How To Read Literature Like A Professor In the book how to read literature like a professor every chapter is based on symbolism. The author uses creative ways of symbolism to create different scenarios. The author uses different stories and symbolism to make people look at things from a different perspective. Foster states in the first chapter that everything you do is a quest and that the point of having quests is to have self-knowledge, which is saying that everything you do in life no matter how big or how small can teach you something. He also creates a dinner scene but that scene is not about dinner it was about intercourse and there were different symbols that meant a man or a woman. When you read about a dinner scene, you are not thinking