didn’t like its “sequel”, How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World’s Most Loved Literary Form almost as much. Let’s start with what I like: Reading: how to read novels like a glittering professor

The motif throughout the book is about the reader as the creator. Reading is a creative act. Books require us to have imagination. It reminds me so much of something I heard Jasper Fforde say about reading when I was signing books. According to Foster, “the reader is the ultimate arbiter of meaning in a work” (126). I agree with him, and that is one of the things that can be difficult about teaching English. English teachers are often experienced readers who understand how texts talk to each other and speak the language of symbolism and metaphor. Students, who are inexperienced, often become angry when teachers make connections or interpretations that students fail to make, and English teachers are often falsely accused of inventive intentions. unprecedented fake. The author’s intention doesn’t matter once the reader reads the book. Our readers bring so much experience, prior reading experience, beliefs, perspectives, and knowledge to everything we read, that no two readers read the same book and no reader. who read the same book that the author wrote. I really like that Foster explains the importance of the reader so clearly because it is a real problem whenever two readers disagree about a book.
I like Foster’s analysis of 18 things we can tell about a book on the first page. This is a great tutorial for students who have difficulty with annotations. If you can lead students to look for style, tone, mood, direction, point of view, presence in the narrative, narrative attitude, time frame, time management, place, model tip, theme, irony, rhythm, pacing, expectations, characters, and instructions on how to read the novel (whew!), you will pave the way for them to better understand the novel and help them Find out what to look for when reading. Eighteen is a bit too much, but I find when I flip through the list I agree that most, if not all, of these factors can be identified to some extent on the first page of the book. novel.
I would like to tell students that literature is the mirror we hold to our own world and to ourselves. It tells us who we are and what we want. Foster also expressed a similar sentiment: “So almost any novel can teach us, and the novel has a great lesson at its root: we matter. Human life is valuable not because it belongs to an owner, ruler, collective or political party, but because it exists as it is” (115). As such, the characters in the novel matter because they are us. We see ourselves in them. We see our humanity in their humanity.

Now to what I don’t like:

The book repeats itself. Foster discusses the same books, over and over, and if for some reason you’re unfamiliar with one of his pet texts or if you don’t like it for some reason , it’s hard to connect with what Foster is saying—or it is for me. Your mileage may vary. I don’t really like Joyce. That’s what I said. I gave him a try. I guess I like my novels to be like the great Victorian novels that Foster describes. I’m not opposed to Postmodernism here or there, and I don’t have to go with the characters in a straight line. But Joyce doesn’t do it for me. I love that Foster admits that we have different reactions to fiction. At the end of the book, he describes a discussion with a high school English class in which a single dissident admitted that he did not like Great Expectations. About this student, Foster said, “It takes courage to say that you are learning AP English and not panic about one of the established classics. There is, however, the weight of more than a century of views taken against you” (292-293). Right. THAT’S RIGHT. I don’t like Ulysses. I tried to read it. I was summed up on page one. I gave up on it. And that’s okay, even though “the weight of [nearly] a century of “received opinion” is going against me. But he is a fan of Foster’s (unsurprisingly, since he seems to be a favorite on many college profiles), and he is used as an example over and over again. And since I don’t learn Ulysses, I don’t find myself connecting with those examples very well.
I think Foster’s definition of the topic is off and I don’t recommend sharing it verbatim with students. Foster defines it as “the conceptual content of the novel” (30). When I teach it, I tend to take it further than that. What message do you get from the novel? Deeper than it says – why did the author write it? Of course we can’t know that, but we can extrapolate. Did F. Scott Fitzgerald write The Great Gatsby because he wanted to comment on how the American Dream can’t be achieved by everyone, and maybe it’s dead or never existed in the first place? I don’t know, but that’s a message I got from it when I read it. Certainly different readers will see different themes. But I don’t find the definition of “idea content” useful.
Likewise, Foster describes different types of narrative on pages 46-47. I teach my students the omniscient first person, the third person, and the limited third person. I refer to the second person as a type of narrative that they will rarely come across. That’s it. And I discovered that there are other types called third-person, central first-person, and second-person targets, which, as Foster describes, seem like needlessly splitting hairs. He also introduced stream of consciousness into it, not as a narrative, but as a narrative technique. And he even said that it’s not some kind of storyteller, so I find it confusing that he’s including it on this list. It doesn’t belong there.
The book has no table of contents. How to Read Like a Professor has a very good index. It makes finding information a lot easier.
The book does not have a must-read list. There’s another list of literary criticisms to read, but in How to Read Literature Like a Professor, Foster shared a list of great literary works to read. I like it. I assume he figured out the list of all the novels he mentioned in the should-do book, but I liked the list in the other book.
Foster’s appeal lies to a great extent in his entertaining style. He joked. He is irritable. For some reason, in How to Read Literature Like a professor feels happy. In How to Read Novels Like a Professor, I found it less engaging and at times a bit out of place.