Blindness: Chapter 22

Blindness in literature shows the significance of the” level of sight” within a piece of work. Ranging from an actual blind character to a character that is unable to see the truth, usually blinded by lack of knowledge or awareness. These characters allow for the reader to understand that there should be emphasize elsewhere due to the introduction of a blind character cause “the author [to] created a minor constellation of difficulties for himself by” having a blind character within his work. In the short story, “Araby” by James Joyce the narrator, a young boy, personifies the ideal blind character by means of beyond the physical blindness. He embodies his blindness by his immaturity and ignorance. Living on a dead-end street the young boy is confined to his limited community. He spends his recreational time striving to find a glimpse of one of his buddy’s sister. He watched the young girl with every opportunity at hand, timing his departure time every morning to cross her path. The narrator is blinded by his immaturity, seeking only romance with the young girl. He guarantees the young girl that he will go to the Araby and bring her a gift back from the Araby, a task that he believes will surely win her love. Waiting till the tardy time of nine O’clock of his uncle’s arrival back home, the young boy quickly gets money and sets off to the Araby only to find disappointment waiting for him. The Araby is dark and much of the stands have already been closed. This symbolizes the narrator’s blindness as a whole. Everything he dreamed and hoped about soon looses their grips in his heart. The dim lighting in the Araby emphasizes the young boy’s lack of ability to see reality. This highlights that he is still immature and hopefully, unable to see the harsh reality of the world just yet.

Geography: Chapter 19

"And we feel that those novels and stories couldn't be set anywhere but where they are, that those characters couldn't say thee things the say if were uprooted and planted in, say, Minnesota or Scotland. They'd say differnt things and preform different acts...So What's geography? Rivers, hills, valley, buttes, steppes, glaciers, swamps, mountains, prairies, chasms seas, islands, people. In poetry and fiction, it may be mostly people."

Geography develops literature. Geography is single handily the most important element in a piece of work. Geography is the combination of the “hills, creeks, deserts, beaches, degrees latitude,” economics, politics and humans that inhabit the area. The location in which a story’s setting takes place defines and develops the characters. For instance a person from Scotland will say different sayings and act certain ways compared to some on from Texas or in the Middle East. Writers understand that readers place stereotypes on a character when they are from a particular location. They use this as leverage in their stories when creating their characters. Geography frequently plays “quite specific plot role in a literary work.” When a character travels to different geography it can be faced with certain restraints common to that location. Such as in A Room with a View the main character Lucy Honeychurch travels to Florence where she must lose her “racially inherited stiffness. Finding her racial freedom stems from the “fiery nature of the Italian City.” Florence allows for this transformation to happen exemplifying how geography can play a precise plot role in a piece of work. Foster implies that writers send characters to different settings “because they are having direct, raw encounters with the subconscious.” Writers employ geography as a simple metaphor for the psyche. He illustrates that when characters are sent south is usually for the digging deep into their subconscious to take place. The geography of a warmer climate and sunshine influences new self expression from characters within a piece of literature. Poetry also has a strong grasp on geography. They are able to employ the beauty of a certain location. However they are also able to apply this to unspecific regions such as desert, never stating which desert in particular but just deserts as an overall theme.

Illness: Chapter 24

Illness is portrayed in literature just as in real life with mysterious and frightening aspects. Illness within a piece of work can have “strong symbolic or metaphorical possibilities.” Prime literary diseases should be picturesque and the origins of the diseases are most commonly unexplained. When there is a stated illness the focus transfers from the mere symptoms of the disease to employing that there is a stronger “element of verisimilitude” and “houses symbolic or metaphorical intentions.” Illness plays a massive part in literature just like it does in reality.

In A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease the narrator’s family has a remarkable family history of heart disease that the title fully announces. However the family also has a significant history of silence. These two negative characteristics define Jonathan’s family as he sees it, as well as being a Jewish family. The whole short story is dedicated to how Jonathan’s family communicates to each other. Silence dominates their conversations and the family never tells each other their true heartfelt feelings to one another. He takes every aspect of their communication and develops it into what it mainly consists of, whispers, silence, extra heated agreements, unique familiar phrases, and so on. Their exchange of chit chat most commonly directs it’s self at the heart disease which purges their good health. With a father who has suffered twenty-two heart attacks it can easily be seen that the heart diseases causes continuous worrying for the other members of the family. The illness stands as a symbol for the lack of connection within their family, they are always at a distance with each other but down deep in their heart they truly love on another thoroughly. Their illness portrays more than heart trouble physically but emotionally too. It lies between the health of a person and the health between a family.

Symbols: Chapter 12

“What the cave symbolizes will be determined to a large extent by how the individual reader engages the texts. Every reader’s experience of every work is unique, largely because each person will emphasize various elements to differing degrees, and those differences will cause certain features of the text to become more or less pronounced. We bring an individual history to our reading, a mix of pervious readings, to be sure, but also a history that includes, but is not limited to, educational attainment, gender race, class, faith, social involvement and philosophical inclination. These factors will inevitably influence what we understand in our reading, and nowhere is this individuality clearer than in the matter of symbolism.”

Symbols are mistaken in literature to represent one solid idea, action, or thing. In Chapter 12, Is That a Symbol?, Foster advises the readers that a symbol can mean a multitude of things not just something in particular. It’s merely a matter of the reader’s pervious reading, philosophical inclination, and educational attainment in addition to other factors that build the foundation for the reader’s perceptive of a symbol. A symbol can’t be reduced to one single statement. It will have “a range of possible meanings and interpretations” that can differ from one prospect reader to another. It is ultimately up for the reader to analyze the literature and seek the symbol’s meaning, understanding that a symbol can mean a various array of things. The reader must not look for the writer to emphasize the various “distinct elements for a giver symbol” but go in search for their own individual understanding of the symbol.

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne is plentiful in symbols. The scarlet letter worn upon Hester’s breast is a precisely the type of symbol Foster is talking about. Throughout the book the letter transforms into different meanings and contains a multitude of ideas and concepts. Starting as a sign of adultery it can also be a symbol of her actions of committing this dreadful act, a sign of public humiliation and a sign of an outcast. The symbol then converts to stand for “able” and a symbol of strength Hester processes. Within the book the symbol has diverse connotations to the different characters ranging from her innocent daughter Pearl to the Native Americans who visit the town. This conveys how the symbol can have different meanings from reader to reader but also demonstrate how a specific symbol can have different meanings to each of the characters within a work of literature.

Violence: Chapter 11

Violence within literature contains substance and meaning beyond that witnessed merely on its outer surface layer. Authors employ a multitude of violent acts throughout literature, but each situation utilizes an array of symbols behind each of these circumstances. In today’s society violence often stems from spontaneous acts, not carefully crafted or analyzed events. However throughout literature, authors will purposefully inject violence into a story, to imply greater meaning. For example, Sethe, a desperate slave who is confined to a plantation with her child that she cannot help escape, kills her beloved youngster to save it from the tortures of slavery. This act of violence is symbolic of the brutal slave trade system and its victims of all forms. It also provides representation of the love Sethe held for her child, willing to take its life and send it to a better place, rather than have it suffer just as she has all of her life. Sethe’s “actions speak for the experience of a race at a certain horrific moment in history,” they do not stand merely as an act of violence.

Specific details throughout a story may appear as an accident within the cover, however “on the outside they’re planned, plotted, and executed” with adequate precision. Authors will carefully plan who survives and who does not within a story to add depth, as well as meaning to a piece. This tactic employed by authors, hooks the reader through suspense, but also engages their deeper mind to survey for greater symbolic meaning within the text. Most often these plotted violent attacks have been created with a multitude of meanings from the author. It is often hard to pinpoint the true connotation associate with a certain happening, but again this allows for reader’s evaluation and opinions to form. The use of violence throughout a story most often encourages deeper thinking and contains more significance than seen simply upon its surface.

Fairytales: Chapter 8

Inscribed into everyone’s brain are the infamous fairy tales in which have acted as the chief entertainment for youth. Ranging from Alice in Wonderland to Little Red Riding Hood we are comfortable with the elements that each of these stories contains, “parallels, analogies, plot structures,[and] references.” Memorized since childhood even the oldest of the elders can recall on these stories in a quick second.

In Gretel in Darkness by Louise Gluck, the poem is narrated by the legendary Gretel. Gluck shows open wounds that consume Gretel’s life after the journey of the famous fairytale of Hansel and Gretel. Gluck exemplifies how Hansel and Gretel’s “happily ever after” did not turn out just the way they plan to. The Poem embarks into Gretel’s mind, where confusion, sorrow, and abandonment are abundant. Starting where the fairytale left off the readers are required to recall on their memory of the fairytale to be able to understand why Gretel is now in misery. Now living in the hut with her father and brother the readers are to presume that she should be content now, ending in her supposed “happily ever after.” However, the poem tells of an other wise misery, causing for a reevaluation of the expected by the reader. Gretel turns for Hansel’s company only to be rejected, “nights I turn to you to hole me but you are not there,” comforted by confusion. The reader is now able to share the confused feelings with Gretel understanding that she saved her brother’s life from the witch, with the pervious knowledge of the original fairy tale. Gluck’s method of relying on the reader’s profound understanding of Hansel and Gretel to create complexity with her rather short poem is brilliant. This poem allows for a new twist to be brought upon Hansel and Gretel and for a new appreciation of the story from the readers.

Sonnet: Chapter 4

Count Down
BY ROBIN MORGAN

Survival is the final offer
that arrives at the eleventh hour
just when pain to the tenth power
would kill you with another ninth degree.

By then, relief strikes you brief as an eighth note;
you wear doom proudly; it's your seventh seal.
But life whispers through your sixth sense
of what might await you in some fifth dimension

where miracle is saved for the fourth quarter.
Tricked, you sigh and rise on the third day.
You know better, but with no second thought,
risk that first step—absurd as first love at first sight—

as if you were back at ground zero, as if it cost
nothing, as if this were not the last laugh.



The sonnet, a classical poem which has been “written in every era since the English Renaissance,” is set apart from all other poems. The uniformed, distinguished, and distinctive geometry of a sonnet allows for swift reorganization. With the capability to be so versatile the sonnet will by no means ever disappear. Thomas Foster stresses in this chapter how a “sonnet is the only poetic form the great majority of readers ever need to know.” Being able to recognize and understand a sonnet is the only category of poetry that someone who has not done any intensive study of poetry will need.

In Count Down, the sonnet’s apparent square shape is easily acknowledged. Consisting of the ordinary fourteen lines and using the typical iambic pentameter provides this sonnet with its square figure even though it does not look like it at first glance. The iambic pentameter is very apparent, especially in the last couplet of the poem, both lines consists of the 10 syllables. Holding the same format as a Shakespearean sonnet, Count Down is divided up by three quatrains, four lines, and an ending couplet one line. However this sonnet differs from regular Shakespearean sonnets holding a different rhyming scheme. Robin Morgan’s sonnet holds a more modern feel with a non existing rhyming scheme contrasting to the standard rhyming scheme of a Shakespearean sonnet, a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, e-f-e-f, g-g. The unique count down in the sonnet gives it extra spunk, going from 11 to zero. This much thought inserted into the poem shows the unique attention, given to each number, that has provided while the sonnet was being constructed. Morgan carefully creates a sense of time running out with the countdown structure. Slowly moving down the number line in each line. She gives the sense of feeling that this is the end of existence for someone.

Textuality: Chapter 5

“This dialogue between old texts and new is always going on at one level or another. Critics speak of this dialogue as intertextuality, the ongoing interaction between poems or stories. This in deepens and enriches the reading experience, bringing multiple layers of meaning to the text, some of which readers may not even consciously notice. The more we become aware of the possibility that out text is speaking to other texts, the more similarities and correspondences we begin to notice, and the more alive the text becomes. We’ll come back to this discussion later, but for now we’ll simply note that newer works are having a dialogue with older ones, and they indicate the presence of this conversation by invoking the older text with anything from oblique references to extensive quotations.”

Throughout Chapter 5, Now Where Have I Seen Her Before?, Thomas Foster illuminates the concept of intertextuality , the realization of the connection that new literature posses with previously existing literature. All Literature is linked. Authors use previous stories or parts of stories within in their own creation. They enact obvious key features from other authors’ work to enhance the quality of their own. This piggy back concept may appear as a form of plagiarism, however these tactics are acceptable because “there’s no such thing as a wholly original work of literature.” The involvement of other works becomes extremely advantageous as it provides new depth and meaning to the piece. The reader is forced to connect prior readings with the section at hand, ultimately providing more substance than the mere plot and surface content. As the author performs this task of including deeper meaning within their literature, it provides a prime environment to develop and mold young mind into better reader, writers, and analyzers. This method of inserting preceding ideas does not distract or mellow the outcome of the piece due to the reality that the final outcome differs. Also recognize that historical events and happenings are applied to many stories in the same manner as fictional ideas and this is acceptable because history is virtually a story as well. In the chapter, the author discusses the novel, Going After Cacciato. This novel inserts the historical reference of Sacagawea and her guiding ability through a young Vietnamese women trying to help the main character find a safe secret passage through hostile territory to escape the war. Although Sacagawea was an actual historical figure, he allusion to her lifestyle through the young Vietnamese women serves as an accurate depiction of the use of literature piggy backing off of previous literature or stories.

Vampires: Chapter 3

“In those works that continue to haunt us, however, the figure of the cannibal, the vampire, the succubus, the spook announces itself again and again where someone grows in strength by weakening someone else.

That’s what this figure really comes down to, whether in Elizabethan, Victorian, or more modern incarnations; exploitations in its many forms. Using other people to get what we want. Denying someone else’s right to live in fact of our overwhelming demands. Placing our desires, particularly our uglier ones, above needs of another. That’s pretty much what the vampire does, after all.”

In Chapter 3, Nice to Eat You: Acts of Vampires, Thomas Foster talks about how the appearances of a vampires, cannibals, and succubus have occurred again and again through the decades of writing. They are a tool for the writer to use making them able to write of taboo subjects and issues not allowed to be openly talked about during that time era. These “creepy” beings make for an open door for these subjects to be written without the restrains of the time era.

Vampires have frequently been used as symbol of “lust, seduction, temptation, danger among other ills.” Thomas describes the cycle of a vampire being one of an older man, the vampire, looking to corrupt a young woman, taking away her energy and virtue, using everything that is fresh in her then moving onto a new victim. These creatures stand for selfishness, destroying women for their own virtue. They are putting their needs above all others people needs, using what they need to survive. The reader can easily recognize them as a symbol for “of our more common reality” and associating them while reading, making them a useful tool in writing.

These dark creatures have become well known figures throughout. Dracula is the ultimate vampire, famous to all generations. Dracula stood as a symbol of sex, lust, evil and selfishness as he tried gain the soul, spirit, and companionship of NAME in the afterlife. Marley, the ghost from A Christmas Carol, a very well-known ghost, is recognizable in the many different creations of A Christmas Carol. Marley serves as a “walking, clanking, moaning lesson in ethics” for the main character Scrooge. Marley is used throughout the story to teach a lesson, standing as a symbol of good morals and positive character more than a symbol of the “unspeakable.”

Communion: Chapter 2

Throughout the short story Cathedral, The author implements some of tactics discussed in Chapter 2 of How to Read Literature Like a Professor. The chapter focuses on the value and symbolic meaning of communion when displayed in a story. Not tradition communion that transpires within the walls of a church as a religious ceremony, but communion in the sense of people simply gathering to consume food and connect socials. The act of communion can layout how people feel about each other in a story and even foreshadow upcoming events within a story. Ultimately, people will not gather around a table and guzzle food with those they do not like, appreciate, or admire. The feasting around a table stands as a symbol of positive social interaction, as well as friendship. There are times in a story that people congregate upon a mea with their enemy, in due course trying to demise their company at the table, but again the table acts as a symbol of these people’s relationship.
The short story Cathedral applies these same ideas as the main character is forced to overcome his dislike of disabled, indifferent, or other people he feels inferior to himself, when his wife allows a longtime blind friend to come stay with them after the blind man’s lost his wife. As the husband confronts blind man, he is initially filled with reservation and rejection for the disabled man. Although after simply scarfing down a large meal, with no communication, the husband begins to recognize Robert’s actions. He admires Robert “as he used his fork and knife on the meat,” just as capable as any other person. The observation of this normal performance in this ordinary task creates new found respect in the husband for Robert. Ultimately, the husband overcame his divergence with the disabled man and became close friends with him, even partaking in evening ritual together.

Chapter 1: Quest

In This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona, Victor ventures out to Phoenix, Arizona to make arrangements due to the death of his distant father. He is a quester sent off on a quest without the awareness of even being sent on one. Setting off to seek his father cremated remains, savings account and pickup truck Victor is faced with challenges before even leaving the Indian reserve. Victor being broke must find money for his trip to Phoenix to began, however the council will only give him a 100 dollars not nearly enough for a plan ticket. This is where his old friend Thomas Builds-the-Fire plays a vital role of assisting Victor on his quest. Thomas offers money for the plane ride to Phoenix but only if he can join Victor.
Thomas Builds-the-Fire not only provides Victor with the extra money needed to complete the trip but pivotal role of helping Victor understand the hole that is missing from his life with his father’s absents. Thomas tells a story of walking all the way to Spokane to follow a dream. Victor’s Father takes him back to the reserve worried about his safety; he promises he won’t tell anyone in return for Thomas to look out for Victor. Victor sees his father in a different light through Thomas’ story changing his views of his father. This is an example of how a quest being a place to go transforms to the real reason for a quest, self-knowledge. The real reason for the quest was to gather things up of his father’s from Phoenix but then is change to find forgiveness for a father who left him and learning about a caring side he never saw in his father.
Victor gains insight about his dad from his trip, finding that even though he left him that he still cared about him and the significants of “taking care of each other.” Victor being the quester was given a place to go, Phoenix, sent to take care of arrangements due to his father’s death. Money was a challenge in his quest but the realization of a fathers care was the real reason for the quest.