Premium Essay

How To Read Literature Like A Professor Character Analysis

Submitted By
Words 474
Pages 2
Aslan represents a Christ figure. In How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster, Foster describes a Christ figure as “sacrificing yourself in some way for others” (129). In the movie, Aslan willingly trades his life for Edmund, one of the Pevensie children who betrays his siblings, to appease the White Witch’s claims that Edmund belongs to her because of his traitorous behavior. Aslan’s self-sacrificing actions are similar to those of Jesus Christ whose death was used to atone for all of mankind’s sins. The parallel of their deaths makes Aslan’s altruistic behavior even more sacrificial because it compares his action to the person whose sacrifice is greatly known by most people. Furthermore, Foster explains that as a Christ figure, he should have disciples. Already known by Narnia as the “King of the Woods” or the “Real King of Narnia,” the mere mention of Aslan brings hope to his followers despite him being away for many years. The Pevensie children, well most of them anyway, get baptised. According to the book, Foster describes baptism as “...taking the new believer completely underwater causes him to die out of his …show more content…
In the book, Foster describes the idea that “the plot needs something to happen in order to move forward, so someone must be sacrificed” (84) and it is very rare for that “someone” to be a protagonist. When Edmund accidentally reveals to the White Witch that Mr.Tumnus let Lucy escape rather than turn her in, the White Witch has Mr.Tumnus arrested. Upon finding out about Mr.Tumnus’s arrest, Lucy believes it is because of her doing, an event, which leads her to convince her siblings to stay in Narnia longer. Additionally, a fox is turned into stone when the White Witch finds out that it has been recruiting for Aslan. This event allows Edmund to see the full extent of the White Witch’s cruelty when it comes to those who try to rebel against

Similar Documents

Free Essay

Stuff

...the assigned reading within the first two weeks of the school year. AP English IV (11th grade students entering AP IV in 2016-2017) Seniors should create a synopsis card for each novel read of literary merit. Your teacher will explain how this will prepare you for the open questions for the AP Literature exam. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C, Foster Complete writing assignments from the chapter sheet that accompanies Foster. See Assignments on the back of this sheet. Access this link for tips on dialectical journal entries: https:www.YouTube.com/watch?v=CBsJTqfB1Ws AP English IV Writing Assignments Directions: Complete assignments for chapters 1-10 as you read Foster’s work. Writing Assignments for How to Read Literature like a Professor By Thomas C. Foster (Adapted from Donna Anglin by Sandra Effinger) Introduction: How’d He Do That? How do memory, symbol, and pattern affect the reading of literature? How does the recognition of patterns make it easier to read complicated literature? Discuss a time when your appreciation of a literary work was enhanced by understanding symbol or pattern. (200 words) Chapter 1 – Every Trip Is a Quest (Except When It’s Not) List the five aspects of the QUEST and then apply them to something you have read (or viewed) in the form used on pages 3-5. Chapter 2 – Nice to Eat with You: Acts of Communion Choose a meal...

Words: 1265 - Pages: 6

Premium Essay

Read Literature Like A Professor Chapter Summary

...One amongst many other sayings, "It doesn’t matter what you what you look like on the outside; it’s what's on the inside that count.” (Unknown) This is true when it comes to finding a significant other, but also when pertaining to literature. How to Read Literature like a Professor by Thomas Foster, is a guide purposefully identifying literary conventions to enable a reader to develop analytical skills. Each chapter highlights essential elements seen in texts within the literature society including references to the Bible, purposeful environment settings, and the symbolic attachment of supernatural creatures. The Bible is a powerful piece of literature connecting to the vast majority of society's morals and beliefs. Foster states how "often those values will not be religious in nature but may show themselves in connection with the individual's role within society."(Fitzgerald 88)Religious references in literary text do not always refer to God but biblical references in a text can strengthen the plot through...

Words: 651 - Pages: 3

Premium Essay

How to Read Literature Like a Professor

...How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster Chapter Reflections Introduction: How’d He Do That? * How do memory, symbol, and pattern affect the reading of literature? How does the recognition of patterns make it easier to read complicated literature? Discuss a time when your appreciation of a literary work was enhanced by understanding symbol or pattern. * When reading literature: memory, symbol, and pattern help you understand the text better. If you don’t comprehend literature, then you won’t know the real meaning behind that passage. But that’s why memory, symbol, and pattern come in to help. I think the recognition of patterns make it easier to read complicated literature because then we can analyze what exactly it is that we are reading. It gets readers to look more in depth of the literature itself. I think memory helps the readers connect emotionally and/or physically to that literature. Also, symbols analyze a deeper thought to something. When I read something, I picture it in my head and I would create a scene in my mind. Then by using memory, symbol, and pattern, I’ll try to sort everything out to make it clearer for my understanding. Chapter 1 – Every Trip is a Quest (Except When It’s Not) * List the five aspects of the QUEST and then apply them to something you have read (or viewed) in the form used on pages 3-5. * The quest has five aspects, which includes: (a) a quester, (b) a place to go, (c) a stated reason to go there, (d)...

Words: 1577 - Pages: 7

Free Essay

Reading

...AP English Literature and Composition 2012 Summer Reading Assignment I. DRAMA Oedipus Rex by Sophocles We are not requiring any particular edition of the play; however, we would highly recommend a version which includes supplemental materials/explanations of Greek drama and Greek mythology. Purchase, read, and annotate the play prior to the first day of class. It would be wise to focus your annotation on instances of dramatic irony, images of vision and blindness, and tension between fate and free will. The following literary analysis assignment will be collected during the second week of school. LITERARY ANALYSIS OF DRAMA In a typed, one-page essay, offer your assessment of Oedipus at the end of the play. Was he foolish? Heroic? Fated? Support with textual evidence as appropriate and follow MLA format. II. READING FOR PLEASURE Read a book—fiction or non-fiction—strictly for pleasure. Strong readers and writers have a wealth of textual experiences and a vast amount of background knowledge from which to draw. The most important aspect of this assignment is that you select a work you will enjoy reading. During the first week of class, you will conduct a book talk over your selected work in which you will “sell” the experience of reading your book to your peers, so pick something good! Some suggestions for selecting your “reading for pleasure” book include, but are not limited to: * Classic works of literature from an era, author, or genre you...

Words: 485 - Pages: 2

Free Essay

Miaws

...A TEACHER’S GUIDE TO THE SIGNET CLASSICS EDITION OF G EORG E B E R N A R D S HAW ’S PYGMALION By LAURA REIS MAYER BUNCOMBE COUNTY SCHOOLS, ASHEVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA S E R I E S E D I T O R S JEANNE M. MCGLINN, Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Asheville and W. GEIGER ELLIS, Ed.D., University of Georgia, Professor Emeritus 2 A Teacher’s Guide to the Signet Classics Edition of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion TABLE OF CONTENTS An Introduction .......................................................................................3 Synopsis of the Play .................................................................................3 Prereading Activities .................................................................................6 During Reading Activities ......................................................................13 After Reading Activities .........................................................................21 About the Author of this Guide .............................................................29 About the Editors of this Guide .............................................................29 Full List of Free Teacher's Guides...........................................................30 Click on a Classic ..................................................................................31 Copyright © 2007 by Penguin Group (USA) For additional teacher’s manuals, catalogs, or descriptive brochures, please email academic@penguin.com or write...

Words: 11837 - Pages: 48

Premium Essay

English

...Devin Murray English 101 Professor Molitoris March 18, 2014 A Breakdown of Two Small But Powerful Poems Robert Frost’s “Fire and Ice” poem and Gwendolyn Brooks’ “We Real Cool” are ten lines or less but are poems that are extremely powerful and influential. Robert Frost talks about death but if the world ended, how would an individual want to die. Would an individual rather die by burning to death or being frozen to death? Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem is about a group of young black men who have no potential or future. All in all these poems have a vivid sense of imagery, an inspirational theme, and an odd rhyme scheme and meter. Although these two poems have two completely different subjects, they make you think and actually begin to questions certain aspects of life. In Brooks’ she sets the scene along with her characters and setting before even starting the poem. She lets know the characters are seven pool players, at the Golden Shovel. The Golden Shovel is a metaphor for these teenagers digging their own grave, when they’re supposed to be having fun, because they’re in their golden years. In lines 2-4 of her poem she talks about how the teenagers dropped out of school, stay out late, and that they commit crimes head on. This is a great example of imagery, because one can easily imagine young African-American kids not having anything to do after they dropped out of school and start to do illegal things. Therefore Brooks’ gave a great name for the setting, the Golden Shovel...

Words: 720 - Pages: 3

Free Essay

About Me

...The process piece I chose to revise was my About Me page. Due to the relatively small length of the piece (two paragraphs), especially in comparison to longer papers like the Familiar Genre Analysis (four pages), doing a momentous amount of revisions is unpractical. However, the changes I did make significantly altered the piece. To start off, I made some corrections to various middle and lower order concerns, like grammar (added “am” before “from” in the first sentence) and transitions (first sentence of second paragraph links the two, creating flow that was previously absent). After that, I focused on these, more important higher order concerns: audience, pathos and genre conventions. Previously, the reference to the audience for my blog was vague and practically missing. By adding the fact that “one of the primary uses of this blog is for my English 1020 class at Wayne State University,” I was able to hone in on my prospective audience: my professor and fellow classmates. Next, I added in more details about myself to help the reader feel better connected to me. By stating where I lived through my life and what country I identity myself as being from, as well as one of my biggest goals in life, I am allowing future readers to know me and my writing, not just the latter. Finally, I attempted to improve my use of genre conventions. About Me pages typically include a reason why the writer started a blog, so I included that. Also, I tried to be more interactive with my readers...

Words: 1477 - Pages: 6

Free Essay

Facebook

...Facebook to Teach Rhetorical Analysis Jane Mathison Fife The attraction of Facebook is a puzzle to many people over the age of thirtyfive, and that includes most college faculty. Yet students confess to spending significant amounts of time on Facebook, sometimes hours a day. If you teach in a computer classroom, you have probably observed students using Facebook when you walk in the room. Literacy practices that fall outside the realm of traditional academic writing, like Facebook, can easily be seen as a threat to print literacy by teachers, especially when they sneak into the classroom uninvited as students check their Facebook profiles instead of participating in class discussions and activities. This common reaction reflects James King and David O’Brien’s (2002: 42) characterization of the dichotomy teachers often perceive between school and nonschool literacy activities (although they are not referring to Facebook specifically): “From teachers’ perspectives, all of these presumably pleasurable experiences with multimedia detract from students’ engagement with their real work. Within the classroom economy technology work is time off task; it is classified as a sort of leisure recreational activity.” This dichotomy can be broken down, though; students’ enthusiasm for and immersion in these nonacademic literacies can be used to complement their learning of critical inquiry and traditional academic concepts like rhetorical analysis. Although they read these texts daily, they are...

Words: 7879 - Pages: 32

Free Essay

Sociology

...Sociology of Literature, Children’s Books, and Social Inequality Amy E. Singer, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Sociology Knox College, USA © 2011 Singer. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract This article discusses the complexity of literary analysis and the implications of using fiction as a source of sociological data. This project infuses literary analysis with sociological imagination. Using a random sample of children’s novels published between 1930 and 1980, this article describes both a methodological approach to the analysis of children’s books and the subsequent development of two analytical categories of novels. The first category captures books whose narratives describe and support unequal social arrangements; the second category captures those whose narratives work instead to identify inequality and disrupt it. Building on Griswold’s methodological approach to literary fiction, this project examines how children’s novels describe, challenge, or even subvert systems of inequality. Through a sociological reading of three sampled texts – Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, A Wrinkle in Time, and Hitty: Her First Hundred Years – readers learn how these analytical categories work and how the sociology of literature might be enriched...

Words: 8238 - Pages: 33

Premium Essay

Literature

...Secondary Classroom Once upon a time, in a school, very much like your own, American History and all its contents were studied alongside tales of triumph, and defeat. In this history class, the students supplemented curriculum delivered through lectures and textbooks, with materials from sources such as diary entries, editorials, and historical fiction. This is an example of how narrative text can coexist with expository information found in content area classrooms in today's high schools. While the need for expository text is vital to the success of a student to understand the content (i.e., Social Studies) curriculum, narrative literature and various other texts are a great way to supplement the learner with information from which they can draw a better understanding of the state standards. Explained below is a definition of narrative literature, advantages and disadvantages of using narrative text in the high school Social Studies classroom, and five possible uses for using narrative texts in the high school classroom. Narrative Literature Narrative literature can be both fiction such as novels, as well as non-fictional works such as memoirs (Burke). Often, narrative literature includes many of the following: a plot, character, problems, and themes. In fictional work, one generally finds a setting, with a beginning, a reaction, and an ending (Roe, Stoodt-Hill, & P. C. Burns, 2004). Narrative literature can, and does exist on its own in a secondary education classroom...

Words: 1279 - Pages: 6

Premium Essay

How To Read Literature Like A Dinner Table

...The main significance of a dinner table explained by the book How to Read Literature Like a Professor is that it brings about unity or fights between characters which allows them to determine their relationship from this. An author would put a dinner table scene in a story if he would like the audience to be able to infer how a relationship would turn out to be. In other words, if the dinner table situation and the talking going on while eating has a negative aura then the relationship is done or finished off with. This symbolism of the dinner table is also shown in the short story “Everyday Use”. The dinner table in the short story was supposed to determine the relationship between the mother and Maggie and the eldest daughter Dee. “‘That’s...

Words: 564 - Pages: 3

Free Essay

The Age of Innocence

...Laboratory but Affettuoso Naturalism in literature, still popular and widely appreciated nowadays, is a crucial part of the evolution of American literature. In this essay, I’ll explain naturalism from my point of view by referring to some information I found and analyze a few clips of The Age of Innocence in depth to seek the naturalistic technique in it. Naturalism, a prominent literary movement in the mid-19th-century France, spread all its way to many countries’ literature circle and exerted profound effect on the development of the later literature. It is a completely different tune from literally realism while it provided warm-bed for the emergence of the later literal category, temporary literature in America. Though it didn’t last for a long time, plus no systematic formula for it was created, its influence and how popular it was with the readers and critics can be easily seen nowadays. As one of the most well-known naturalists, Zola, once said, “Naturalism, in literature…is the return to nature and to man, direct observation, correct anatomy, the acceptance and the depiction of that which is. The task is the same for the scientist as for the writer. Both have to abandon abstractions for realities, ready-made formulas for rigorous analysis. Hence no more abstract characters in our words, no more history of everyone, the web and woof of the daily life…” We could clearly see that naturalists tend to depict the society and people in the most objective way, trying to...

Words: 2253 - Pages: 10

Premium Essay

Reading Interests of Male

...could be formed about how men express emotional behaviors just like women. This research was done using the one topic that segregates men from women that is their choices. When it comes to choosing novels it is assumed in most cases that women prefer thrillers and romantic genre while men prefer more mystery genre but through my research I have come to conclusions with the fact that the novel choices of men are less emotional when compared to women but there are a few cases of exceptions. The purpose of this research paper was to find out whether females still read more emotional centered novels than males using survey techniques. Key Terms: Emotions, Gender, Novels This research was conducted for the purpose of understanding human behaviors and gender stereotypes within those behaviors. Emotions are an important aspect for humans to make judgments and choices (Huebner, Dwyer, & Hauser, 2009) hence my research will be based on the choices we make and whether gender plays a role in it or not. Objectives Primary Objective: * To find out whether there are male students who choose emotional novels as compared to females in Manipal University, Dubai. Also, whether females do not choose to read emotional novels regardless of the general stereotype of their emotional behavior. Secondary Objective: * To find out what genres of novels the students of Manipal University prefer * To find out their favorite novelists * To find out which sex reads the most number of...

Words: 2478 - Pages: 10

Premium Essay

Yolo

...DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND FOREIGN LANGUAGES AND LITERATURE College of Arts and Sciences San Beda College COURSESYLLABUS First Semester, AY2014-2015 San Beda College, a Catholic educational institution, is committed to the Christian formation of the Bedan Community as its service to the Church, the Philippine society, and the world. Vision : San Beda College envisions a community that is Fully Human, Wholly Christian, Truly Filipino, and Globally Competitive. Mission : San Beda College aims to form its members in Faith, Knowledge, and Virtue Core Values : Inculcate in the students the Benedictine core values of Study, Community, and Pursuit of Peace ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________ Course Title Course Code Pre- requisite Credits : : : : World Literature Lit 02 Lit 01 3 Units Vision-Mission Statement : Instructor : Email : Office : Consultation Hours: MWF Venue : Consultation Rm. I. Course Description: Socorro D. De Jesus, Ph.D. Associate Professor 1 socorro_dejesus@hotmail.com General Education Faculty Rm, 2 nd floor, St. Anselm's Building 1 The course will introduce students to the writings of persons from selected countries across the different continents of the world. Students will gain an understanding of literary concepts to be able to interpret, analyze and evaluate various genres. Furthermore, students will have the opportunity...

Words: 1595 - Pages: 7

Premium Essay

Macbeth

...A TEACHER’S GUIDE TO THE SIGNET CLASSIC EDITION OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’S MACBETH LINDA NEAL UNDERWOOD S E R I E S E D I T O R S : W. GEIGER ELLIS, ED.D., ARTHEA J. S. REED, PH.D., UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA, EMERITUS and UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA, RETIRED A Teacher’s Guide to the Signet Classic Edition of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth 2 INTRODUCTION William Shakespeare developed many stories into excellent dramatizations for the Elizabethan stage. Shakespeare knew how to entertain and involve an audience with fast-paced plots, creative imagery, and multi-faceted characters. Macbeth is an action-packed, psychological thriller that has not lost its impact in nearly four hundred years. The politically ambitious character of Macbeth is as timely today as he was to Shakespeare's audience. Mary McCarthy says in her essay about Macbeth, "It is a troubling thought that Macbeth, of all Shakespeare's characters, should seem the most 'modern,' the only one you could transpose into contemporary battle dress or a sport shirt and slacks." (Signet Classic Macbeth) Audiences today quickly become interested in the plot of a blindly ambitious general with a strong-willed wife who must try to cope with the guilt engendered by their murder of an innocent king in order to further their power. The elements of superstition, ghosts, and witchcraft, though more readily a part of everyday life for the Renaissance audience, remain intriguing to modern teenagers. The action-packed...

Words: 8499 - Pages: 34