How to Read Literature Like a Professor

crazy (redundant if also number 2) fictional a circus act, departing a cannon suspended on wires an angel heavily sy ...

various implications. Milkman’s great-grandfather, Solomon, flew off to Africa but couldn’t hold on to his youngest child, Jake, ...

of your friends and neighbors sport feathers? In truth, stories with winged characters make up a pretty small genre, but those f ...

If our consideration of flying were limited to those works where characters literally fly, we’d have a pretty thin discussion. T ...

16 – It’s All About Sex... p. 135THERE’S AN UGLY RUMORcirculating that English professors have dirty minds. It’s not true, of co ...

bodies like cordwood if they were dead (although usually without blood), but living bodies couldn’t get horizontal together. Hus ...

My favorite Lawrence story, bar none, is called “The Rocking-Horse Winner” (1932), about a little boy who wants to please his mo ...

provide wives with plausible deniability. With a scene of encoded sex, Mother could pretend not to notice that something untowar ...

the possibilities of writing about sex. p. 145Even in the modernist period, though, there were limits. Hemingway was restricted ...

Henry Miller’s novels, which really do have that much sex in them, and it’s pretty much about the sex. But even with Miller, the ...

made T. S. Eliot faint. Modern women writers—as diverse as Anaïs Nin, Doris Lessing, Joyce Carol Oates, Iris Murdoch, and Edna O ...

that this thing will never have a wide readership in his lifetime. So now it’s my turn. What’s up with that? 18 – If She Comes U ...

stories, who perishes. The younger one, Conrad, the one who would never survive, survives. And he’s tortured by his success at l ...

picnic by the flooded river. They seem to be having a great time, talking and laughing and drinking beer, when Henry Jr. suddenl ...

dying and rebirth is all about. In her Beloved, Morrison makes even greater use of the symbolic implications of baptism and drow ...

So what does she do with this brand-new life of hers? Tell young Fergusson “I love you,” a thought which has never occurred to e ...

stream twenty-seven miles from a dirt road when you really want to watch the sun go down from a white sand beach. Writers have t ...

invading (and then, retreating) troops, the total absence of any possibility of comfort or safety or solace. So what’s geography ...

fine clothes, watch, shoes—but they prove to be the currency with which he buys his real worth. At one point direct contact with ...

his travelers find sunshine in the south, they also encounter curious and sometimes dangerous political and philosophical ideas. ...