How to Read Novels like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World's Favorite Literary Form

“The novels we read allow us to encounter possible persons, versions of ourselves that we would never see, never permit ourselves to see, never permit ourselves to become, in places we can never go and might not care to, while assuring that we get to return home again.”

Foster zeroes in on the transportive allure of novels. People read a novel so that it can briefly carry them out of their own lives and selves. More importantly, Foster emphasizes the transgressive appeal of a narrative, which allows readers to envision being someone that social and moral conventions may never allow them to be.

“I can’t go as far as Barthes in killing off the author, but I’m with him on the importance of the reader. We are the ones, after all, who exist long after the author (the real, physical being) is in the grave, choosing to read the book, deciding if it still has meaning, deciding what it means for us, feeling sympathy or contempt or amusement for its people and their problems.”

These lines illustrate Foster’s central idea that reading is a creative act, one that gives novels meaning. He draws on Postmodern literary theory to postulate that readers give a text meaning and life.

“Terms are often butter knives where surgical precision is demanded.”

An example of Foster’s witty narrative style, this pithy statement illustrates a paradox: Terms are supposed to provide definition but often end up being vague. Foster applies this statement to how people use the catch-all term “romance” to refer to novels as diverse as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851).