How to Read Literature Like a Professor

Another great nineteenth-century realist who sees the figurative value of illness is Henrik Ibsen. In his breakthrough play A Do ...

of the demographic distribution of its infection history, AIDS adds another property to its literary usage: the political angle. ...

p. 226REMEMBER THETWELFTHNIGHTparty in Joyce’s story “The Dead” that we looked at earlier? To a child of late-twentieth-century ...

Instead try to find a reading perspective that allows for sympathy with the historical moment of the story, that understands the ...

And this is a fairly recent story. How much harder to understand the mind-set behind, say, Moby-Dick. The Last of the Mohicans. ...

much worthwhile. I also find, with some regularity, myself asking, How could someone so talented be so blind, so arrogant, so bi ...

a process of association in which you thought, or felt (since this really works as much at the visceral as at the intellectual l ...

rain and Beckett’s road. In each case, the sign carries with it a customary meaning, but that doesn’t guarantee it will deliver ...

disjunction between what books ought to be and the function assigned to them here by Forster. It goes on and on. In Virginia Woo ...

capacity to choose is taken away, evil is replaced not with goodness but with a hollow simulacrum of goodness. Because he still ...

Breakfast was not yet over before the men came to put up the marquee. “Where do you want the marquee put, mother?” “My dear chil ...

p. 248“Only a very small band,” said Laura gently. Perhaps he wouldn’t mind so much if the band was quite small. But the tall fe ...

fall. “Huh,” she sighed, and the moment after the sigh shep. 250sat up quickly. She was still, listening. All the doors in the h ...

“Hans, move these tables into the smoking-room, and bring a sweeper to take these marks off the carpet and—one moment, Hans—” Jo ...

face that she hadn’t got them. “Let me see.” And she said to Sadie firmly, “Tell cook I’ll let her have them in ten minutes.” Sa ...

“Don’t they carry one back to all one’s parties?” said Laura. “I suppose they do,” said practical Jose, who never liked to be ca ...

That really was extravagant, for the little cottages were in a lane to themselves at the very bottom of a steep rise that led up ...

still be having our party, shouldn’t we?” Laura had to say “yes” to that, but she felt it was all wrong. She sat down on her mot ...

“Darling Laura, how well you look!” “What a becoming hat, child!” “Laura, you look quite Spanish. I’ve never seen you look so st ...

sympathetic, and now—” Oh well! Laura ran for the basket. It was filled, it was heaped by her mother. “Take it yourself, darling ...