How to Read Literature Like a Professor

For the last couple of centuries, since Wordsworth and the Romantic poets, the sublime landscape—the dramatic and breathtaking v ...

That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the ...

emotionless and rule-bound world that is Europe. He must overcome an initial problem: nobody wants to read about geopolitical en ...

expands on the seasonal implications with time of day (late evening), mood (very tired), tone (almost elegiac), and point of vie ...

p. 182 Ordinarily the theft of even a beautiful young girl by a god would go unchecked, but this particular girl is the daughter ...

Seasons can work magic on us, and writers can work magic with seasons. When Rod Stewart wants to say, in “Maggie May,” that he’s ...

b. Absolutely, yes. c. Let me try again. p. 187On one level, everyone who writes anything knows that pure originality is impossi ...

of any stripe, but sometimes we really can’t do without it. What I’m talking about here involves a couple of concepts we need to ...

stories. That component could be anything: a quest, a form of sacrifice, flight, a plunge into water, whatever resonates and cat ...

self-inflicted marks—Grateful Dead tattoos for instance—p. 194might say something about your musical tastes. But by and large a ...

something was up. The oddity of the name, the way it calls attention to a physical problem, suggests that this aspect of his ide ...

In his Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell introduces numerous characters with disabilities and deformities of various sorts—tw ...

Are deformities and scars therefore always significant? Perhaps not. Perhaps sometimes a scar is simply a scar, a short leg or a ...

Oedipus is blind to the truth and eventually blinds himself. What they may miss, though, is the much more elaborate pattern runn ...

pretty early. I call this “the Indiana Jones principle”: if you want your audience to know something important about your charac ...

Aside from being the pump that keeps us alive, the heart is also, and has been since ancient times, the symbolic repository of e ...

story he turns to stone, or not him entirely, just his heart. The man whose heart was figurative stone at the outset has his hea ...

realized throughout the story. What’s of immediate interest here, though, is how the priest got that way. He’s had a stroke, not ...

syphilis and gonorrhea reached near-epidemic proportions, yet except for Henrik Ibsen and some of the later naturalists, venerea ...

health of his various alter egos. Not every one of these was labeled “tubercular.” Some were “delicate,” “fragile,” “sensitive,” ...