How to Read Literature Like a Professor

by

Thomas C. Foster

Teachers and parents! Our Teacher Edition on Read Like a Professor makes teaching easy.
Themes and Colors
Surface Reading vs. Deeper Reading Theme Icon
Symbol and Metaphor Theme Icon
Archetype and Pattern Recognition Theme Icon
Intertextuality Theme Icon
Literature, Life, and Society Theme Icon
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.
Symbol and Metaphor Theme Icon

Of all the literary devices examined within the book, symbol and metaphor are arguably the most important. Although they have similar meanings, there is an important distinction between them. A symbol is something that, within the context of a literary work, has a different meaning or meanings from its literal or primary one. A metaphor, meanwhile, is a figure of speech in which an idea is conveyed in an indirect, non-literal way. For example, in a particular poem flowers might be a symbol of natural beauty, or female sexuality, or renewal (or all three!). The “flower of youth,” on the other hand, is a Biblical metaphor for virginity.

Foster stresses that objects, images, and even acts and events within literature usually have a symbolic meaning beyond their literal significance within a text. Once readers get accustomed to using the symbolic imagination—in other words, being alert to symbolic meaning—their understanding of literature will be transformed.

The importance of identifying symbol and metaphor underpins almost all the different reading strategies covered in each distinct chapter of the book. The chapters on quests, eating scenes, vampires, the Bible, seasons, and so on all primarily deal with symbolic or metaphorical meaning, even as they examine very different frameworks for how to identify symbols and what these symbols signify. In Chapter 3, for example, Foster explores how certain symbolic objects link Dracula to Twilight, thereby creating a shared plane of meaning within which these two very different texts explore the same themes (such as sexuality).

Foster also addresses symbol specifically in Chapters 12 and 25. In Chapter 12, Foster stresses the benefits to be gained from confidently naming things as symbols, and reminds readers that symbolic meaning is rarely definitive. He argues that the answer to the question “Is that a symbol?” is usually yes, but that what a particular thing symbolizes does not usually have a single right or wrong answer. Chapter 25, meanwhile, highlights the challenge that comes when authors use “private symbols,” meaning symbols whose significance is unique to that author or text. Although these symbols can be difficult to decipher, it is possible to understand their reading by trusting your instincts and relying on your knowledge of other works of literature.

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Symbol and Metaphor 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 Symbol and Metaphor.
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: xxv
Explanation and Analysis:

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: xxvii
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

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.

Page Number: 17
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

There is only one story. Ever. One. It's always been going on and it's everywhere around us and every story you've ever read or heard or watched is part of it.

Related Symbols: The One Story
Page Number: 27
Explanation and Analysis:
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.

Page Number: 106
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Page Number: 114
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 14 Quotes

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
Page Number: 129
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 19 Quotes

Literary geography is primarily about humans inhabiting spaces, and at the same time the spaces inhabiting humans.

Page Number: 173-174
Explanation and Analysis:
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
Page Number: 200
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 25 Quotes

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.

Page Number: 243
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 26 Quotes

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.

Page Number: 255
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 27 Quotes

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.

Page Number: 267
Explanation and Analysis:
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.

Page Number: 296-297
Explanation and Analysis: