Roy Chung
Period 3
How to Read Literature Like a Professor
Template
Introduction: How’d He Do That?
Take notes on the key details of the chapter, including moments of nuance. Your notes should be bulleted.
· Beginner reader goes with the flow of the book
· Experienced reader askes how the effect came to be, who a character resembles, where did he/she see this experience before.
· 3 Key Features: Memory, Symbol and Pattern
· Memory ties to how an experienced reader can recall and make connections between works.
· Symbol is a mantra that prevents the reader from taking things merely on face value
· Patterns enables the reader to distance him/herself from the text even as they engage with it, allowing the reader to take a broader perspective of something.
· Thomas Foster sets out for the reader reasons why the book was written.
· Book was written as an instructional guide that hopes to enrich he reading experience by pointing out the cues that make a work of literature what it is.
· Introduction is a summary of all the cues
· Recalls a classroom experience, students could not understand why and how he had reached a certain conclusion about a character in the book “A Raisin in the Sun.”
· Many Layers of meaning are often embedded in a text.
· Literary analysis requires a certain amount of effort and training that is not immediately at hand to the beginner reader or student of literature.
· The way to identify, recognize and learn the cues is through practice.
· Experienced Reader vs Beginner Reader
Answer the chapter questions on the other Professor page. As part of your response, apply the key parts of this Professor chapter to Frankenstein (if possible) and the other text listed in the chapter question. Note that when the chapter question only has you focus on Frankenstein, application to another text is not necessary. Answers should take the form of a developed paragraph.
How do memory, symbol, and pattern affect the reading of literature? How does the recognition of patterns make it easier to read complicated literature? Discuss a time when your appreciation of a literary work was enhanced by understanding symbol or pattern.
The 3 key features (memory, symbol, and pattern) is used to distinguish an experienced reader to a novice reader. Memory in reading literature involves recollection of previous work studies that might allow the reader to make connections between works. Symbol on the other hand, helps the reader to dive deep into the meanings behind it instead. Lastly, pattern helps the reader distance him/herself from the text as they engage with it to take a broader perspective of things. Recognitions of pattern gives the ability to look at things from a broader perspective and debrief the meanings behind a text or literature. My appreciation of a literary work was enhanced by the understanding of a symbol or pattern when I made a reference of a movie to an event in history that was significant which is the hardships of World War 1.
Chapter 1 – Every Trip is a Quest (Except When It’s Not)
Take notes on the key details of the chapter, including moments of nuance. Your notes should be bulleted.
· Foster gives an imaginary story about a boy named Kip.
· The story involves the boy riding to the A&P to buy a loaf of “Wonder Bread” , on the way he meets his crush in the car of someone he hates. Then he lies about his age at the marine Recruiter.
· Foster claims that an English professor would read it as a knight going on a quest.
· Though the story is simple, there are elements where certain characters represent key components of the quest narrative.
· To see the how the boy’s trip can fit the archetype of the quest, a reader must view the story structurally.
· 5 Structural Elements:
1. A Quester
2. A Place to go
3. A reason to go there
4. Obstacles along the way
5. The real reason for the quest
· Real Example would be Thomas Pynchon’s “The crying of Lot” which he claims is the best quest novel of the 20th century.
· Foster argues that many classic quest stories share a cartoonish side.
· Don’t get stuck on figuring out the “right” or “wrong” analysis of a work of literature.
Answer the chapter questions on the other Professor page. As part of your response, apply the key parts of this Professor chapter to Frankenstein (if possible) and the other text listed in the chapter question. Note that when the chapter question only has you focus on Frankenstein, application to another text is not necessary. Answers should take the form of a developed paragraph.
List the five aspects of the QUEST and then apply them to something you have read (or viewed) in the form used on pages 4-5.
From the Indiana Jones: Temple of Doom
1. A adventurer, archaeologist, and professor (Dr. Henry Walton Jones Jr. played by Harrison Ford)
2. A Place to go (to seek artifacts)
3. A reason to go there (colleague insisted him to go, wants to know if such artifacts exits)
4. Obstacles along the way (Group attacks want to stop him from leaving with the artifacts)
5. The real reason for the quest (Realize the certitude of the artifact and danger of possessing it)
Chapter 2 – Nice to Eat with You: Acts of Communion
Take notes on the key details of the chapter, including moments of nuance. Your notes should be bulleted.
· Sigmund Freud was once teased for his love of cigars.
· Anytime Characters eat together, this is communion
· The broader definition of the term is anytime people come together to share food and, in doing so, create a temporary community with one another.
· Eating scene in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones is an example of Communion
· The scene describes eating in highly sensual, vulgar terms, highlighting the way in which eating together can be a sexual act.
· Another example would be Raymond Carver’s short story “Cathedral” (1981)
· Two key turning points in the main character’s change of opinion are when he watches the blind man eat and when the two of them smoke marijuana together.
· Just as a harmonious meal signals interpersonal connection and community, so does a difficult meal spell disaster.
· Tense events during meals made a character in “The Dead” realize that he is not superior to other people.
·
Answer the chapter questions on the other Professor page. As part of your response, apply the key parts of this Professor chapter to Frankenstein (if possible) and the other text listed in the chapter question. Note that when the chapter question only has you focus on Frankenstein, application to another text is not necessary. Answers should take the form of a developed paragraph.
Choose a meal from a literary work and apply the ideas of Chapter 2 to this literary depiction
The eating scene in Ms. Doubtfire
Chapter 3 – Nice to Eat You: Acts of Vampires
Take notes on the key details of the chapter, including moments of nuance. Your notes should be bulleted.
· “Actual vampires” are not even the scariest thing in literature.
· Vampires in film versions are immortal, evil, yet strangely attractive male figure who preys upon young, beautiful, innocent virgins.
· This show that vampires can play on fears about sexuality.
· Just as vampires symbolize more than monstrous horror, so too do ghosts and doppelgangers (doubles).
· Often, ghosts convey a message.
· Authors developed covert techniques of portraying sex and sexual themes-methods that have survived in the present day.
· Movies such as “Teen Vampire”