2. How to Read Literature Like a Professor By: Thomas C. Foster Chapter 19: Geography Matters

3. What Is Geography? By definition geography is the science that describes the surface of the earth and its features, inhabitants, and phenomena. Examples: rivers, hills, valleys, mountains, islands, and etc.

4. Geography Plays a Major Role in the Plot of a Literary Work Explanation Without a setting a story, poem, or any other piece of literary work has no mood. A setting brings mood, history, and culture to a story. Without a setting where would a story be? When reading the first question asked is usually “where did the story take place.” The quiet isolation of the depression. = mood, history, and culture to a story.

5. Marigolds – What is the setting of the story? a poor section of rural Maryland – What is the social setting/time period of the story? the United States in the midst of the Depression

6. Marigolds – More? Dust everywhere, dirt roads, shanty/ramshackle homes colored dull gray – Describe the weather/season. Late summer

7. Marigolds – Consider the hour it’s just after 4 A.M. What are some characteristics of time just before dawn? – Four o’clock in the morning is a time when few people are awake and it is still mostly dark. It is a time when a person who is awake can easily feel “alone in the world.” The early hour tends to isolate Lizabeth and make the reader wonder what she plans to do. – How does all of this affect our character(s)? “smoldering emotions of that summer swelled.”

8. Add Your Own Example

9. Geography Plays a Major Role in the Plot of a Literary Work “Geography in literature can also be more. It can be revelatory of virtually any element in the work. Theme? Sure. Symbol? No problem. Plot. Without a doubt?” The marigolds in Eugenia Collier’s short story serve and important plot point to advance the story, as a SYMBOL illuminating theme as well as character’s of both Lizbeth and Miss Lottie.

10. Add Your Own Example

11. Foster’s Argument “ Geography can also define or even develop characters”.

12. Geography in Marigolds In “Marigolds” the geography of Miss Lottie’s home plays a major role in Collier’s indirect characterization of this lonely, but hopeful woman. Her home the most wretched of all in the community, and her “queer headed” son on the porch adds to the impression of lowliness. Her house is a reflection of her social standing, which is probably lower than Lizabeth’s. Her marigolds illustrate her desire to find beauty or hope in an otherwise desolate life.

13. Setting Builds Character In Edward Scissorhands The eerie sameness of all the homes in the little town that our protagonist Edward is thrown into contrasts greatly with his uniqueness.

14. Setting Builds Character In Edward Scissorhands As he attempts to integrate himself into the community through his topiary designs, his character becomes more familiar to the audience. He becomes less of an oddball Burton creation and more human.

15. Add Your Own Example

16. Foster’s Argument “Geography can also, frequently does, play quite a specific plot role in a literary work”.

17. Setting and Plot in Catching Fire Much of the action in Catching Fire is set in a beach and forest environment. This island setting functions as a plot device to put the tributes in danger. Moreover as we learn that the land functions like a ticking clock the island becomes a living anthropomorphic character out to destroy.

18. Add Your Own Example

19. Foster’s Argument “ When writers send characters south, its so they can run amok”.

20. Blu the Macaw protagonist in Rio is taken from his cozy home in Minnesota to run amok in Brazil.

21. Extended Examples High The word high is usually associated with purity, greater than, power, etc. So why did the chicken cross the road? Why did Jack and Jill go up the hill? Maybe it was because a higher power instructed them to or maybe the next destination was of better interest than their previous destination. Low The word low is usually associated with darkness, unpleasantness, less than, worst, death, hell, etc. Why in a scary movie must someone be taken down to the cellar to be killed? Why must we always fall down a hill? People are most likely to go down to a cellar to hide evidence or to even hide the killing. At also adds to the suspense of the thriller. We fall down the hill because of gravity, plane and simple.

22. Foster’s Main Point “ So, high or low, near or far, north or south, east or west, the places of poems and fiction really matter. It isn’t just the setting that hoary English class topic. It’s place and space and shape that bring us to ideas and psychology and history and dynamism.”

23. Add Your Own Example

24. How to Read Literature Like a Professor By: Thomas C. Foster If geography matters, Chapter 20: …So Does Season

25. Foster’s Argument Maybe it’s hardwired into us that spring has to do with childhood and youth, summer with adulthood and romance and fulfillment and passion, autumn with decline and middle age and tiredness but also harvest, winter with old age and resentment and death. This pattern is so deeply ingrained in our cultural experience that we don’t even have to stop and think about it. Think about it we should, though, since once we know the pattern is in play, we can start looking at variation and nuance.

26. Foster’s Argument When our writers speak of harvests, we know it can refer not only to agricultural but also to personal harvests, the results of our endeavors, whether over the course of a growing season or a life.

27. Add Your Own Example

28. How to Read Literature Like a Professor By: Thomas C. Foster If geography matters and so does season then Chapter 10: It’s More Than Just Rain or Snow

29. Foster’s Argument “weather is never just weather. It’s never just rain. And that goes for snow, sun, warmth, cold, and probably sleet”

30. Foster’s Argument So what’s special about rain? Ever since we crawled up on the land, the water, it seems to us, has been trying to reclaim us. Periodically floods come and try to drag us back into the water, pulling down our improvements while they’re at it. You know the story of Noah: lots of rain, major flood, ark, cubits, dove, olive branch, rainbow. I think that biblical tale must have been the most comforting of all to ancient humans. The rainbow, by which God told Noah that no matter how angry he got, he would never try to wipe us out completely, must have come as a great relief.

31. A Cinderella Story

34. Click link to see what happens: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61vh38Zg_GI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61vh38Zg_GI

35. So why did it rain?

36. Rain as a plot device The rain forces people together in very uncomfortable circumstances. The misery factor. Rain can be more mysterious, murkier, more isolating than most other weather conditions. Fog is good, too, of course.

37. Rain as Symbol Rain is clean. One of the paradoxes of rain is how clean it is coming down and how much mud it can make when it lands. So if you want a character to be cleansed, symbolically, let him walk through the rain to get somewhere. He can be quite transformed when he gets there. He may also have a cold, but that’s another matter. He can be less angry, less confused, more repentant, whatever you want. The stain that was upon him – figuratively – can be removed. On the other hand, if he falls down, he’ll be covered in mud and therefore more stained than before.

38. On the other hand, rain is also restorative. Rain is the principal element of spring. April showers do in fact bring May flowers. Spring is the season not only of renewal but of hope, of new awakenings.

39. Rainbows Rain mixes with sun to create rainbows. The main function of the image of the rainbow is to symbolize divine promise, peace between heaven and earth. God promised Noah with the rainbow never again to flood the whole earth. No writer in the West can employ a rainbow without being aware of its signifying aspect, its biblical function. Rainbows are sufficiently uncommon and gaudy that they’re pretty hard to miss, and their meaning runs as deep in our culture as anything you care to name. Once you can figure out rainbows, you can do rain and all the rest.

40. Fog It almost always signals some sort of confusion. The fog can be mental and ethical as well as physical. In almost any case I can think of, authors use fog to suggest that people can’t see clearly, that matters under consideration are murky.

41. Snow Snow is clean, stark, severe, warm (as an insulating blanket, paradoxically), inhospitable, inviting, playful, suffocating, filthy (after enough time has elapsed). You can do just about anything you want with snow.

42. Add Your Own Example

43. And Jungian Archetypes

44.  In literature, an archetype is a typical character, an action or a situation that seems to represent such universal patterns of human nature.

45.  flight is freedom.  Images of birds, feathers, and flying, all of which, while not referring to literal flight, evoke thoughts of metaphorical flight, of escape.  Indeed, often in literature the freeing of the spirit is seen in terms of flight.  Similarly, we speak of the soul as taking wing.

46.  The bird is an archetypal symbol of elevation, of the aspiration for rising to the absolute dimension of the sky, a constant and universal metaphor for the soul. In most archaic mythologies, migratory birds are incarnations of the soul of the dead person who departs for the afterworld.

48.  Birds have been considered “messengers of gods and all the manifestations of the spirits’ power assumed their wings.” Birds, wings and flight have all symbolized superior states of being. The connection between birds and the sky made the former be associated with angels and be attributed the angelic or solar language, which is nothing but poetry, a rhythmic language, meant to facilitate immersion into higher mental states. (Luc Benoist)

49.  The bird performs an initiating rite of passage, one of breaking through the space between the two worlds.

50.  The bird or the birds around the tree of life create an opening to the Garden of Eden; the connection with the afterworld allows the bird to foretell death.

51.  On the other hand, “birds symbolize thoughts and intuitions – between people and the soul there has always been a symbolic connection” (Aniela Jaffé).

53.  All characters who are as famous for their shape as for their behavior. Their shapes tell us something, and probably very different somethings, about them or other people in the story.  Deformities project, hide, personal history, overcome Are deformities and scars therefore always significant? Perhaps not. Perhaps sometimes a scar is simply a scar, a short leg or a hunchback merely that. But more often than not physical markings by their very nature call attention to themselves and signify some psychological or thematic point the writer wants to make. After all, it’s easier to introduce characters without imperfections. You give a guy a limp in Chapter 2, he can’t go sprinting after the train in Chapter 24. So if a writer brings up a physical problem or handicap or deficiency, he probably means something by it.

59.  Here’s the problem with symbols: people expect them to mean something. Not just any something, but one something in particular. Exactly. Maximum. It doesn’t work like that.  In general a symbol can’t be reduced to standing for only one thing.  If it can, it’s not symbolism, it’s allegory.

60.  Symbols, though, generally don’t work so neatly.  The marigolds in Collier’s text…

62.  Represents life and knowledge

64.  Derives from light; it is celestial fire and the source of divine goodness.  In Greek myth it is a symbol of the creative powers of Zeus.  In the Old Testament, lightning refers to the spiritual illuminations as a sudden realization of truth cutting across time and space in a sign of God’s judgment or to reveal momentarily the real appearance of God  Navaho myths linked lightning to the Thunderbird, the symbol of salvation and divine gifts.

66.  The more you exercise the symbolic imagination, the better and quicker it works. We tend to give writers all the credit, but reading is also an event of the imagination; our creativity, our inventiveness, encounters that of the writer, and in that meeting we puzzle out what she means, what we understand her to mean, what uses we can put her writing to. Imagination isn’t fantasy. That is to say, we can’t simply invent meaning without the writer, or if we can, we ought not to hold her to it. Rather, a reader’s imagination is the act of one creative intelligence engaging another.  So engage that other creative intelligence. Listen to your instincts. Pay attention to what you feel about the text. It probably means something.