How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World’s Favorite Literary Form by Thomas C Foster (PDF)

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The follow-up and companion volume to the New York Times bestselling How to Read Literature Like a Professor—a lively and entertaining guide to understanding and dissecting novels to make everyday reading more enriching, satisfying, and funOf all the literary forms, the novel is arguably the most discussed . . . and fretted over. From Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote to the works of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and today’s masters, the novel has grown with and adapted to changing societies and technologies, mixing tradition and innovation in every age throughout history.Thomas C. Foster—the sage and scholar who ingeniously led readers through the fascinating symbolic codes of great literature in his first book, How to Read Literature Like a Professor—now examines the grammar of the popular novel. Exploring how authors’ choices about structure—point of view, narrative voice, first page, chapter construction, character emblems, and narrative (dis)continuity—create meaning and a special literary language, How to Read Novels Like a Professor shares the keys to this language with readers who want to get more insight, more understanding, and more pleasure from their reading.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “By bringing his eminent scholarship to bear in doses measured for the common reader or occasional student, Professor Foster has done us all a generous turn. The trained eye, the tuned ear, the intellect possesed of simple cyphers brings the literary arts alive.” — Thomas Lynch, author of The Undertaking“A smart, accessible, and thoroughly satisfying examination of what it means to read a work of literature. Guess what? It isn’t all that hard, not when you have a knowledgeable guide to show the way. Dante had his Virgil; for everyone else, there is Thomas Foster.” — Nicholas A. Basbanes, author of A Gentle Madness, Patience & Fortitude, and Among the Gently Mad About the Author Thomas C. Foster, author of How to Read Literature Like a Professor and Reading the Silver Screen, is professor emeritus of English at the University of Michigan, Flint, where he taught classes in contemporary fiction, drama, and poetry, as well as creative writing and freelance writing. He is also the author of several books on 20th-century British and Irish literature and poetry. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. How to Read Novels Like a ProfessorA Jaunty Exploration of the World?s Favorite Literary FormBy Thomas FosterHarperCollins Publishers, Inc.Copyright © 2008 Thomas FosterAll right reserved.ISBN: 9780061340406IntroductionOnce Upon a Time:A Short, Chaotic, and Entirely IdiosyncraticHistory of the NovelIris Murdoch only wrote one novel in her lifetime. But she wrote it twenty-six times. Anthony Burgess never wrote the same book twice. And he wrote about a thousand. Are those characterizations accurate? Fair? Of course not. You will hear from time to time that criticism of Murdoch, and in fairness, they are pretty similar. The Green Knight (1993), her last novel before the Alzheimer’s-damaged Jackson’s Dilemma, isn’t all that far from Under the Net (1954). Same class, same sorts of problems, same ethical preoccupations. Strong characterization and strong plotting. All this was deemed a positive virtue during her lifetime: her fans could count on a new yet familiar novel every two to three years. Those novels would always be solid and, once in a while, as with the Booker Prize winning The Sea, the Sea (1978), they would knock your socks off.And Burgess? He has his consistencies, as well. But nothing in the early novels can prepare the reader for A Clockwork Orange (1962), which is wildly unlike the Enderby novels of the 1970s, which are formally quite distant from the experimentalism of Napoleon Symphony (1974) or the historical artfulness and Elizabethan language of his novels on Shakespeare, Nothing Like the Sun (1964), and Christopher Marlowe, A Dead Man in Deptford (1993), or the Maugham-like performance of what many call his masterpiece, Earthly Powers (1980), to say nothing of his novels in verse. Where readers of Murdoch can begin a new novel with a quiet confidence, opening a Burgess book is an exercise in anxiety: what the devil is he up to this time?Does it matter, this difference in uniformity? Not really. After all, each novel would have both its return audience and its newcomers, so each book had to teach its readers how to deal with it, as if for the first time, which for some it was.It always is. Every novel is brand-new. It’s never been written before in the history of the world. At the same time, it’s merely the latest in a long line of narratives—not just novels, but narratives generally—since humans began telling stories to themselves and each other. This is the basic dialectic of literary history. The impulse to originality clashes with the received tradition of things already written. Miraculously, neither ever seems to overwhelm the other, and novels keep appearing, as do audiences to read them. Even so, some novels are more traditional, some more experimental, some impossible to classify.Let’s go back to a time when the novel really was new. Once upon a time, there weren’t any novels. There were other things that were narrative and lengthy—epics, religious or historical narratives of the tribe, prose or verse romances, nonfictional narratives like travelogues. You know, The Iliad and The Odyssey, The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Táin Bó Cuailgne in Ireland, the romances of Chrétien de Troye and Marie de France. Plenty of candidates out there. Just not novels. Then some things began emerging, sporadically. It may be that the Catalan writer Joanot Martorell’s Tirant lo Blanc, first published in Valencia in 1490, is the first European novel we can recognize as such. Note the date. Columbus hadn’t sailed the sea to discover modernity yet, but he was about to. The rise of the novel coincides with the rise of the modern world—exploration, discovery, invention, development, oppression, industrialization, exploitation, conquest, and violence—and that’s no coincidence. It took more than movable type to make the novel possible; it took a new age. But I digress.Rightly or wrongly, there are two novels we generally think of as the “first”—and they’re seventy years apart. In 1678 someone, perhaps Madame de La Fayette, published a little novel of profound significance. Its popularity was such that people lined up at the publishers waiting, sometimes for months, for their copies. Take that, Harry Potter. The book is called La Princesse de Clèves, and its chief claim to fame is not as a first novel but as the first roman d’analyse, a novel of analysis, a book that investigates emotions and mental states, pushing well beyond the mere conveying of plot. Some readers three hundred and some years later may find the tale a little clunky for their tastes, although the clunkiness largely resides in the surface details, in how persons in the novel speak and address one another and how the writer handles character presentation. The mores of the novel are not ours, but they are genuine in themselves, as are the consequences that grow out of the dictates of conscience. For its time (published within a decade of the Sturm und Drang that is Paradise Lost), the narrative is an extremely subtle performance, and writers as various as Jane Austen, Henry James, Gustave Flaubert, and Anita Brookner couldn’t do what they do without it. Madame de La Fayette is one of the giants of the novel, but she’s just a kid.At the yonder end of the century, 1605 to be exact, a book came out that really set the world on its ear. Here’s what I heard the amazing Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes say at a conference once: “All of Latin American literature grows out of Don Quixote.” Not fiction or novels. Literature. All of it. The Hispanic world gets to claim Miguel de Cervantes and his masterpiece, of course, but it has to share with the rest of us. The book is simply too big for any one group to own. It’s goofy and serious, hilarious and sad, satiric and original. And it’s first. Okay, okay, there are lots of “first” novels. But this is a big first. Cervantes shows everyone else what might be done. He paro dies earlier narrative forms as his Quixote descends into confusion between the world of the too many romances he has read and the dull world life has saddled him with. Cervantes uses an out of touch figure locked in some never-never past to make commentary on the author’s here and now. His hero is comic, certainly, but there’s a forlorn quality there, too, as we watch someone too far gone in fantasy to notice, whose gestures, as in his championing of Dulcinea and his tilting at windmills, are both noble and pathetic, uplifting and pointless.Continues…Excerpted from How to Read Novels Like a Professorby Thomas Foster Copyright © 2008 by Thomas Foster. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐I read How to Read Literature Like a Professor last summer when it was assigned to my child for AP Literature, so when I saw How to Read Novels Like a Professor on Amazon, I just had to read it. I am glad that I did. I gave it five stars, because it was very readable, sometimes funny, and always entertaining. It was so much fun that I didn’t realize how much I was learning about how novels are written and why. He presents the reader with these laws of novels which are very helpful. I recommend this book to anyone who loves curling up with a good book, because Professor Foster discusses so many different authors and novels that it will take many hours just to read what is of interest to the reader. Read the book!

⭐I give this book a solid 3 stars. I would have gone for 4, but for the repitition. It’s almost as if the chapters were lectures spread over several years and, of course, he had to cover the same ground again. The fact that they are so disjointed is a give away. Either that or he has Alzheimer’s.The first 2/3 of the book are aimed at writers. I know this because the sticky notes don’t appear in my copy until about page 200. And even then they make only a brief appearance. And, speaking of sticky notes, I could list the key points on a small one. But, if you’re a writer, there’s a lot to be gleaned from that first two thirds. As a writer myself, it’s worth a re-read or two.The take away is that novels are products of their times and none exist in a vacuum. So when you read Toni Morrison, say, you’re reading a novel based on her experience in her time, plus all the novels she’s ever read, and all the novels those writers read, and so on. He makes several other, thought-provoking points, but I don’t want to be a spoiler.Still, generally speaking, it’s a good read by an entertaining writer. A bit too entertaining at times, even a bit, er, jaunty – but then he warned us.Bottom line is that if you’re a writer read the whole thing a couple of times. You may even want to take a few notes. Otherwise, jump in at page 200.

⭐This is a chatty, blithe, erudite and helpful survey of past and contemporary novels, both Western and world. It discusses similarities, changes and differences among dozens and dozens of novels and novelists.

⭐I enjoyed this book tremendously, and I learned many things with great examples.Also, Foster also made the book amusing to read, and I found myself laughing multiple times by ingenious choices of words that fit perfectly in the context, and without me losing focus – on the contrary, it encouraged me to keep reading and learning eagerly. As a biomedicine student, I find that much of the non-fiction I read, in the long run, bore me – but this book is terrific. Would highly recommend, and I also purchased “How to read poetry like a professor”.

⭐I was skeptical of this book as it looked like it might be aimed more at humor than education, but it is a good user-friendly survey of literature and how to approach it.

⭐This nonfiction book is a companion to “How to Read Literature like a Professor” Both these books help us understand some of the basic workings of literature. They are very well written; they are funny; they are informative. I have referred to the ideas and information in both of them in teaching my Junior Honors English classes.I would highly recommend both of these to students who want to expand their understanding AND to the teachers who want a fresh approach to teaching literature.The author is really good. I would love to be a student in his class.

⭐Having learned more from T.C.Foster about reading literature than anyone,(How to Read Literature like a Professor), I find he does not disapoint in his approach to novels as he again points out key elements to look (or listen) for in a text. While some chapters are a little discursive, his urban-folksy skaz dispels any pedantic intimidation one might fear from such a work. Although his many allusions to classic novels may cause guilt for all the novels one should have read but havn’t, this book is a must have for any aspiring serious reader.

⭐There were concepts that I could understand but there were that some ideas led me to think “so what”. Because I’m not an English major, some text were meaningless. Yet his explanation of The First Page made sense, and good guys/bad guys and different writing styles all made sense to me.

⭐I teach High School English and this offers some wonderful insights on how to study a novel. Excellent for anyone going into a University English class.

⭐Thoroughly enjoyed. I was half afraid that the book might pedantic puts me to sleep. I got hooked when I was sampling a few chapters. Author has a fresh take on study of literature. Not so surprising that the book is used in various western universities and is highly recommended by professors.

⭐Very good condition. Excellent content.

⭐excellent ! En effet, je le recommande chaleureusement à qui veut appréhender la lecture d’un roman DIFFEREMMENT, merci pr cet ouvrage !

⭐

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