How to Read Literature Like a Professor Ch 1-13

A quest consists of 5 things: a quester, a place to go, a stated reason to go there, challenges on the way, & a real reason to be going there

The real reason for a quest is always self-knowledge, self-fulfillment, self-discovery

Ex: Huckleberry Finn, Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien, Star Wars, Crying of Lot 49

Whenever people eat or drink together, it’s a communion
Communion is “an act of sharing of peace” & doesn’t have to be religious at all (usually isn’t)

Food is something everyone likes & therefore has in common, so we can watch characters getting along (or not getting along)

Ex: Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral”, Joyce’s “The Dead”

Ghosts and Vampires are never only about Ghosts and Vampires

Classic Traits:
-Older figure representing corrupt, worn out values
-A young, preferably virginal female
-A stripping away of her youth, energy and innocence
-A continuance of her life force for the older figure
-Death or destruction of the young woman

Victorian Age- vampire, topics like sex & sexuality couldn’t be talked about directly, so this character used to bring the issues forefront

Ex: Marley’s Ghost in a Christmas Carol, James’ Daisy Miller, Hardy’s Tess of the D’ Urbervilles

Sonnets have been written in every era since the Renaissance

There are always 14 lines long, usually with about 10 syllables per line.

Get quality help now

KarrieWrites

Verified

Proficient in: Flashcards

5 (339)

“ KarrieWrites did such a phenomenal job on this assignment! He completed it prior to its deadline and was thorough and informative. ”

+84 relevant experts are online

Hire writer

This format makes the poem itself, more or less, look like a square

There are 2 types :
-The Petrarchan (or Italian), which consists of two parts- one section of 8 lines & one section of 6 lines, with a unified rhyme scheme

-Shakespearean consist of three 4 line stanzas (quatrains) & 1 two line stanza (couplet)

There’s no such thing as a wholly original work of literature

We are influences, no matter how much, by things we have seen before

There’s only one story

To make connections to past characters, think of new characters in generic forms & you will often find ties in plot usage and/or characterization

Stories come out of other stories & even history is a story, therefore there is only one story into one massive “barrel of eels”

Ex: O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato, Alice in Wonderland, Son’s of Anarchy, Lion King- Hamlet

Many references, which are made by situation or by quote, are references to Shakespeare.

Many well known quotes are also attributed to him.

Macbeth- “by the pricking of my thumbs something wicked this way comes”

“O brave new world, that has such people in it” Aldous Huxley Brave New World

Biblical references don’t have to be religious in nature, convey morals

Is nonsectarian (all writers may get ideas from it)

Ex: Steinbeck’s East of Eden- East of Eden to be in a fallen world, Joyce’s “Araby”, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Biblical Names (Marys, Josephs, Rebeccas, Ruths, Jonah)

The “literary canon”: a master list of works that everyone pretends doesn’t exists but that we all know matters in some important way

List changes with time and population- the best source for parallels, analogies, plot structures, and references is “kiddie lit”

Ex: Hansel & Gretel: idea of children lost & far from home. Widely used with many interpretations in many literary works

Fairytales not recreated- details and patterns are used to add depth and texture

“One child’s gingerbread is another child’s drug”- Foster
Wants strangeness and familiarity in our stories. We want character, story, ideas, etc. but we also want to make connections with literature that is familiar

Last chance for change- characters given one last chance to redeem him/herself or make a difference before it’s too late

Myth is a body of story that matters. In a myth we find the ability to explain ourselves in ways that physics, philosophy, mathematics and chemistry cant.

Examples: The tale of Icarus and his flight to the sun is used to teach values, The film, “O Brother, WHere Art Thou?” and Joyce’s Ulysses are recreations of Homer’s Odyssey.

It’s never just rain

“It is never just rain. And that goes for snow, sun, warmth, cold and probably sleet…”

Why use weather (especially the rain) at all? Plot device atmosphere misery factor cleaning paradox (rain=clean, mud=dirty)

Rain may be said to be restorative: it restores the past, can show people what they’re looking for, can heal and can clarify

Rainbows symbolize promise or the peace between Heaven and earth; we are rewarded

Examples:
Hemingway’s A farewell to Arms ends with the protagonist, Frederic Henry, leaving the hospital after his lover has just died in childbirth, walking through the rain

Joyce’s “The Dead” has 2 important examples of weather: near the end Gretta Conroy tells her husband about the great love of her life who, although dying of consumption, stood outside her window in the rain and died a week later

Gabriel, Gretta’s husband, sees himself as superior to other people. He is now at the end of an evening in which he is broken down little by little and looks upon the snow which is falling “upon all the living and the dead” making the snow a great unifier.

Is one of the most personal and even intimate acts between human beings, but it can also be cultural and societal in its implications. It can be symbolic, thematic, biblical, Shakespearean, romantic, allegorical, transcendent. Violence in real life just is.

Violence has 2 categories: 1. The specific injury that authors cause characters to inflict on one another or on themselves (shootings, stabbings, bombings, etc) and 2. the narrative violence that causes characters harm in general (the death and suffering authors put into their work for plot advancement or thematic development).

Writer kill off characters for the same set of reasons every time — to make actions happen, to cause plot complications, to end plot complications, to put other characters under stress

Examples:
In Morrison’s Beloved, Sethe decides to save her children from slavery by killing them (succeeding only once). Morrison wants the reader to grasp the horrors of slavery which allows its victims no decision-making power over any suspect of their lives; the only power they have is the power to die. We see a mother seeing no other means of rescuing her child except infanticide.

Frost’s “Out, Out..” depicts a young farm boy, distracted by a call to dinner, who has his hand cut off by the buzz saw he’s been using, showing that our relationship with an indifferent universe is hostile and uncaring

Symbolism is found in what you find to symbolic. Some symbols have a relatively limited range of meanings, but in general a symbol can’t be reduced to standing for only one thing

If they can it’s not symbolism, its allegory. Allegory– thing stand for other things on a one-for-one basis

Example of allegory:
Orwell’s Animal Farm, in which he tells us revolutions inevitably fail because those who come to power are corrupted by it and reject the values and principles they initially embraced.

Always remember that actions, not just things, can also be symbolic

Break down the work into smaller pieces and organize your thoughts and question the text to best find symbols

Examples: Rivers:
Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: the Mississippi River. Huck and the escaped slave Jim are floating down the river a raft. Jim uses it to escape to freedom but it takes him deeper into slave territory. Its both danger and safety. It also serves as a vehicle for Huck, a white boy, to get to know Jim as a man. The river is also a road, and the trip is a quest with Huck growing to maturity and understanding.

Hart Crane’s poem sequence The Bridge: beginning with the East River and the Brooklyn Bridge, the river then grows into the Hudson and ultimately into the mississippi (which represents all rivers to Crane). Crane uses the bridge as a connection between 2 pieces of land, and the Mississippi as a connection between 2 parts of the country

Eliot’s The Waste Land (written immediately after WW1): the River Thames which carries the refuse of a dying civilization; it’s slimy and dirty, the bridge is falling down; it is no longer has grandeur. It is a symbol of corruption of modern life and collapse of Western civilization.

Overtly political writing can be dull and boring, so it’s better to make your point with an enjoyable story by Dickens, Poe, or Irving.

All writing is to some degree political, as everyone is influenced in their writing by their beliefs. We can better understand the political significance of a work by learning a little bit about the social and political conditions of the time in which it was written.

Examples:
British social thinker Thomas Malthus’ theory that in helping the poor in or in increasing food production to feed more people we would, in fact, encourage an increase in the number of the impoverished, who would procreate in order to take advantage of the surplus food, Hence, Dicken’s Scrooge who insists he wants nothing to do with destitute.

Poe in both “The Masque of the Red Death” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” implicitly believes that what Europe represents is degrading and decaying

Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” illustrates the beginning of America and the problems it faced after the Revolution ended.