Book Report - How to Read Literature like a Professo

Book: How to Read Literature Like a Professor

Author: Thomas C. Foster

I choose to respond to #12 of the response choices on page 3.

What is the author's purpose for writing this book? Who is the intended audience? Use evidence from the book to support what you decided to say?

In How to Read Literature Like a Professor I, in my opinion think that Thomas C. Foster has written this book to approach the often challenging domain of literature in an accessible way. It breaks down the academics and common readers in the real world. Being an English professor at the University of Michigan at Flint, where he teaches classic and contemporary fiction, drama, and poetry, he realizes the struggles readers are having with their experiences of reading. After his studies he has written a lively and entertaining guide to making the common readers experience more fun. He focuses on the basics of literature. Foster uses major themes and motifs, literary models, and narrative devices as a broad overview of literature to write his guide for making reading more of a comfort.

Thomas uses a huge variety of examples from all genres from novels to short stories to plays, and poems. Thomas C. Foster has many purposes for writing this, as I call it literature guide. He planned for it to be used as a useful practical tool for class lessons and book clubs. His resources have been chosen from his personal likings, and stories that relate to the message he is trying to portray. He uses examples that are from biblical times to modern day writers such as Robert Pinsky (author of "How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry 2000). For example in chapter 3 "Nice to Eat You: Acts of Vampires"(pages 15-21), where Foster uses vampires and mortals to explain that preposition' make a huge difference in literature. He writes it to show that "to show not all eating that happens in literature is friendly (pg.15)". O us. Meals are just meals, but in literature, they always hold a deeper meaning. All people have in common the need to eat, as others tend to eat more than others, but it can also bring people together as one unity. As for vampires, literature vampires manifest themselves in literature in a symbolic way, they can become figurative symbolism. "Try this for a dictum: ghosts and vampires are never just ghosts and vampires (pg. 17)". It just goes to show that memorable pieces of literature represent things deeper than what they appear on the surface, not just about its literal vampirism. They don't always have to appear in visible forms to the human eye.

As Thomas wrote in chapter 3, he had explained the works of Henry James famous story "Daisy Miller"(1878), where there is no demonic possessions, no ghosts. Only a young American woman, Daisy Miller who takes a midnight trip to the Colosseum in Rome. She does as she pleases, but she upsets the social customs of the European society