Thomas C Foster How To Read Literature Like A Professor Analysis

Thomas C. Foster’s How To Read Literature Like A Professor is, as it says in the title, a guide on how to read literary works more professionally in order to better understand the concepts, themes, symbolism, and other aspects, like intertextuality better. Mr. Foster includes examples from many well known and praised works in order to give the reader a sense of what they should be looking for in order to contextualize a literary work. For example, Foster uses each chapter as sort of a guide. Each chapter explains a literary element via an example of said element along with how Foster believes it ties into literature and how it is used or should be used.
Each chapter in the story presents the reader with different ways to storytelling. Chapter twelve is one of the chapters that Foster uses that I believe was worth remembering. In this chapter Foster uses examples to show allegories and symbols which are both very important literary rhetoric devices. To show an …show more content…
Foster uses an example that I thought was very useful in explaining how irony works. When citing G.K. Chesterton's “The Arrow of Heaven” Foster points out that “The arrow itself is stable; arrows are arrows. The uses to which arrows can be put and the meanings we attach to them, however, are not so stable."(Page 239). What Foster means by this is that we shouldn't expect everything to be completely straight to the point in literature and in fact should be on the lookout for the unexpected even though it seems like we know what the outcome will be. For me I think this helps adds context and comedic effect to stories, for example “The heaviest fully enclosed tank in history weighed 188 tons and was considered one of the largest tanks ever built, it was conveniently nicknamed the Maus (Mouse in