Reading Like a Professor

I read four chapters of How To Read Literature Like a Professor today. It isn't easy to understand sometimes. Foster uses a lot of words that I'm not familiar with, endless sentences, and a lot of examples from books I've never read. But, I'm doing my best :) In chapter 6, he talks about how often writers use Shakespeare as an example in their works. I thought it was pretty funny when Foster said, "It makes them sound smarter?" when he asked why we turn to Shakespeare as our example when writing literature. It's true, Shakespeare uses sophisticated, profound language that just sounds fancy. In chapter 7, Foster talks about parallels with books he read to the Bible. For example, he compares a young boy from "Araby"(1914) to "The Fall", when Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit. In both stories, he finds a common theme: the loss of innocence. Humanity now bears a sinful nature after Adam and Eve's disobedience and the young boy loses his innocence when he discovers that he likes a girl. This comparison and others he used show me how similar all books really are. I learned something from this book, something that her keeps on mentioning in every chapter: Writers use earlier, familiar works into their own. So true. When you read a book, it often reminds me of another familiar story or fairytale I read. In chapter 8, he talks about how writers often use "kiddie lit" in their stories to incorporate familiarity, while putting their on twist on it to make it original. Ironic, huh? haha. That's smart because what kid isn't familiar with Sleeping Beauty or Alice in Wonderland? In a nutshell, I learned that writers often incorporate one or more of three kinds of myth into their works: biblical, fairy tales, or Shakespearean lit. I I'm forced to look up a lot of words in order to find out what Foster's talking about. So, I  learned some vocab:

1. Hapless- (adj.) unfortunate
2. Obscure- (adj.) dim; gloomy
3. Ubiquitous- (adj.) omnipresent
4. Aspire- (v.) to seek to attain or accomplish a particular goal
5. Confer-(v.) to grant

Bye!