How to Read Literature Like a Professor

true. The oxcart and Sarkin Aung Wan’s aunties fall faster than she and the soldiers despite the law of gravity, which decrees t ...

But we haven’t read everything. Neither have I. Nor has anyone, not even Harold Bloom. Beginning readers, of course, are at a sl ...

Carmen. Now that’s art. Nor is the Shakespeare adaptation phenomenon restricted to the stage and screen. Jane Smiley rethinks Ki ...

Who steals my purse steals trash [Life’s] a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing The better par ...

Ever heard any of those? This week? Today? I heard one of them in a news broadcast the morning I started composing this chapter. ...

But here’s something you might not have thought of. Shakespeare also provides a figure against whom writers can struggle, a sour ...

does, of spitting in the face of a friend? I think not. Fugard reminds us, of course, even if he does not mention it directly, t ...

road. We see, and Sethe intuits, that what’s coming in the front gate is the Apocalypse. When the Four Horsemen come, it’s the L ...

Maybe a writer doesn’t want enriching motifs, characters, themes, or plots, but just needs a title. The Bible is full of possibl ...

persons from the Koran and the life of the Prophet. He knew not everyone would understand his ironic version of a holy text; wha ...

figuring out where and what it means. It helps that I know that Baldwin was a preacher’s son, that his most famous novel is call ...

courses. This being America and not France, there is no academy that actually sets a list of canonical texts. The selection is m ...

the witch’s property, Coover forces us to see how our responses—anxiety, trepidation, excitement—are conditioned by our previous ...

Socially out of their depth in this part of town. Morally misguided, perhaps. Lost and in danger. Ironically, their symbols of p ...

What we mean in speaking of “myth” in general is story, the ability of story to explain ourselves to ourselves in ways that phys ...

we have a picture of farming and merchant shipping with no narrative or thematic power. I teach, with some regularity, two great ...

Achilles becomes angry with his leader, Agamemnon, withdraws his support from the Greeks, only rejoining the battle when the con ...

know, James Joyce envisioned every one of the eighteen episodes of the novel asp. 72a parallel to some incident or situation in ...

weather. It’s never just rain. And that goes for snow, sun, warmth, cold, and probably sleet, although the incidence of sleet in ...

backfires. In Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison gives her poor jilted lover, Hagar, an encounter with cleansing rain. Having been t ...