On How to Read Literature Like a Professor

Foster’s book is a classic. I remember chapters of it being assigned in high school, though I never made it through the whole thing. He has an excellent sense of humor and makes the reading of symbols genuinely comprehensible, and I love that he never once imposes a reading on a text — he suggests possibilities, drawn from how an image or motif has been used before in the human Ur-story. Intertextuality gets plenty of attention too. A lot of the stories he cites were familiar to me and a lot weren’t, which let me add to my to-read list while flagging others I want to return to. None of it will be ground-breaking to a heavy reader, but it’s worth coming back to now and then.