How To Read Literature Like A Professor By Robert Foster

In this chapter of “How to Read Literature Like a Professor,” Foster explains how violence is a personal intimate act and has many functions. Also violence can be societal or cultural based, making its functions “symbolic, thematic, biblical, Shakespearean, Romantic, allegorical, transcendent.” Foster in HTR claims that violence in real life has no more meaning other than that or aggression, but he said in that the same act of violence in literature can be a metaphor. Using the example of Robert Frost’s poem, “Out Out­”, Foster portrays how the hostile relationship of humans and the universe. In the poem a boy had his hand taken by a buzz saw, personified to seem like a monstrous mind of its own. With this type of violence, it signaled
that