How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World's Favorite Literary Form

How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World's Favorite Literary Form Features

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Of 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.

What Customers Say About How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World's Favorite Literary Form:

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. 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. I would love to be a student in his class. The author is really good. 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.

Like many sequels, this book does not live up to the promise of its predecessor.My first concern as a classroom teacher is that my students have not yet encountered a majority of the texts Foster references. In my experience, high school readers take flip comments literally when they are not fluent in the subject matter. Our school's AP program uses the book and I've shared select chapters with my underclassmen.

Joyce and Faulkner may act as common ground for those of us with degrees in literature, for those still in training Salinger and Twain would be more effective.I appreciate Foster's wit and voice, but that is because I know the material he is discussing well enough to differentiate between zingers and revelations. While I may chuckle at Foster's humor or find his comments unnecessarily distracting, my students would be lost.The chapters in this book lack the tight focus of How to Read Literature; Foster wanders aimlessly at times as though the purpose of the chapter is to fill space. The voice that makes his work approachable to me, is the same voice that would utterly confuse my students.

As a high school English teacher, I thoroughly enjoyed Foster's How to Read Literature Like a Professor. Foster relies on examples to clarify his points, but the use of oblique references to texts his potential readers are unfamiliar with undermines the clarity of his text. Had the book been shorter and the focus tighter, this would have been a better book.

I picked up How to Read Novels Like a Professor with high hopes that I would be able to use it in my classroom. The reader who needs a book titled How to Read Novels like a Professor is unlikely to be fluent in Joyce.

To be honest, I was looking forward to something a bit more similar to his first book. I found myself skimming and skipping through a few areas. It is also not as exciting or as humorous as his first work either; this book comes off a bit more dry at parts. It did offer some wonderful insight in why authors do what they do, the choices they make, and experiments they take. All of the examples used to try and illustrate how to `read' a passage was much better used as a writing guideline / example. This guide has a roughly similar idea, but it really did not do anything for me as far as learning how to read a novel.

Don't get me wrong, this is a good book and it offered some really great information, but when compared to "How to Read Lit." it is average at best. I am still on the fence about this book. Having read his prior guide, "How to Read Literature.", I was looking very forward to this work as well. He even references his creative writing classes several times as examples.

I got much more out of this book on a writing level than on a reading level. There is a lot in here for an aspiring writer, examples of different techniques, character studies, writing styles, plot, theme, and so forth. If you are looking for something as straightforward as his first book, this does not come close. Three stars on a reading level, four, if not five, on a study in writing & technique.

It offered some very straight forward approaches in how to look at, scrutinize, and analyze literature. The problem is that Foster did not offer much in how to interpret this. I know some people had an issue with his `cookie-cutter' approach in his first work, but that is exactly why it is now being used in the classroom by many teachers, including myself. Having finished, I am not exactly sure where I stand.

So, in other words, the book makes a great guide for aspiring writers and for those who want some history and aspects of the novel as a form of lit. Which leads me to the next thing.This book, perhaps, should have been titled, "How to Craft Novels Like a Writer", or some other similar idea. It was more of a study in novel history, styles, and techniques. It was like a study in the various ways writers craft their technique and how it differs between them (and time).

Seems that, by now, readers are so far abstracted from reality that comments are meaningless. Foster's book. Foster's internalization of these novels. If I must comment, however, I must admit I enjoyed this erudite and witty book more than the dozens of other literature books I've read in the last six months. Fosters book based upon these internalizations. First, there is reality.

Then there is Prof. Then there are the readers' reviews based upon their internalizations. Then there are authors' internalizations of reality. Then there are the readers' internalizations of Prof. Bravo. Then there are authors' novels, which are based upon their internalizations.

Then there is Prof.

A must read for people who like to read and want to get greater joy out of a habit that is already a great joy. What if the story was told from a different point of view or with a different tone. For most people it will probably be like throwing gasoline on a flame. How a story is told is examined and the more you learn, the more you want to go on to the next book and enjoy it more deeply with your newfound tools and techniques.

This book was a real pleasure to read. A great book, gleefully informative and fun. This book has helped to broaden my appreciation of other books, amplified the pleasure I get from reading, intensified the meaning, value and effect of many books for me. Thomas C.

I would imagine that the target audience for this book would probably be booklovers- but I think this book could engage any casual reader and get them excited as well. Foster takes you behind the literary scenes and asks you to consider the stylistic and structural decisions made by authors. Presentation is dissected here.