How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines

The word “communion” used in this sense means a coming together. Although some texts refer to communion in the religious sense, Foster explains that the broader use indicates a sense of human fellowship. Foster discusses this in Chapter 2 when referring to food in literature and other experiences that foster community. For example, Raymond Carver’s short story “Cathedral” is about a man with a chip on his shoulder who thinks he dislikes another character. Only after the two men share an experience do they come to some kind of understanding. 

Foster defines a conceit as an “extended metaphor” that works as an “organizing device” in a plot or a poem. The term originated in the literary analysis of poetry, and Foster refers to it when discussing John Donne’s poem “The Flea.” The flea is used throughout the poem as a figurative reference to sexual intimacy between the poet and the woman he is pursuing. For instance, Donne writes about the flea: “It suck’d me first, and now sucks thee” (241). The narrator means that their blood has mingled from being bitten by the same insect and uses that as a pretext for suggesting closer direct relations.

Critics refer to two types of characters in stories: flat (or static) and round (or dynamic). A flat character is one that does not change as the text progresses. They experience no personal growth and they have a limited range of traits, so Foster calls them “two-dimensional” (84). They are used by writers mostly to further the narrative and to develop round characters, allowing the latter to grow. 

This term refers to a dialogue that takes place between texts in the sense that one text makes a reference to another. For example, when John Gardner uses the character Grendel from the old English poem “Beowulf” in his novel Grendel, intertextuality is at work. Intertextuality need not be an obvious connection or a major connection. Works constantly interact with other works, so “[t]he result is a sort of World Wide Web of writing” (197).

Irony is a rhetorical device in which something occurs that is the opposite of what one expects to occur. Foster refers to irony throughout the book and focuses on the device in Chapter 26. There, he explains its origins in the comedies of ancient Greece” “there was a character known as the eiron who seemed subservient, ignorant, weak, and he played off a pompous, arrogant, clueless figure called the alazon” (257). The dissonance between the outward appearances of the characters and the fact that the “weak” character verbally bested the “strong” one captures the notion of irony. Many authors in the Modernist tradition favored irony, among them Hemingway and Joyce.

A metaphor is a literary device that takes the form of a comparison. When two things are compared indirectly through implication or directly by saying one thing is another thing, a metaphor is created. Foster provides an example when discussing D. H. Lawrence: “when his characters go south, they are really digging deep into their subconscious, delving into that region of darkest fears and desires” (178). Here the comparison takes place between geography and the human psyche. (For comparisons that use the word “like,” see Simile below.)

When characters go on a trip, or a quest, something happens to test them, and they emerge somehow changed or more knowledgeable about themselves. Literature is full of quests, from Arthurian legends that involve actual quests in search of the Holy Grail, to John Updike’s short story “A&P” in which a boy takes a figurative quest, riding his bike to the supermarket. The story’s stated reason to go on a trip is never the real reason for the quest; the real reason is revealed at the end of the story after the character goes through some kind of trial.

As noted above, a round (or dynamic) character is one of two types of characters. Round characters are fully fleshed out with a range of qualities that allow them to grow and change; thus Foster calls them “three-dimensional” (84). Round (or dynamic) characters exhibit change of growth as the events of the narrative unfold. The protagonist, or main character, of a story is always round.