How to Read Literature Like a Professor

with the rainbow never again to flood the whole earth. No writer in the West can employ a rainbow without being aware of its sig ...

“Intentionalists”—writers who attempt to control every facet of their creative output and who intend virtually every effect in t ...

whole time. I sat down at the keyboard again and started in again but got distracted and worked on something else. Eventually I ...

the universe, of which the best that can be said is that it is indifferp. 89ent, though it may be actively interested in our dem ...

p. 91 So where does this alleged weight come from? Not alleged. Felt. We sense greater weight or depth in works when there is so ...

emphasizing their masculine tendencies, while Henry is simply Henry or the young man. Only by radically changing the interperson ...

accidents only on the inside of the novel—on the outside they’re planned, plotted, and executed by somebody, with malice aforeth ...

names indicate their qualities, and in the case of Despair, his size as well. Allegories have one mission to accomplish—convey a ...

of Plato’s cave interior may: perhaps this cave experience has something to do with Adela getting in touch with the deepest leve ...

in the witness box. Perhaps it’s all about nothing more than her own self-doubts, her own psychological or spiritual difficultie ...

considerable authority, and indeed I have a pretty strong grasp of what they mean—for me. The authority I bring to these reading ...

13 – It’s All Political p. 108NOWADAYS WE THINKof A Christmas Carol as a private morality play and a nice Christmas tale to boot ...

problems, including those in the social and political realm, that addresses the rights of persons and the wrongs of those in pow ...

Okay, you’re right, that may be going too far. Still, he implicitly believes that what Europe represents is degraded and decayin ...

that with Rip and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1819) he was creating an American consciousness in literature, a thing that had ...

14 – Yes, She’s a Christ Figure, Too p. 117THIS MAY SURPRISE SOME OF YOU, but we live in a Christian culture. What I mean is tha ...

good with children good with loaves, fishes, water, wine thirty-three years of age when last seen employed as carpenter ...

p. 12016) had disciples, twelve at first, although not all equally devoted very forgiving came to redeem an unworthy world ...

have to be male. Don’t have to be Christian. Don’t even have to be good. (See the stories of Flannery O’Connor for example after ...

the hymnal. And this character would be very hard pressed to take over Savior duty. No literary Christ figure can ever be as pur ...