How to Read Literature Like a Professor

p. 263The little woman in the gloomy passage seemed not to have heard her. “Step this way, please, miss,” she said in an oily vo ...

“I say, you’re not crying, are you?” asked her brother. Laura shook her head. She was. Laurie put his arm round her shoulder. “D ...

Use any interpretive strategies you’ve picked up from this book or elsewhere Employ no outside sources about the story No ...

differentiation and snobbery. Consider the third response. The writer, Diane, is a recent graduate who took several classes from ...

dead man. It is while looking at him that she chooses to see, instead of the reality of the hardship the man’s death leaves to h ...

“rosettes.” And the real roses themselves have bloomed “in the hundreds” overnight, as if by magic or, since Mansfield mentions ...

What just happened here? For one thing, as my student respondents note, Laura has seen how the other half lives—and dies. One ma ...

Demeter warns her daughter against eating anything in some versions of the original. Moreover, Mrs. Sheridan sends Laurie, a lat ...

itself: “Well, little book, you’re not that much but you’re the best I could make you. Now you’ll just have to make your way in ...

Ranger waving from astride the rearing Silver, Richard III crying out for a horse, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda roaring down th ...

Primary Works p. 285W. H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts” (1940), “In Praise of Limestone” (1951). The first is a meditation on hu ...

trouble. Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), A Christmas Carol (1843), David Copperfield (1850), Bleak House (1853), ...

William H. Gass, “The Pedersen Kid,” “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” (both 1968). These stories make clever use of la ...

world of Kafka, characters are subjected to unreal occurrences that come to define and ultimately destroy them. It’s much funnie ...

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late fourteenth century). Not for beginners, I think. At least it wasn’t for me when I was a be ...

Movies to Read Citizen Kane (1941). I’m not sure this is a film to watch, but you sure can read it. The Gold Rush (1925), Modern ...

tens of thousands of us how to think about the special way poems convey what they have to say. As a poet himself and a translato ...

Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (1977). I’ve said so much throughout this book, there’s really nothing left, except read it. Ackn ...

p. 301 Aaron’s Rod (Lawrence), 170 Absalom, Absalom! (Faulkner), 50 ,84 ,94 -95 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain), 6 ,3 ...

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 189 Baldwin, James, 54 -55,56 ,227 -28,229 -31 Balthazar (Durrell), 147 baptism/rebirth, 152 -62 “Barn Burning ...