Foster, How to Read Literature Like a Professor

Imaginations and not reading with just your eyes makes you think and look harder into what you are reading into, trying to find a deeper meaning.

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/ChelsieBitner/2009/03/imagination_station.html

"The formula I generally offer is this: don't read with your eyes" (Foster 228).

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/JulianneBanda/2009/03/imagination_is_key.html

Shall I Compare Thee to Rihanna???
"How could someone so talented be so blind, so arrogant, so bigoted?"
http://blogs.setonhill.edu/AliciaCampbell/2009/03/shall_i_compare_thee_to_rihann.html

"The formula I generally offer is this: don't read with your eyes."
~page 228

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/JenniferPrex/2009/03/reading_empathy.html

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/NikitaMcClellan/2009/03/throw_away_everything_you_lear.html

"There are lots of useful lessons in the Illiad, but while it may at times read like an episode of the Jerry Springer Show, we'll miss most of them if we read through the lens of our own popular culture."

Foster, page 232

How often do we forget the context of literature?

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/ChristopherDufalla/2009/03/reading_into_something.html

Foster suggests to his readers, themselves studiers of literature, that reading must be done from a "perspective that allows for sympathy with the historical moment of the story, that understands the text as having been written against its own social, historical, cultural, and personal background" (Foster 228-29).

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/AlyssaSanow/2009/03/a_historical_lens.html

OMG Yes! And the Bible
http://blogs.setonhill.edu/AjaHannah/2009/03/omg_yes_and_the_bible.html

Foster suggests to his readers, themselves studiers of literature, that reading must be done from a "perspective that allows for sympathy with the historical moment of the story, that understands the text as having been written against its own social, historical, cultural, and personal background"

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/AlyssaSanow/2009/03/a_historical_lens.html

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/RosalindBlair/2009/03/altering_fixed_positions.html

"...Don't read only from your own fixed position in the Year of Our Lord two thousand and some. Instead try to find a reading perspective that allows for sympathy with the historical moment of the story, that understands the text as having been written against its own social, historical, cultural, and personal background."

Foster's great point about reading with eyes that are not ethnocentric.

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/AndrewAdams/2009/03/worlds_apart.html

"Every day they return to the same spot, hoping the unseen Godot will show up, but he never does, they never take the road, and the road never brings anything interesting their way. In some places writing something like that will get you a fifteen-yard penalty for improper use of a symbol."
Oh, Foster, you crack me up with your witty-yet-educational comments!

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/MatthewHenderson/2009/03/road_as_a_distraction.html

Getting the most out of it, but not through your own eyes!
“It seems to me that if we want to get the most out of our reading, as far as is reasonable, we have to try to take the works as they were intended to be taken. The formula I generally offer is this: don’t read with your eyes.” (228) Foster Chapter 25

Blinding Content
http://blogs.setonhill.edu/AprilMinerd/2009/03/blinding_content.html

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/JessicaBitar/2009/03/dont_read_with_your_eyes.html

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/CarlosPeredo/2009/03/historical_background.html

"the goal of deconstructive readings is to demonstrate how the work is controlled and reduced by the values and prejudices of its own time."

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/RebeccaMarrie/2009/03/forget_the_future_live_in_the.html

"It seems to me that if we want to get the most out of our reading, as far as is reasonable, we have to try to take the works as they are intended to be taken."
-228, Foster

Foster mentions "Sonny's Blues" noting that, "...it is meant as a study of relations between brothers, not as a treatise on addiction." (Foster 228)
http://blogs.setonhill.edu/MarieVanMaanen/2009/03/keeping_in_mind_the_big_pictur.html

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/JoshuaWilks/2009/03/symbolism_embolism.html

This blog talks about some specific ideas about symbolism and my opinions about them. "dont have an embolism when you talk about symbolism"

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/SueMyers/2009/03/a-dry-flood.html

"The flooding that climaxes the novel is thematically situated to provide maximum counterpoint to the drought which originally forced the Joads to migrate west. Disenfranchised and dehumanized, the Joads can only curse the rising floodwaters even as they once prayed for a deluge to feed their parched crops." (Cassuto 2).