How to Read Literature Like a Professor Notes

How to Read Literature Like a Professor

Introduction How did he do that?

Language of Reading

Students only begin to be introduced

Every language has grammar

A set of rules that govern usages and meaning and literary language is no different

Comparison with Art

Western and Oriental art

Japanese artists and their audience were serenely untroubled by the lack of perspective in their paintings however in western Art perspective is considered a good thing and vital to a painting

When readers encounter a fictive text they focus on

Story

Characters

Who are these people?

What are they doing?

What wonderful/terrible things are happening to them?

Readers respond with emotion however a Professor attention are on other elements

Where did that effect come from?

Whom does this character resemble?

Where have i seen this situation ?

Memory Symbol Pattern

3 Items that are more separate the Professorial reader from the rest

Professors also read and think symbolically

Is this a metaphor ?

Is this an analogy?

What kind of thinking does this signify

Most Professional Students of Literature learn to take in the foreground detail while seeing the patterns that detail reveals.

Chapter 1 Every Trip is a quest ( except when it's not)

A Quest contains five things

a quester

A quester is just a person who usually goes own a quest weather the person knows it a quest or not ( usually does not know)

a place to go

A stated reason to go there

(A place to go and a stated reason to go should be considered together)

Someone tells our protagonist (hero) who need not look very heroic to go somewhere and do something

challenges and trials en route

a real reason to go

There is a real reason that is not the stated reason

Real reason for a quest never involves the stated reason

more often than not the quester fails at the stated reason

The Quest is educational

They don't know enough about...