Analysis Of How To Read Literature Like A Professor By Thomas C. Foster

The sixteenth chapter of How to Read Literature Like a Professor has the sole purpose of introducing readers to the sexual potential in works of art. But Thomas C. Foster stresses that the sexuality lingering in a novel doesn’t have to be explicit and that in a great deal of older works it isn’t. He explains how different objects were used as symbols for certain reproductive organs in a sort of half-hearted censorship. His examples include lances and swords due to their phallic nature while chalices and bowls represent female sexual organs (Foster 147). This type of censorship can mostly be attributed to the Hayes Code but is also a result of a less permissive time. The Hayes Code was active from somewhere around 1935 to 1965, but some of the