Thomas C. Foster's How To Read Literature Like A Professor

In his book “How to Read Literature Like a Professor,” Thomas C. Foster provides a list of attributes that a fictional character may have if they are a symbolic Christ Figure in their story. The list consists of characteristics such as “very forgiving” and “came to redeem an unworthy world.” In Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” although the Old Man is thought to be an angel by the awe struck people around him, it is possible to claim that he is a Christ Figure. While the Old Man doesn’t turn water into wine, he seems to have something with the odd “miracles” occurring in the town. The Old Man’s ragged appearance is also an attribute that should be accounted for. Foster explains that “he’s dirty and unkempt and bug-ridden,

1. In chapter eleven of his book How to Read Literature Like a Professor, Thomas Foster examines violence in literature, and particularly the way violence functions on multiple levels. Foster identifies two different kinds of violence in literature, and discusses how those two different kinds create different literal and literary meanings. By examining Foster's categories of violence in more detail, one can see how violence in literature serves as an important link between the internal events of a story and the story itself.

In How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster, he exclaims that when someone is thrown into the water, it symbolically has the same pattern that is seen in baptism. The pattern is death and rebirth becoming a medium of the water. Furthermore, this chapter relates to The Stranger as signs of water, such as swimming pools and the beach, submerges people into having a new start or ending their life. Failures of baptism is also present within the novel.

How to Read Literature like a Professor by Thomas C Foster is a how to do book that teaches children how to become better readers. The novel was written in second person. The purpose of this novel is to inform readers on details that they wouldn’t usually realize in literature. Students who read Thomas C Foster’s How to Read Literature like a Professor are suppose to gain knowledge of how to identify details of their story that have connections to other literature or have alternative meanings that the author is trying to get across to the reader. Thomas C Foster believes reading his novel can help develop you into a better reader. He believes this because the information that he includes can apply to your reading. When you

Thomas C. Foster utilizes various allusions and forms of symbolism to apply a multifaceted meaning or message to any piece of literature. In “How to Read Literature Like a Professor” Foster theorizes how an author can assist a reader in getting a better grip on the message or purpose of a work using figurative language including symbolism, tones, allusions, and techniques. The chapters “…Or the Bible”, “It’s Never Just Heart Disease”, and “Nice to Eat with You: Acts of Communion” all demonstrate how Foster’s theories can be applied to the way authors have written and will continue to write.

In the novel How to Read Literature Like a Professor, Thomas C. Foster discloses to the readers the significance of the communion of food, which can be applied to the journey Pi experiences in the novel Life of Pi. Foster manages to portray the significance of the communion of food by explaining that “whenever people eat or drink together, it’s communion” (Foster 8). Communion can not only be religious, but it can also be an act of understanding a character’s relationship with other characters.

Mike Bunn’s article, “How To Read Like a Writer”, simply does what the name implies: it is trying to encourage readers, students for the most part, to ‘read like a writer’. Bunn briefly reveals how he came acquainted with ‘reading like a writer’, and then goes on to explain to his audience how to ‘read like a writer’ themselves. From the opening sentence, to the closing statement, Bunn is encouraging students to analyze how a certain texts were written and why they were written that way. Bunn claims that by using this way of reading, you not only understand the text better, but you also become a better writer as you learn and develop the skills you analyze. Bunn is hoping that, after reading his article and adopting his methods, students will

There are many ways for an author to utilize the literature around them to express their ideas. Such ways are explained in How to Read Literature Like a Professor, by Thomas C. Foster, a brilliant author who takes reader behind the scenes and into the world of literature. Reading the book is one thing, but using it to help provide insight on a book is another. In The Life of Pi, by Yann Martel, Martel effectively uses symbolism and a parallel to enhance both the story and the reader’s insight of the book.

In the beginning, God created the Earth. He created the land, the sea, the sky, and all that live among them. In Yann Martel’s Life of Pi a young boy named Pi Patel encounters the Earth in its rawest form when he is stranded at sea with only a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker and a handful of other animals as shipmates. Through the use of biblical allusion, the significance of water, and symbolism, Life of Pi shows readers that God is present in all things and through faith, one can overcome all trials.

In ‘How to Read Literature Like a Professor’ by Thomas Foster, Foster states that in literature weather can be used for much more than just plot progression. through the use of fog, rainbows, snow, rain, and many other weather elements it gives literature a much richer meaning through symbolism, foreshadowing, and other literary devices. In Act 3 Scene 2 of King Lear, Lear is beginning to lose his sanity in a storm as he shouts “LEAR: Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks! You sulfurous and thought-executing fires, Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts, Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder, Smite flat the thick rotundity

In the novel Fahrenheit 451 written by Ray Bradbury and the film V for Vendetta by James McTeigue, there are a different range of features of their text type which explore the common theme of individuality against oppression. A fascist government occupies London after a world war in V for Vendetta. Where V uses terrorist tactics to fight the dictators, after saving Evey from the secret police, he now discovers an ally in the battle against England’s corrupt government. Fahrenheit 451, set in the futuristic 24th century, tells the story of Guy Montag and his struggle with the censored society. Burning books as a living, he begins to question his occupation and joins an underground network of intellectuals to rebuild a literate and cultural

through time and space with her younger brother as well as her friend in an attempt to rescue her

This movie could be placed in the morbid dark twisted movie that encompasses very classic literature that made me think about the deeper meaning of the purpose the author wrote the script for V for Vendetta. The film uses play on words that start with the letter V. This correlates with the subconscious having trouble to throw out the common idea of Violence out of their head because of the elementary factor that violence is the most common word used in the English language that starts with V. This can be seen in the scene when V goes on a rant and uses words such as view, veteran, vicariously, victim, villain, visitor, vanity, vice, vanity, valorous, visitation, vivified, vowed, vanquished, vicious, very, etc. One cannot exclude the title

V for Vendetta is set in the future in England and it depicts the events following a major world war, terrorist attacks and large amounts of degradation within the nation and world. The government that is in power is at first shown as the standard postindustrial government that uses media to inform the people, and in most cases, spread their form of propaganda. The government prides itself in being efficient, in maintain control and the safety of its citizens. The film slowly shows how the government took power and how its use of power resembles a model like Weber’s. To take power, there had to be a party that could seize power, this is where the bottom line focus came in. The seizing power used fear, but they use of terrorist attacks committed by

Overall, V for Vendetta is a film in which I quite thoroughly enjoyed and is one that I find to be rather important to watch, but difficult to explain as it is kind of cryptic and hard at times to understand the context. V for Vendetta is greatly thought provoking and deals with concerns that aren’t all that hard to imagine. Although the movie is difficult to follow at points – this could be simply due to my lack of inquisitive, not a fault of the film – it is definitely one to pay attention to. I have to admit, the film is not what I imagined, yet I was pleasantly surprised and intrigued. It starts as your typical hero vs. villain film, but turns deeply political very quickly.