How to Read Literature Like a Professor Read Online Free PDF Page B

in Love (1920), in which Gudrun Brangwen and Gerald Crich, although ostensibly in love with one another, each realize that only one of them can survive and so engage in mutually destructive behavior. Iris Murdoch—pick a novel, any novel. Not for nothing did she call one of her books A Severed Head (1961), although The Unicorn (1963) would work splendidly here, with its wealth of phony gothic creepiness. There are works, of course, where the ghost or vampire is merely a gothic cheap thrill without any particular thematic or symbolic significance, but such works tend to be short-term commodities without much staying power in readers’ minds or the public arena. We’re haunted only while we’re reading. In those works that continue to haunt us, however, the figure of the cannibal, the vampire, the succubus, the spook announces itself again and again where someone grows in strength by weakening someone else.
    That’s what this figure really comes down to, whether in Elizabethan, Victorian, or more modern incarnations: exploitation in its many forms. Using other people to get what we want. Denying someone else’s right to live in the face of our overwhelming demands. Placing our desires, particularly our uglier ones, above the needs of another. That’s pretty much what the vampire does, after all. He wakes up in the morning—actually the evening, now that I think about it—and says something like, “In order to remain undead, I must steal the life force of someone whose fate matters less to me than my own.” I’ve always supposed that Wall Street traders utter essentially the same sentence. My guess is that as long as people act toward their fellows in exploitative and selfish ways, the vampire will be with us.

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If It’s Square, It’s a Sonnet
    E VERY FEW CLASS PERIODS, I’ll begin discussion by asking the class what form the poem under consideration employs. That first time, the correct answer will be “sonnet.” The next time it happens, “sonnet.” Care to guess about the third? Very astute. Basically, I figure the sonnet is the only poetic form the great majority of readers ever needs to know. First, most readers will go through life without ever doing any intensive study of poetry, while many poetic forms require in-depth analysis to be recognized. Moreover, there just aren’t that many villanelles in the world for us to see them very often. The sonnet, on the other hand, is blessedly common, has been written in every era since the English Renaissance, and remains very popular with poets and readers today. Best of all, it has a look. Other formsrequire mnemonic assistance. It doesn’t take any great sagacity to know that Ezra Pound’s “Sestina: Altaforte” (1909) is actually a sestina, but I for one am very grateful that he labels it as to form. We would notice that something funny is going on, that in fact he uses the same six words to end the lines in every stanza, but who has a name for that? We can learn to put the name “villanelle” to Theodore Roethke’s “The Waking”(1953), but most readers don’t carry that information around with them. Or need to, really. Is the quality of your life harmed by not recognizing on sight something like the rondeau? That’s what I thought. And so, unless your ambitions have been spurred by this discussion, I’ll stick to the sonnet, for one single reason: no other poem is so versatile, so ubiquitous, so various, so agreeably short as the sonnet.
    After I tell the students that first time that it’s a sonnet, half of them groan in belated recognition (often they know but think I have a hidden agenda or a trick up my sleeve) and the others ask me how I knew that so fast. I tell them two things. First, that I read the poem before class (useful for someone in my position, or theirs, come to think of it), and second, that I counted the lines when I noticed the geometry of the poem. Which is? they ask. Well, I respond, trying to milk the moment for all its