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How To Read Literature Like A Professor Chapter 1 Summary

1102 Words5 Pages

Mercedes Blanchard
Mrs. Mary Smith
AP Literature
20 September 2017
After reading and discussing How to Read Literature like a Professor, some of the many literary techniques Foster emphasized was Characters and their meaning, symbolism, and deformity. These three techniques really inspired me and pointed out certain characteristics and “clues” of the story that I otherwise would not have discovered previously. As I continued to read the book, I was compelled and even bewildered at the thought that I have missed so many hidden meanings in iconic works of writing. I came to the conclusion that literature is really a giant mystery and we readers are really just detectives trying to solve it.
To begin, Chapter 10 goes into depth on the types …show more content…

One of the main ideas mentioned was “physical deformities correlate with moral and spiritual deformities” (Foster, 133). In real life, people’s deformities go unnoticed, or are deemed unimportant. However in stories, characters who are deformed or have a disability are special. Authors don’t take the time to set a character apart for no reason. He used an example about bringing a blind man into a plot, and that the author will have to change the other characters and the plot so that they adapt to the man being blind. It takes a lot of work, so they are going to be special. This got my mind churning. I began to consider The Lion King, and how Scar, the evil brother, had a scar on his face. He was special. He was a villain, and his scar correlated with his twisted, jealous mindset. Foster uses the book Oedipus Rex, as an example. He explains that his parents feared the prophecy that he was going to kill his father, so they send him to the wilderness with bound feet to die. He lives and later accidentally kills his father, and marries his mother unknowingly, and when he finds out that his children are really his siblings, he blinds himself. Foster explains that this is a deformity that represents guilt and shame (Foster 134). At the end of this chapter, I racked my brain to recall the books I’ve read with characters that had deformities and how they impacted the book. I was enchanted at the

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