Transcript How to Read Literature Like a Professor By: Thomas C. Foster

How to Read Literature Like a
Professor
By: Thomas C. Foster
Chapter 19: Geography Matters
What Is Geography?
• By definition geography
is the science that
describes the surface of
the earth and its
features, inhabitants,
and phenomena.
• Examples: rivers, hills,
valleys, mountains,
islands, and etc.
Geography Plays a Major Role in
the Plot of a Literary Work
• The quiet isolation of the
depression. = mood,
history, and culture to a
story.
Explanation
• Without a setting a story, poem, or any other piece of
literary work has no mood. A setting brings mood, history,
and culture to a story. Without a setting where would a story
be? When reading the first question asked is usually “where
did the story take place.”
Marigolds
– What is the setting of the story?
• a poor section of rural Maryland
– What is the social setting/time period of the
story?
• the United States in the midst of the
Depression
Marigolds
– More?
• Dust everywhere, dirt roads,
shanty/ramshackle homes colored dull gray
– Describe the weather/season.
• Late summer
Marigolds
–
–
Consider the hour
• it’s just after 4 A.M.
• What are some characteristics of time just before dawn?
– Four o’clock in the morning is a time when few people are
awake and it is still mostly dark. It is a time when a person
who is awake can easily feel “alone in the world.” The early
hour tends to isolate Lizabeth and make the reader wonder
what she plans to do.
How does all of this affect our character(s)?
• “smoldering emotions of that summer swelled.”
Add Your Own Example
Geography Plays a Major Role in
the Plot of a Literary Work
• The marigolds in Eugenia Collier’s short
story serve and important plot point to
advance the story, as a SYMBOL
illuminating theme as well as character’s of
both Lizbeth and Miss Lottie.
• “Geography in literature can also be more.
It can be revelatory of virtually any element
in the work. Theme? Sure. Symbol? No
problem. Plot. Without a doubt?”
Add Your Own Example
Foster’s Argument
“ Geography can also define or even develop
characters”.
Geography in
Marigolds
• In “Marigolds” the geography of
Miss Lottie’s home plays a
major role in Collier’s indirect
characterization of this lonely,
but hopeful woman. Her home
the most wretched of all in the
community, and her “queer
headed” son on the porch adds
to the impression of lowliness.
Her house is a reflection of her
social standing, which is
probably lower than Lizabeth’s.
Her marigolds illustrate her
desire to find beauty or hope in
an otherwise desolate life.
Setting Builds Character In
Edward Scissorhands
• The eerie sameness of all the homes in the
little town that our protagonist Edward is
thrown into contrasts greatly with his
uniqueness.
Setting Builds Character In
Edward Scissorhands
• As he attempts to integrate himself into the
community through his topiary designs, his
character becomes more familiar to the
audience. He becomes less of an oddball
Burton creation and more human.
Add Your Own Example
Foster’s Argument
“Geography can also, frequently does, play quite
a specific plot role in a literary work”.
Setting and Plot in Catching Fire
• Much of the action in Catching Fire is set in a
beach and forest environment. This island
setting functions as a plot device to put the
tributes in danger. Moreover as we learn that
the land functions like a ticking clock the
island becomes a living anthropomorphic
character out to destroy.
Add Your Own Example
Foster’s Argument
“ When writers send characters south, its so
they can run amok”.
Blu the Macaw protagonist in Rio is taken from his
cozy home in Minnesota to run amok in Brazil.
Extended Examples
High
Low
The word high is usually
associated with purity, greater
than, power, etc. So why did
the chicken cross the road?
Why did Jack and Jill go up the
hill?
Maybe it was because a higher
power instructed them to or
maybe the next destination
was of better interest than
their previous destination.
The word low is usually
associated with darkness,
unpleasantness, less than, worst,
death, hell, etc. Why in a scary
movie must someone be taken
down to the cellar to be killed?
Why must we always fall down a
hill?
People are most likely to go down
to a cellar to hide evidence or to
even hide the killing. At also adds
to the suspense of the thriller.
We fall down the hill because of
gravity, plane and simple.
Foster’s Main Point
“ So, high or low, near or far, north or south,
east or west, the places of poems and fiction
really matter. It isn’t just the setting that
hoary English class topic. It’s place and space
and shape that bring us to ideas and
psychology and history and dynamism.”
Add Your Own Example
How to Read Literature
Like a Professor
By: Thomas C. Foster
If geography matters,
Chapter 20: …So Does Season
Foster’s Argument
• Maybe it’s hardwired into us that spring has to do
with childhood and youth, summer with adulthood
and romance and fulfillment and passion, autumn
with decline and middle age and tiredness but also
harvest, winter with old age and resentment and
death. This pattern is so deeply ingrained in our
cultural experience that we don’t even have to stop
and think about it. Think about it we should, though,
since once we know the pattern is in play, we can
start looking at variation and nuance.
Foster’s Argument
• When our writers speak of harvests, we
know it can refer not only to agricultural but
also to personal harvests, the results of our
endeavors, whether over the course of a
growing season or a life.
Add Your Own Example
How to Read Literature Like a
Professor
By: Thomas C. Foster
If geography matters and so does season then
Chapter 10: It’s More Than Just Rain or Snow
Foster’s Argument
• “weather is never just weather. It’s never just
rain. And that goes for snow, sun, warmth,
cold, and probably sleet”
Foster’s Argument
• So what’s special about rain? Ever since we crawled
up on the land, the water, it seems to us, has been
trying to reclaim us. Periodically floods come and try
to drag us back into the water, pulling down our
improvements while they’re at it. You know the story
of Noah: lots of rain, major flood, ark, cubits, dove,
olive branch, rainbow. I think that biblical tale must
have been the most comforting of all to ancient
humans. The rainbow, by which God told Noah that
no matter how angry he got, he would never try to
wipe us out completely, must have come as a great
relief.
A Cinderella Story
A Cinderella Story
A Cinderella Story
A Cinderella Story
Click link to see what happens:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61vh38Zg_GI
So why did it rain?
Rain as a plot device
• The rain forces people together in very
uncomfortable circumstances. The misery
factor.
• Rain can be more mysterious, murkier, more
isolating than most other weather conditions.
Fog is good, too, of course.
Rain as Symbol
• Rain is clean.
• One of the paradoxes of rain is how clean it is coming down
and how much mud it can make when it lands. So if you want
a character to be cleansed, symbolically, let him walk through
the rain to get somewhere. He can be quite transformed
when he gets there. He may also have a cold, but that’s
another matter. He can be less angry, less confused, more
repentant, whatever you want. The stain that was upon him –
figuratively – can be removed.
•
On the other hand, if he falls down, he’ll be covered in mud
and therefore more stained than before.
On the other hand,
rain is also restorative.
• Rain is the principal element of spring. April
showers do in fact bring May flowers. Spring is
the season not only of renewal but of hope, of
new awakenings.
Rainbows
• Rain mixes with sun to create rainbows. The main
function of the image of the rainbow is to symbolize
divine promise, peace between heaven and earth.
God promised Noah with the rainbow never again to
flood the whole earth. No writer in the West can
employ a rainbow without being aware of its
signifying aspect, its biblical function. Rainbows are
sufficiently uncommon and gaudy that they’re pretty
hard to miss, and their meaning runs as deep in our
culture as anything you care to name. Once you can
figure out rainbows, you can do rain and all the rest.
Fog
• It almost always signals some sort of
confusion.
• The fog can be mental and ethical as well as
physical.
• In almost any case I can think of, authors use
fog to suggest that people can’t see clearly,
that matters under consideration are murky.
Snow
• Snow is clean, stark, severe,
warm (as an insulating blanket,
paradoxically), inhospitable,
inviting, playful, suffocating, filthy
(after enough time has elapsed).
You can do just about anything
you want with snow.
Add Your Own Example
And Jungian Archetypes
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In literature, an archetype is a typical character,
an action or a situation that seems to represent
such universal patterns of human nature.
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flight is freedom.
Images of birds, feathers,
and flying, all of which,
while not referring to
literal flight, evoke
thoughts of metaphorical
flight, of escape.
Indeed, often in literature
the freeing of the spirit is
seen in terms of flight.
Similarly, we speak of the
soul as taking wing.

The bird is an archetypal
symbol of elevation, of the
aspiration for rising to the
absolute dimension of the
sky, a constant and
universal metaphor for
the soul. In most archaic
mythologies, migratory
birds are incarnations of
the soul of the dead
person who departs for
the afterworld.

Birds have been considered
“messengers of gods and all the
manifestations of the spirits’
power assumed their wings.”
Birds, wings and flight have all
symbolized superior states of
being. The connection between
birds and the sky made the
former be associated with
angels and be attributed the
angelic or solar language,
which is nothing but poetry, a
rhythmic language, meant to
facilitate immersion into higher
mental states. (Luc Benoist)

The bird performs an
initiating rite of
passage, one of
breaking through the
space between the two
worlds.
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The bird or the birds
around the tree of life
create an opening to
the Garden of Eden; the
connection with the
afterworld allows the
bird to foretell death.

On the other hand,
“birds symbolize
thoughts and intuitions
– between people and
the soul there has
always been a symbolic
connection” (Aniela
Jaffé).
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All characters who are as famous for their shape as for their
behavior. Their shapes tell us something, and probably very
different somethings, about them or other people in the
story.
Deformities project, hide, personal history, overcome Are
deformities and scars therefore always significant? Perhaps
not. Perhaps sometimes a scar is simply a scar, a short leg or
a hunchback merely that. But more often than not physical
markings by their very nature call attention to themselves
and signify some psychological or thematic point the writer
wants to make. After all, it’s easier to introduce characters
without imperfections. You give a guy a limp in Chapter 2,
he can’t go sprinting after the train in Chapter 24. So if a
writer brings up a physical problem or handicap or
deficiency, he probably means something by it.
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Here’s the problem with symbols: people
expect them to mean something. Not just any
something, but one something in particular.
Exactly. Maximum. It doesn’t work like that.
In general a symbol can’t be reduced to
standing for only one thing.
If it can, it’s not symbolism, it’s allegory.

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Symbols, though,
generally don’t work
so neatly.
The marigolds in
Collier’s text…
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Represents life and knowledge
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Derives from light; it is celestial fire and the source of divine
goodness.
In Greek myth it is a symbol of the creative powers of Zeus.
In the Old Testament, lightning refers to the spiritual
illuminations as a sudden realization of truth cutting across
time and space in a sign of God’s judgment or to reveal
momentarily the real appearance of God
Navaho myths linked lightning to the Thunderbird, the
symbol of salvation and divine gifts.
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The more you exercise the symbolic
imagination, the better and quicker it
works. We tend to give writers all the
credit, but reading is also an event of
the imagination; our creativity, our
inventiveness, encounters that of the
writer, and in that meeting we puzzle
out what she means, what we
understand her to mean, what uses we
can put her writing to. Imagination
isn’t fantasy. That is to say, we can’t
simply invent meaning without the
writer, or if we can, we ought not to
hold her to it. Rather, a reader’s
imagination is the act of one creative
intelligence engaging another.
So engage that other creative
intelligence. Listen to your instincts.
Pay attention to what you feel about
the text. It probably means something.