How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster

How to Read Literature Like a Professor:
A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines
By THOMAS C. FOSTER

Contents
INTRODUCTION: How’d He Do That?
1. Every Trip Is a Quest (Except When It’s Not)
2. Nice to Eat with You: Acts of Communion
3. Nice to Eat You: Acts of Vampires
4. If It’s Square, It’s a Sonnet
5. Now, Where Have I Seen Her Before?
6. When in Doubt, It’s from Shakespeare...
7. ...Or the Bible
8. Hanseldee and Greteldum
9. It’s Greek to Me
10. It’s More Than Just Rain or Snow
INTERLUDE Does He Mean That?
11. ...More Than It’s Gonna Hurt You: Concerning Violence
12. Is That a Symbol?
13. It’s All Political
14. Yes, She’s a Christ Figure, Too
15. Flights of Fancy
16. It’s All About Sex...
17. ...Except Sex
18. If She Comes Up, It’s Baptism
19. Geography Matters...
20. ...So Does Season
INTERLUDE One Story
21. Marked for Greatness
22. He’s Blind for a Reason, You Know
23. It’s Never Just Heart Disease...
24. ...And Rarely Just Illness
25. Don’t Read with Your Eyes
26. Is He Serious? And Other Ironies
27. A Test Case
ENVOI
APPENDIX Reading List

Introduction: How’d He Do That?
MR. LINDNER? THAT MILQUETOAST?
Right. Mr. Lindner the milquetoast. So what did you think the devil would look like? If he were red with a tail, horns, and cloven hooves, any fool could say no.
The class and I are discussing Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959), one of the great plays of the American theater. The incredulous questions have come, as they often do, in response to my innocent suggestion that Mr. Lindner is the devil. The Youngers, an African American family in Chicago, have made a down payment on a house in an all-white neighborhood. Mr. Lindner, a meekly apologetic little man, has been dispatched from the neighborhood association, check in hand, to buy out the family’s claim on the house. At first,