How to read Literature like a English professor

If its a square its a Sonnet

Can tell its a Sonnet when it looks like a square. Because 14 lines is
about the same length as one line of poetry.
Sonnets are important because theyre so common in the english
language.
Why is it important to learn about the structure of poems? Wouldnt it
be good enough to just enjoy the poem as it is? I would agree for the most
part. What good is any poem if it isnt beautiful and doesnt have a certain
aethetic touch to it? It conveys ideas, emotions, etc. all of which is very
remarkable. Just enjoy the experience. After youve had your first pleasure,
though, one of the additional pleasures is seeing how the poet worked that
magic on you. There are many ways a poem can charm the reader: choice of
images, music of the language, idea content, cleverness of wordplay. And at
least some part of the answer, if that magic came in a sonnet, is form.
There isnt much space in a Sonnet for narrative. Regardless though it
can achieve two purposes. Most have two parts one octave and one sestet
Different types of Sonnets
Petrarchan binds octave together with rhymes and the sestet
together with rhymes
Shakespearean Divides up by four. 1st 4. 2nd 4. 3rd 4. And last 2
(couplet). First two groups unify together. The 3rd four and the last two do
too.
An echo by Willow Wood by Christina Rosetti
This poem is made of two sentences. The first period marks the end of
the octave (first 8 lines) and the other marks the end of the sestet (6 lines)
and of the poem.
Octave- unusual rhyme scheme abbaab; sestet cddcdc

Octave- event of two lovers on the verge of an event

Reference to Narcissus demonstrates the feeling of danger, because
Narcissus looked into his reflection and fell in love with it causing him to
drown.
Poets write Sonnets not because theyre lazy but because they want to
convey an idea in this form (which takes a lot of effort).
Now where have I see her before
No such thing as a wholly original piece of literature
Tim O Briens Goin After Casciato (1978)
OBrien borrowed a lot from other writers but that doesnt make his
writing anything less than original.
Halfway through the book, OBriens characters fall through a hole and
the only way to get out is to fall back out. (Alice in wonderland reference by
Lewis Carroll)
There is a Vietnamese girl who is brown-skinned and guides mostly
white men, she knows where to go, where to get food (Sacajawea reference;
this assosciation lets the reader understand how desparate Paul Berlin is for
guidance)
Its all about Shakespeare
... Or the Bible
East of Eden
The author knew the book of Genesis really well. Being east of Eden
means to be in a fallen world.
Araby by James Joyce
Eudora Welty Why I Live at the P.O.

A name has to sound right for a character BUT also has to carry
whatever message the writer want to convey about the character or the
story
How do you find biblical allusions?
resonance test: If something seems to be out of the scope of the
immediate dimensions of the story or poem, if it resonates outside itself,
start looking for allusions to older and bigger texts
Hanseldee and Greteldum
You dont have to use the entire part of a fairy tale. Just a part that
helps demonstrate what youre trying to accomplish.
But why fairy tales? Because were all familiar with them. Every kids
show on TV uses plots relating to the originals. The familiarity and warmth of
proximity well recognize when we are approached by a similar element.
Virgils Oddysey was based on Iliad by Homer
Ironic example: Aenas and his followers are survivors of Troy and here
we have this Trojan hero acting out the patterns set down by his enemies.
2,000 years later. Walcott
More symbolic derivative. The theme of protecting ones family. Need
to maintain ones dignity: Achilles. The determination to have faith:
Penelope. The struggle to return home: Odysseus.
Other greek works of mythology
Ovids Metamorphoses.
Franz Kafka referenced it in the Metamorphosis.

Indiana Jones looks like a typical Hollywood movie but the intrepid
searcher after fabulous treasure goes back to Apollonius and The
Argonautica, the story of Jason and the Argonauts.
There is no form of dysfunctional family or no personal disitegration of
character for which there is not a Greek or Roman model.
Examples:
Wronged woman gone violent in her grief and madness? : Aeneas,
Dido, or Jason and Medea.
There are 2 disservices people do when it comes to symbolism.
1) They always want to know that one thing it is. Its up to perspective,
as long as you have literary evidence.
2) Its not just an object that can be symbolic, a action can too.
3)
Its all about politics
Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol
Dickens caricatures this Malthusian thinking in Scrooges insistence
that he wants nothing to do with the destitute and that if they would rather
starrve than live in the poorhouse or in debtors prison, then by golly, they
had best hurry up and do it and decrease the excess population. What a
guy! Some announcements early in the story are almost verbatim from
Malthus or his Victorian descendants.
He hates political writing ones that are really obvious and dont have
anything to offer for contemporary readers. They work for lots of us only as
cultural anthropology. For example Ezra Pound and his writing about why he
supports fascism and the evils of lending and borrowing between the world
wars.
The type he likes: Dickens Gabriel Garca Marquez and Toni Morrison,
Henrik Ibsen, and George Bernard Shaw
D.H. Lawrence

Radical individualism
Edgar Allen Poe The Masque of the Red Death criticizes European
class system, which privileges the unworthy and the unhealthy. Brother
burries the sister dead. She escapes and when he hugs her they both fall
over dead. The house collapses into the black and lurid tarn. = what
Europea represents is degraded and decaying. Inevitable and even just
outcome of a corrupt social organization.
Sophocles wrote his plays at a very old age. Oedipus at Colonus
Theseus protects Oedipus from poetential harm and guides him to the
sacred spot where the old man is fated to die.
End of his life
End of fifth century B.C. end of Athenian Greatness
In play Creon attacks (real life Spartans)
Suggests if they have another Theseus as a leader, then the spartans
wouldnt attack
Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway
You do yourself a huge disservice if you dont understand the milieu of
the author and the problems they wrote about.
Lady Bruton invites Richard Dalloway (MP) and Hugh Whitbread
(position at court); dictates them material she wants to see introduced into
legislation; people wouldnt take her seriously if it came directly from her
^Criticism of the notion that women arent capable of critical thinking
Yes, Shes a Christ Figure, too
Culture is heavily influenced by its religious traditions.
A man, old, poor, humble profession (fisher for example), people dont
like him, boy believes him, parents tell their boy to be far away from him. =
good with children, maybe disciple, world he lives in is rather sullied and
unworthy, fallen even. Catches huge fish, takes him into wilderness, his
hands get bruised really badly, gone for 3 days, when he comes back
(resurrection), he carries his mast (looks like a cross from some directions).
Even doubters start to believe him again.
^The Old man and the Sea by Hemingway.

Dont have to hit all the marks. (look at stories of Flannery O Connor)
Clues: certain age, certain behaviors, provides for certain outcomes, or
suffers in certain, provides for certain outcomes, literary antennae should
twitch.

Baptism
Judith Guests Ordinary People
Conrad and his big strong athletic brother are out in the storm of a
sea/ brother dies/ Conrad survives. People think Conrad should have died
instead of his strong athletic brother.
Conrad learns he was stronger
Know he has to learn to live with it.
Hes alive all over again
Conrad that went out to the sea is not the same one who comes back.
And not just in terms of Heraclitus (greek philosophers who wrote that
everything is changing and that you cant step into a river twice)
apothegms of change written by Heraclitus about constantly shifting
nature of time.
Conrad is reborn: symbolically the same pattern we seen in baptism:
death and rebirth through the medium of water.
Wonderful Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich
Henry Lamartine Jr., Vietnam veteran sufferung from posttraumatic
stress disorder.
Comes out of it a little when his brother Lyman damages car
While having a great time Henry runs into the flooded stream
Through dying Lyman thinks Henry has purchased his share of the car
and rolls it down the stream

Analysis: The characters deaths are a form of choosing, of exerting

control in a society that has taken control from them.
Song of Solomon
Milkman is immersed in water 3 times. Stepping in small stream, given
a bath by Sweet, and swimming with Sweet in the river. He becomes nicer,
more considerate, less of a sexist pig. The thing about Baptism is you have
to be ready to receive it. He loses things that mark him as a fine city man.
He has to lose all the outer remnants of his raiment, all the things he has
acquired from being the son of his father. He returns the favor of bathing to
Sweet, which is important because of what it implies. When he is immersed
in water when he swims, he whoops and hollers. Hes a changed man and he
can feel it (dying, rebirth).
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Paul D. escapes from prison by digging a hole in the ground is
swimming out into his new life.
*Baptism can mean a host of things
Mother kills her daughter on the Ohio River, so she doesnt have to
experience slavery. River could symbolize the river Styx through which
people crossed over to the underworld to Hades.
The Horse Dealers Daughter by D.H. Lawrence
Mabel, a young girl, nearly drowns, rescued at the last moment by the
local doctor. Family horse farm has been sold off after her fathers death.
And wont go to a manor house, the only place thatll take her in. She cleans
her mothers gravestone (its depicted that she would like to join her). When
Dr. Fergusson recues her, almost dying in the process, he cleans her of this
nasty fluid surrounding her. When she wakes up she is wrapped in a towel
and feels as clean as the day she was born. (She is reborn). Theyre both
new people and see something in each other their previous selfs, limited by
their assosciations with the rest of the family, couldnt possibly find.
What does it mean if a character drowns?
Rebirth/Renewal are always really similar to each other but drowning
always means something different. Or in the words of Tolstoy in Anna
Karenina: All happy families are the same, but every unhappy one has its
own story. Drowning can have different purposes: character revelation,
thematic developmeant of violence or fialure or guilt, plot complication or
denouement.

Geography matters
Faulkner usually has it take place in his made up place:
Yoknapatawpha County Mississippi.
Thomas hardy: Wessex, the southwest corner of England
Most writers arent as tied to a certain place like these two.
The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway
Could only take place in the caribbean.
The place brings with it history, interaction between American and
Cuban culture, corruption, poverty, fishing, and baseball.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Could only travel the river in Mississippi, to make that story possible. It
matters when they reach Cairo and the Ohio emtpies into the big river. When
they get to the Deep South.
Literary geography is about humans inhabiting spaces. Geography is
the literal sense is setting but also can be psychology, attitude, finance,
industryanything that can forge in the people who live there.
The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe
The setting creates a dark, scary feeling, which the character makes
worse. He puts normal human specimens in that setting, where no one can
feel safe.
Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver
Missy wants to escape from Kentucky, where the life is hard (tobacco
farming), no one has much from it. The narrator also feels her horizons
circumscribed by whawt seem like local certainties: early pregnancy and an
unsatisfactory marriage to a man who will probably die young. She gets
away, and renames herself to Taylor Greer (rebirth). She finds herself in a
completely alien but inviting landscape. Big horizons, clear air, brilliant
sunshine, and open possibilities.
Geography can be character

Going after Cacciato by Tim OBrien

Tunnels are everywhere. Tunnels turn into the enemy because they house
the Vietcong fighters only to deliver them virtually anywhere, produce
surprise attacks and sudden death. Bullet come from a VC near a village.
Soldiers decide to burn down the village. Its Geography: center of mystery
and threat, as alien environment, as generic home of potential enemies and
uncertain friends.
Geography as plot role
E. M. Forsters early novels
In a room with a View
Lucy Honeychurch travels to Florence. She attains freedom and much of it
stems form the passionate, fierynature of the Italian city.
Lady Chatterleys Lover by D.H. Lawrence
Employ geography as a metaphor for the psyche. When characters go south
theyre really digging deep into their subconcious, delving into that region of
darkest fears and desires.
Running south = running amok
The snows of Kilimanjaro by Hemingway
Contrasts leopard dying and preserved in the snow on the peak, with the
writer dying of gangrene down on the plain. The leopards death is clean,
cold, pure, while the writers death is ugly, unpleasant, horrible. Final result
is the same but one is much less wholesome than the other.
Its place and space and shape that bring us to ideas and psychology and
history and dynamism.

 So does Season
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruind choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Deaths second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consumed with that which it was nourishd by.
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
Shakespeare
Seasons having their appropriate emotions- fear no more the heat o
th sun, Nor the furious winters rage
Henry James
American girl Daisy Miller;playful, flirtatious
American man/long resident of Europe Frederic Winterbourne
You know things cant end well because Daisies cant flourish in Winter.

Different Seasons meanings

Spring: childhood and youth
Summer: adulthood and romance and fulfillmetn and passion
Autumn: Decline and middle age and tirednesss but also harvest
Winter: old age and resentment and death

Sometimes its not obvious what season it is

Robert Frost
Not explicitly state that its Autumn but the fact that the narrator just
got done picking apples suggests that it is Autumn.
Not only agricultural but also personal harvests. Results of our
endeavors. We reap the rewards and punishments of our conduct.
Doesnt just talk about the sleep of the woodchuck but suggests also a
longer sleep, the big sleep. For Frost such a dual gaze (Janus: one face
looking backwards, one looking forwards) applies equally well to the autumn
and the harvest season.
Never assume seasons can only be used in one way. Look at how they
are used.
One Story
Its impossible to write a completely original story. A good writer
makes his work acquire depth and resonance from the echoes and chimes it
sets up with prior texts.
Books are more comforting because we recognize elements in them
from our prior readig.
Intertextuality
Everythings connected. And everything is having a dialogue with each
other
Is there whether you think it is, or not.
Archetype
Archetypes take on power with repetition. We can never get to the
pure level of myth or the original Archetype. We as readers or writers,
tellers or listenersunderstand each other, we share knowledge of the
structures of ourmyths, we comprehend the logic of symbols, largely
because we have access to the same swirl of story. We have only to reach
out into the air and pluck a piece of it.

Marked for Greatness

When people in real life have imperfections it means nothing
thematically, metaphorically, or spiritually.
But scoliosis on Richard III. Shakespeare is very much a product of his
time in suggesting that ones proximity to or distance from God is
manifested in external signs.
Difference is always rich with possibility in literature, while sameness
doesnt present us with metaphorical possibilities.
Usually heroes are marked. For example: Harry Potters
Milkman Dead- one leg being shorter than the other.
^to demonstrate how life marks him as you go on
Character differentiation
King blinds himself.
Oedipus feet are bound together as a child which causes a minor
wound.
The Sun also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
Presents a society that has been rendered barren --- spiritually,
morally, intellectually, and sexually --- by the war.
How do we know Jake Barren is the fisher king? He goes fishing.
Parallel to the Wasteland Myth. Perhaps with a touch of Isis and Osyris
thrown in; Osiris was torn apart, and the goddess Isis succeeded in
reassembling him except for the part that makes Jake Barnes resemble him.
Isis takes in other lovers. Much like Lady Brett Ashley.

Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell

Two characters with eye patches and one with a glass eye
Everyone is damaged as they go through life. But they arent
particularly incommodated. Clea the painter reports late in the final novel
that her prosthetic hand can paint. The gift lies not in her hand, in other
words, but in her heart. her mind, her soul.
Frankenstein
The monster represents the aftermath of the scientist-sorcerer, forging
an unholy alliance with dark knowledge that scares us; forbidden insights, a
modern pact with the devil, the result of science without ethics. Faustian
pact with the devil.
Vicotr represents the dual nature of man. No matter how well made or
socially groomed, a monsterous Other exists. --- exact opposite of the
hunchback of Notre Dame.
Hes Blind for a Reason, You know
Often blindness is not the inability to see the physical world but the
inability to see what is really going on.
Oedipus
Oedipus is blinded because he doesnt really see what is going on and
Tiresias who is blind understands what is going on. Every scene includes who
saw what. And images of light and darkness.
Araby by James Joyce
The street the narrator lives on is called Araby = dead end street.
A good story is one that lets us feel that theres something more going
on in the story --- a richness, a resonance, a depth --- than we picked up at
first, so we return to it to find those elements that account for that
sensation.
Its Never Just Heart Disease

Heart has been the symbolic repisotory of emotion and is also the
pump that keeps us alive.
The remorseful day by Colin Dexter
Kills off his recurrent detective Morse. Killed by heart attack. The
emphasis is on his humanity, not his misdeeds.
The man of adamant by Nathaniel Hawthorne
His heart turns to stone.
Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
Jim makes bad decisions, the novel questions his strength of the heart,
both in terms of bravery and of forming serious attachments. Do to one of
his miscalculations, his best friends and the son of the chieftain dies. He
promised if any of his decisions cause the death of people, Jim will forfeit his
own life. Doramin(the leader) shoots him through the chest. Led a life by a
true heart can only die because his heart stops functioning.
More commonly heart troube takes the form of heart disease
Lolitas Humbert Humbert by Vladimir Nabokov
Self absorbtion leads him to cruelty, rape, murder and the destruction
of several lives. Only one death symbolically appropriate to this situation.
irony
And rarely just illness
The sisters by James Joyce
Narrator mentions that his priest is dying. Priest has no hope. Literary
antenna should go off! Whats important is WHY he is has paralysis. Boy
witnesses priest begin the slow decline after earlier strokes (his clothing
covered with bits of tobacco and ash, his movement awkward, his speech
affected). Priest gets released from his parish. Lives his last years as a
recluse in the back of his sisters house, which indicates the degree to which
emotional or mental paralysis had already set in before his stroke.

For Joyce, paralysis --- physical, moral, social, spiritual, intellectual,

political ----informs his whole career.
Before the 20th century diseases were a mystery/treated superstitial
and still are e.g. button your coat, or youll get sick.
Principles for disease in literature:
1. It should be picturesque; tuberculosis: sufferer acquires a sort of
bizarre beauty. The skin becomes almost translucent; the eye sockets dark,
so that the sufferer takes on the appearance of a martyr in medieval
paintings.
2. should be mysterious in its origin
3. should have strong metaphorical or symbolic possibilities.
Tuberculosis was a wasting disease, both in terms of the individual washing
away, growing thinner and thinner, and in terms of the waste of lives that
were often barely under way.
Doesnt have to be labeled tubercular.
delicate, fragile, sensitive, washing away symptom or two would
suffice for the audience who were all too familiar with the disease.
4. a sufficiently compelling metaphor can induce an author to
bring an otherwise objectionable illness into a work.
Example: plague; in terms of suffering not good; but in terms of
widespread societal devastation its a champion.
Oedipus Rex
Thebes is hit by various plagues; divine wrath
The Plague by Albert Camus
Interested in philosophical possibilities

The isolation and unvertainty caused by the disease, the abdsurdly

random nature of infection, the despair felt by a doctor in the face of an
unstoppable epidemic, the desire to act even while recognizing the
pointlessness of action.
This is how writers use illness when it is less central.
Daisy Miller by Henry James
Kills Daisy off. He gives her Roman fever AKA malaria.
Malaria works great metaphorically: Bad air --- malicious gossip--- and
hostile public opinion --- throughout her stay in Rome. Formerly thought it
was contracted from hot air. Romans make her frantic to join the elite.
Destroyed from the clash between her own vitality and the rotten
atmostphere of this oldest of Old World cities.
A Dolls House by Henrik Gibson
Doctor is dying of tuberculosis of the spine. He says he contracted it
from his fathers dissolute living.
AIDS
Not picturesque; but has the same wasting quality as TB
Mysterious YES
Symbolic? Mother lode of symbol and metaphor; Tendency to lie
dorman for so long, then make an appearance, its ability because of that
dorman period to turn every victim into an inknowing carrier, its cirtual one
hundred percent motality rates over the first decade or so of its history, all
these things offer strong symbolic possibilities. Hit the gay community hard.
Scource in artistic circles. Because of its demographic- political angle.
The Hours by Michael Cunningham
Personal calamity unique in its time but has the universality of great
suffering and despair and courage, of a victim seeking to wrest control over
his own life away from the condition that has controlled him. Its a condition,
Cunningham reminds us, that differs only in the specific details, not in the
humanity those details entail.
Dont read with your eyes

The dead by James Joyce

Celery in a vase; roasted Goose; American apples and oranges on the
sideboard. Pretty remarkable unless you live in preelectrified Dublin.
Celery is from America and therefore quite expensive; Success of this
event needs to be seen from their eyes.
Sonnys Blues by James Baldwin
Deals with two brothers. One who goes to jail because of heroin
possession and he is also a jazz musician. His brother doesnt understand
what drives him to jazz and music and substance abuse. This drives them
apart. At the end they listen to jazz and the good brother hears some of the
suffering as well as the joy that lie behind it. So he sends an offering, a
scotch and milk, that indicates understanding and brotherhood. Cup that
shimmers like the very cup of trembling --- biblical. Its about redemption
NOT recovery.
Is he serious? And other Ironies
Irony trumps everything
Authors that use Irony
John Bunyan
Mark Twain
Herman Melville
Robert Frost
Jack Kerouac
Tom Robbins
Easy Rider
Thelma and Louise

Waiting for Godot

Two tramps: Vladimir and Estragon that wait for a Godot by a Road.
They never take the road.
Theyre in a desolate country beside an avenue of escape they fail to
take.
A Farewell to Arms by Hemingway
Hero, Frederic Heny experienced the death of his lover (Catherine
Barkley), and her baby during child birth. Distraught he goes out for a walk
in the rain.
There is nothing rejuvenating about the rain here; irony
At the end, mother and child, rather than existing for each other, as
experience has taught us to expect, slay each other, the infant strangled by
the umbilical cord, the mother dead after a series of hemorrhages.
Even the Title A Farewell to Arms is ironic
The signifier, while being fairly stable itself, doesnt have to be
used in the planned way. Its meaning can be deflected from the
expected meaning.
The Arrow of Heaven by G.K. Chesterton
The victim is in a high tower with higher windows, so there is no way
for a straight shot except from heaven, which presents us with an insoluble
problem: no one could have shot him with a straight arrow except for God.
Father Brown, Chestertons little hero/detective/priest figures out that
the murderer mustve been with him in the room and used the arrow to stab
him = deflection
Irony chiefly involves a deflection from expectation.
The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

[your] hair has gone quite gold from grief

Ancient Greek Myth
Eiron subservient weak
Alazon - insults a pompus arrogane, clueles figure called the- Alazon
A Passauge to India by E.M. Foster
Howards End by E.M. Foster
Leonard Bast tries to better himself by reading approved books and
attending lectures/concerts.
He meets people of the higher classes: Schlegel sisters and Wilcox family
Ironically the events that he thinks are going to improve his life/make him
hapier do the opposite:
1)Wilcox convinces him to get a more secure job. Leaving his banking
position, he joins a company in which his position gets eliminated while his
old company prospers.
2) In his despair, he spent a night with Helen that has left her pregnant
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Septimus Warren Smith, her damaged war veteran, commits suicide because
his enemies are coming to get him. Enemies=doctors
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Alex = Christ figure
Hes a rapist, murderer. But he has followers, is succeeded by one of them
whose name is Pete. And at the very end falls off of a cliff (temptation that
Christ resisted) died, and revivified.
And the ending conveys a profound, religious message. Argument: Why is
there evil if the world was created by an almighty benevolent being? Without
evil, there cannot be good. Moreover the possibility to choose freely is
important because compelled faith is no faith at all. At the very end Alex
gets to choose goodness after all the evil-doings he is committed.
In the very end Alex is purged of his free will to choose, but he still wants to
choose evil. Society committed a far worse crime against him by taking away
his free will, which for Burgess is the hallmark of the human being.
Because of the multivocal nature of irony, we hear those multiple
voices simultaneaously, readers who are inclined toward univocal
utterances simply may not register that multiplicity. (for example
The Satanic Verses by Rushdies did not register with some Muslim
clerics because of the nature of its subject.)