Review: How To Read Like a Professor

And some reflections on “public-facing humanities”

There’s been a lot of chatter this past week on Substack about how literary study seems to be in the process of passing from the university English department to the “public” and “the people,” by which we all seem to mean “the Internet,” or more specifically the Substack-podcast-social media industry. Some people are excited for this change; others see it as a collapse. Regardless of one’s own feelings about this, it certainly looks as if it is happening, and so it’s worth thinking carefully about how this is going to change literary criticism.¹ What does a successful piece of literary criticism oriented toward a large audience of non-English-majors actually look like?²

One place to look might be at what is fairly clearly the most popular³ book of literary criticism published in the last thirty years: Thomas C. Foster’s How the Read Literature Like a Professor (first published in 2004, and revised in 2014). This is one of those steady-selling nonfiction titles—the sort of thing that you can find at every Barnes and Noble, that has been in the top 10 of the “literary criticism” category on Amazon for as long as I can remember. I don’t have access to sales information, but this book seems like an obvious pick for the most numerically successful work of popular literary criticism, perhaps in the English language.

So, I thought, it might be a good idea to read the thing and try to see what makes it so successful. If literary criticism is going to be produced “for the people,” perhaps we should get a clear idea of what that sort of criticism looks like. So I read Foster’s book, and I have a few thoughts.

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First, Foster addresses the reader’s skepticism. Foster is whatever the opposite of “esoteric” is. The book is written in avuncular, jokey but tame, regular-guy prose—the sort of lightly comical 2000s-era super-readable nonfiction style that you might see in a book by A.J. Jacobs or something. It’s almost aggressively unpretentious—Foster carefully and playfully suggests that he’s far from a genius (and, in fact, has failed a few classes from time to time), that he might spend his spare time baking bread or fixing his car, and so on. Foster seems to have written this book with a keen understanding that English classes intimidate, bewilder, and alienate many people. By casting himself as a regular ol’ guy, no big deal, just a fella who loves books, he’s extending an olive branch to those readers who may still harbor deep resentments about their pretentious high school or university English teachers. (And, from having read around on Substack, I can conclude that there are many of these.)

The lesson that I think aspiring pop-lit-critics can gather from this is that we should be writing with an awareness of that deep resentment. You may not choose to go the aw-shucks route, as Foster does (and as I think I do, at times). But in any case, it’s useful to remember that many—maybe most—people didn’t like English class. Maybe they even feel like it ruined literature or poetry for them. This can feel strange if you, like me, and like many literary people, found English class a kind of oasis.

Foster also pretty relentlessly emphasizes pleasure to answer the question, “why bother trying to do all of this interpretation?” Again and again, Foster answers: because this will deepen your pleasure. You’ll have more fun. Again, I don’t think fun is the only right answer. You might choose to emphasize the therapeutic or character-building aspects of literary interpretation, among plenty of other things. But, if Foster is any indication, the question needs to be answered. (I have two minds about this. I wonder if all of the hand-wringing about what value literature offers, or why literary study is worthwhile, is actually productive, or if any of the arguments are actually persuasive to someone. Part of me thinks, “just do the criticism, and make it interesting enough to compel readers, and don’t worry about trying to justify it constantly.” Then again, I have never written a New York Times bestselling work of literary criticism. So I take my own impulses with a grain of salt, sometimes, too.)

The second thing I noticed about this book is that it does not deliver on its promise. I don’t know any professors who read literature the way that Foster does: he’s really a myth-and-symbol critic at heart, and that school of criticism has been deeply uncool, within the ivied walls, for a long time. Like, nobody’s really publishing much myth-and-symbol stuff.

Basically, what Foster does is identify and describe a bunch of different mythic and symbolic patterns that occur across a wide range of literary texts: rain, for example, or roads, or meals. When authors put their characters in the rain, Foster argues, they’re not just putting them in the rain, but are associating them implicitly with every other piece of literature that has placed characters in the rain. As more and more works of literature include rain, a set of meanings and implications and resonances accrete around “rain,” and literary artists use these implications and resonances to make their writing more powerful and entertaining.

This isn’t a bad way, I think, to introduce the practice of literary interpretation, but it’s not what professors do. Foster doesn’t mention some of the techniques they actually use—for example, he never uses the phrase “close reading” or tries to explain how to do it. He performs close readings a few times, but only in glances. His commentary on ideological critique is similarly glancing, as are a few potshots at more fashionable modes of reading, like deconstruction. But plenty more actual English professors do ideological critique or deconstruction than do myth-and-symbol stuff!

What this implies, to me, is: it might be useful to use your institutional authority to signal expertise (the whole book is premised on the idea that readers will want to “read like a professor,” after all), but you don’t want to simply dress up academic ideas, concepts, and ways of looking at the world in “public-facing” language. The very reading techniques that will make a career in academia will repel normal readers. For those who want to appeal to a broad audience, if a thing seems important and fashionable and smart within academia, one must probably abandon that thing. The two ecosystems of readers—those within and those without academia—are just profoundly different in their values and commitments. Doing public humanities work, therefore, shouldn’t just be exporting academic ideas into the public, but should entail actually coming up with new ideas and perspectives about how to interpret and think about literature.

The third thing I noticed about this book is Foster’s way of answering a fundamental problem I have with public-facing literary criticism: how do you expound on the meaning of a book when most people haven’t read that book? How can I talk about the meaning of, say, Uncle Tom’s Cabin when most Americans living today haven’t read that book?

Foster’s answer to this question is simple: summarize. The book uses tons of examples without really worrying about whether the reader has read the book. Foster has his favorite authors—D.H. Lawrence and Angela Carter, most prominently—and I haven’t read much of what he analyzes. This means that he spends a good deal of time in summary mode, which can, I’ll be honest, get dull, especially if you sit down and gulp down the whole book in three sittings, as I did.

There’s a double-edged sword here. On the one hand, I think Foster makes his points pretty well, and I think most people could understand this book fairly easily. On the other hand, he misses out on one of the coolest feelings that reading literary criticism can do, namely transforming a reader’s experience of a book. What I love about reading literary criticism is when I realize that a book is better, more beautiful and strange, than I had initially given it credit for. But I can’t have my opinion about a book transformed unless I have one in the first place!

It occurs to me, here, that in dismantling the canon—in largely doing away with the idea that there is a single set of books that everyone ought to read—English professors have had a hand in their own undoing. If there is no unified set of books that everyone has read, there is no subject matter for public-facing criticism that will automatically make sense to most readers. Public-facing literary critics will either have to summarize like mad, or will have to appeal only to readers who haven’t read what they’re describing, thereby limiting their audiences.

There’s one last strategy that Foster uses to attack this problem: he reprints Katherine Mansfield’s short story masterpiece, “The Garden Party.” It should go without saying—sorry, Dr. Foster—that reading this story was the most enjoyable part of the book, because this story is just so good. But this is a good idea: reprint the story, then print your interpretation afterward. It’s the sort of thing that George Saunders does in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, which I thought was an excellent piece of public-facing lit-crit, but which didn’t sell as many copies, I think, as Foster’s book did. I could easily imagine that a well-performed reading of a public domain short story, followed by a conversation about that story between two skilled readers, would make a great podcast. (Anyone want to co-host?)

To be honest, I wasn’t super thrilled or compelled by Foster’s reading of “The Garden Party.” It didn’t make me appreciate the story more deeply, I think. It was kinda neato, I guess, in that it identified some mythic parallels between Mansfield’s story and the legend of Persephone. But I found myself not really caring! The story was moving to me because of the fullness of its sense of life, and that aspect of the story doesn’t really get enhanced by imagining that Mansfield partially structured the story on a myth. Ending the book on this note sort of left me with a question: in this case, was the criticism and interpretation something that actually increased my understanding and enjoyment? Or would I have had a better time if it were just me and Mansfield? That is, after all, the ultimate test that literary criticism must pass.

(I picked up a Mansfield collection, and I’ll find out!)

1. For now, let’s leave aside the question of whether it is actually possible for an independent person to support themselves, much less a family, by writing literary criticism without being supported by a university, foundation, etc. It looks to me as if the conclusive answer is “no.” Is there a single Substacker or podcaster whose primary output is literary criticism and who makes, say, at least $35,000 a year from that cultural criticism? Maybe 2-3? But I wouldn’t be surprised if the answer is 0! I saw a post recently that Naomi Kanakia, who writes great stuff at a very fast clip, only makes $10k - $20k a year from her writing. Without institutions, we’re all either hobbyists or one of the 6 critics with a staff job in the U.S. There’s great fun and utility in being a hobbyist, but it’s really very hard to produce a work that is the product of sustained and dedicated intellectual effort as a hobby.

2. We might note one obvious thing: literary and cultural criticism does well commercially when it appeals to conservatives. Think of a bestselling work that spends a long time talking about how to interpret literary texts—Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book, Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personæ, Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon, Jordan Peterson’s We Who Wrestle with God… you get the idea. Even if they aren’t all conservative, necessarily, they all appeal, I would say, to conservative or at least anti-left readers for a variety of reasons.

3. It must be stated here that a large number of the sales of Foster’s book came because… it was assigned! The book was a common assignment for AP English classes. If you ever want to hate teenagers, read the large number of one-star reviews of the book on Google. So who knows how much this book even is successful because it was geared toward the general public; perhaps it was mostly successful because it appealed to high school English teachers.