Preface Introduction Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Interlude: Does He Mean That? Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Interlude: One Story Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Postlude Envoi
All Themes Surface Reading vs. Deeper Reading Symbol and Metaphor Archetype and Pattern Recognition Intertextuality Literature, Life, and Society
All Characters Jesus Christ William Shakespeare Sigmund Freud James Joyce Toni Morrison
All Terms Intertextuality Archetype Canon Conceit Noumenal
All Symbols The One Story The Bible
Instant downloads of all 1391 LitChart PDFs (including How to Read Literature Like a Professor).
Teachers and parents! Struggling with distance learning? Our Teacher Edition on Read Like a Professor can help.
Interlude: Does He Mean That?
Interlude: One Story
Surface Reading vs. Deeper Reading
Symbol and Metaphor
Archetype and Pattern Recognition
Literature, Life, and Society
Noumenal
The One Story
Surface Reading vs. Deeper Reading Theme Analysis
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in How to Read Literature Like a Professor, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Foster explains that he wrote How to Read Literature Like a Professor in order to address a particular problem: the fact that untrained readers tend to read literature in a surface-level way. This kind of reading is akin to the way one "reads" real-life situations, such as taking people at their word when they speak, or assuming there is no symbolic significance to the fact that someone has developed a disease. Foster includes examples of this kind of literal, surface-level interpretation throughout the book as a way of convincing the reader that he understands their resistance to the way professors read literature. Frequently, he begins his explanations of deeper reading techniques by contrasting them with a more superficial interpretation; for example "Sometimes a meal is just a meal… More often than not, though, it's not."
The problem with surface reading is not that it will leave readers unable to understand a work of literature (although this may be true of more complex, modern texts). Rather, it simply means that they will miss key information that makes the text richer, more insightful, and enjoyable to read. Unlike surface-level reading, deep reading is an active, imaginative exercise. It encourages the reader to collaborate with the author in the creation of meaning, and allows for multiple points of view regarding what a text means, some of which may completely contradict one another.
Surface Reading vs. Deeper Reading ThemeTracker
The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Surface Reading vs. Deeper Reading appears in each chapter of How to Read Literature Like a Professor. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
Interlude: Does H...
Get the entire Read Like a Professor LitChart as a printable PDF.
Surface Reading vs. Deeper Reading Quotes in How to Read Literature Like a Professor
Below you will find the important quotes in How to Read Literature Like a Professor related to the theme of Surface Reading vs. Deeper Reading.
Introduction Quotes
The professor, as the slightly more experienced reader, has acquired over the years the use of a certain "language of reading," something to which the students are only beginning to be introduced. What I'm talking about is a grammar of literature, a set of conventions and patterns, codes and rules, that we learn to employ in dealing with a piece of writing.
Page Number and Citation: xxv
Memory. Symbol. Pattern. These are the three items that, more than any other, separate the professorial reader from the rest of the crowd.
Page Number and Citation: xxvii
Because there was so much the Victorians couldn't write about directly, chiefly sex and sexuality, they found ways of transforming those taboo subjects and issues into other forms. The Victorians were masters of sublimation.
Chapter 12 Quotes
We want [a symbol] to mean something, one thing for all of us and for all time. That would be easy, convenient, manageable for us. But that handiness would result in a net loss: the novel would cease to be what it is, a network of meanings and significations that permits a nearly limitless range of possible interpretations.
The more you exercise the symbolic imagination, the better and quicker it works. We tend to give writers all the credit, but reading is also an event of the imagination; our creativity, our inventiveness, encounters those of the writer, and in that meeting we puzzle out what she means, what we understand her to mean, what uses we can put her writing to.
Fiction and poetry and drama are not necessarily playgrounds for the overly literal. Many times I'll point out that a character is Christlike because he does X and Y and you might come back with, "But Christ did A and Z and his X wasn't like that, and besides, this character listens to AC/DC."
Related Characters: Jesus Christ
Related Symbols: The Bible
Literary geography is primarily about humans inhabiting spaces, and at the same time the spaces inhabiting humans.
Interlude: One Story Quotes
We—as readers or writers, tellers or listeners—understand each other, we share knowledge of the structures of our myths, we comprehend the logic of symbols, largely because we have access to the same swirl of story.
Related Symbols: The One Story
Don't read with your eyes. What I really mean is, 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.
The primary meaning of the text is the story it is telling, the surface discussion (landscape description, action, argument, and so on). There comes a point in our literary development when we nearly all lose sight of that fact.
By "reading" here, I am taking a liberal view. You read novels and poems, of course. But you also "read" a play even if you see it in its proper setting, a theater, and not between the covers of a book. Well, then, do you also "read" a movie? I believe so, although some films may reward reading more than others.
What is a sign? It's something that signifies a message. The thing that's doing the signifying, call it the signifier, that's stable. The message, on the other hand, the thing being signified (and we'll call that the signified), that's up for grabs. The signified in other words, while being fairly stable itself, doesn't have to be used in the planned way. Its meaning can be deflected from the expected meaning.
There, just inside the door, stood a wide, shallow tray full of pots of pink lilies. No other kind. Nothing but lilies—canna lilies, big pink flowers, wide open, radiant, almost frighteningly alive on bright crimson stems.
Postlude Quotes
A reader's only obligation, it seems to me, is to the text. We can't interrogate the writer as to intentions, so the only basis of authority must reside in the text itself.