How to Read Literature Like a Professor

[alice wellintown]

One of things I love about T.C. Foster is that he is not afraind to
have opinions; this, I contend, is what often distinguishes teachers
from publishers of academic papers who happen to teach or have to
teach but would prefer not to. Is Foster right? No. of course not.
P-Listers can quickly disabuse him of his misguided opinion with a
list of quest novels that make Lot49 look like the work of a slow
learner or an apprentice. But it is not the opinion that matters, but
the choice of Lot49 to support the argument that matters. Give a class
Lot49 and you will have a class engaged even if most are ready to toss
it in the trash. And, it is the Quest, the connections, to Oedipus and
so on that puts this book at the top of the heap as a teaching text.
And, it is cool. Students like it once they get over their modernist
prejudices. And, that they bring these to the class, and they still
do, is what makes the book a wonder...yes... a quest novel to start a
discusssion of quests in literature, and this topic, of course, is a
grand narrative structure that, once studied, makes following the
yellow brick road to the wonderful world of novels, and other books,
other texts, films and so on, a skipping sin-a-long over to the
rainbow's gravity.

On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 9:38 AM, Keith Davis <kbob42 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Well, he already got me on page 3, "When I teach the late-twentieth-century
> novel, I always begin with the greatest quest novel of
> the last century: Thomas Pynchon's 'Crying of Lot 49 (1965)."
>
> --
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