Foster, How to Read Literature Like a Professor

Why Leave Geography in the History Classroom?
When Foster tackles the idea of the importance of geography in literature, for example, his statements seem like common sense, but I have never considered them before. “Literary geography is typically about human inhabiting spaces, and at the same time the spaces that inhabit humans"(Foster 166).

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/AlyssaSanow/2009/02/why_leave_geography_in_the_his.html

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/NikitaMcClellan/2009/02/is_that_a_fact_mr_foster.html

It may just be me but aren't "general rules" read to be a fact? Now how can Foster make a claim that is quite opinion based? ...
NOTE: I use Andrew Adams as a refrence

"When Shakespeare compares his beloved to a summer's day, we know instinctively, even before he catalogs her advantages, that this is way more flattering than being compared to, say, January eleventh."

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/MatthewHenderson/2009/02/to_everything_turn_turn_turn_t.html

"Seasons can work magic on us, and writers can work magic with season" (Foster 184).

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/JoshuaWilks/2009/02/will_winter_ever_end.html

There are different types of seasons...

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/RosalindBlair/2009/02/tis_the_season.html

"On one level, everyone who writes anything knows that pure originality is impossible" (Foster, 187).

There is only one story.
Authors tell the same story in different ways and we still love it!

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/ChelsieBitner/2009/02/one_story.html

"Actually, the scariest thing Poe could do to us is to put a perfectly normal human specimen in that setting, where no one could remain safe. And that's one thing landscape and place--geography--can do for a story."
~pages 166-67

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/JenniferPrex/2009/02/setting_matters.html

"[T]here is only one story"

Foster, page 185

How is it that life can be only one tale?

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/ChristopherDufalla/2009/02/the_never_ending_story.html

"Even our best intentions, he seems to suggest, can have disastrous consequences in an alien environment."
http://blogs.setonhill.edu/AliciaCampbell/2009/02/flipping_the_bird.html

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/AndrewAdams/2009/02/one_story_cmon.html

My argument against Foster's argument against originality.

The Wild Wild.. South?

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/JustinIellimo/2009/02/the_wild_wild_south.html

High Ground, Low Ground

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/JustinIellimo/2009/02/high_ground_low_ground.html

"'Always' and 'never' aren't good words in literary studies." (Foster, page 159)

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/SaraBenaquista/2009/02/fosters_helping_me_cheat.html

Those Crazy Southerners..and a book I haven't read even though Foster says everyone has.
http://blogs.setonhill.edu/AjaHannah/2009/02/those_crazy_southerners.html

"Have you ever noticed how often literary characters get wet?" Foster pg 153

What is one of your memorable scenes from a book or movie where the character gets "wet", and what do you think it means??? Let me know

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/NathanHart/2009/02/getting_wet.html

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/CarlosPeredo/2009/02/the_sea_is_all_powerful.html

"Geography in Literature can also be more. It can be revelatory of virtually any element in the work." (166)
http://blogs.setonhill.edu/JessicaBitar/2009/02/geography_matters.html

geography is setting, but it also (or can be) physiology, attitude, finance, industry -- anything that place can forge in the people who live there."

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/mt/mt.cgi?__mode=view&_type=entry&id=30752&blog_id=494&saved_added=1

"Literary geography is typically about humans inhabiting spaces, and at the same time the spaces that inhabit humans."
http://blogs.setonhill.edu/AprilMinerd/2009/02/home_is_where_the_heart_is.html

Pluck it From the Sky...
http://blogs.setonhill.edu/AprilMinerd/2009/02/pluck_it_from_the_sky.html

Where you are is what you are.
http://blogs.setonhill.edu/RachaelSarver/2009/02/where_you_are_is_what_you_are.html

"..So what happens to make him a changed man?
Yes he gets wet. Now, his getting wet is different from Hagar's disastrous trip in the rain, in that he enters bodies of water. Rain can be restorative and cleansing, so there's a certain overlap, but it generally lacks the specific baptismal associations of submersion."

"Like baptism, drowning has plenty to tell us in a story. So when your character goes underwater, you have to hold your breath. Just, you know, till you see her come back up."
http://blogs.setonhill.edu/RebeccaMarrie/2009/02/it_seems_like_fosters_got_cath.html

"So high or low, near or far north or south, east or west, the places of poems and fiction really matter. It isn't just setting that hoary old English class topic. It's place and space and shape that bring us to ideas and psychology and history and dynamism." (Foster 174)

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/SueMyers/2009/02/home-is-where-t.html

"Symbolically, that's the same patter we see in baptism: death and rebirth through the medium of water."
A few of the symbols Foster has mentioned are religious...is this a trend?

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/MarieVanMaanen/2009/02/religion_the_universal_languag.html

In chapter 18 of How to Read Literature Like a Professor, Foster speaks of water as a symbol in most writings. He links water and death as one big symbol. “See this in symbolic terms. A young man sails away from his known world, dies out of existence, and comes back a new person, hence is reborn.” Foster continues to state that this is the same as baptism. In baptism someone is put under water blessed by a priest or any holy member ordained to perform the task. I do not see this as baptism in books. I see people falling in water simply as them falling in water. Sure this sometimes has a dramatic effect on the character, or adds a very big twist into the plot. If someone dies in the water it will certainly add something to the plot and take something away from the character that lives, but I still think that the character does not have a ‘rebirth’, but rather just a traumatic experience that they have to deal with throughout the book. Maybe I am not doing enough close reading into Foster’s work, but I just don’t see a character in a book being ‘baptized’ unless they are literally being blessed in the book.

While I was beginning to read The Grapes of Wrath for the second time, I really started to realize the minute details that Steinbeck puts into the first chapter. He uses this chapter as a sort of building block to throw us into the dust bowl. "The rain-heads dropped a little spattering and hurried on to the next country. Behind them the sky was pale again and the sun flared. In the dust there were drop craters where the rain had fallen, and there were clean splashes on the corn, and that was all." This shows what the dust bowl was really like. the rain would come and just spit a litte bit, not even enough to wet the ground. Steinbeck shows the true drought that America was going through at the time. The talk about how you could see just where the rain fell on the ground and corn shows that the weather was truly unforgiving. I do wonder one thing though. Why does Steinbeck not just simply tell us "It was the dust bowl"?

"Have you evere noticed how often literary characters get wet? Some drown, some merely get drenched, and some bob to the surfact. What difference does it make?"

“One of our great storytellers, country singer Willie Nelson, was sitting around one day just nooddling on the guitar, improvising melodies he’d never written down, never heard in quite those forms. His companion, a nonmusician whose name I forget, asked him how he could come up with all those tunes, “They’re all around us,” old Willies said. “You just reach up and pick them out of the air.”