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

Expanding on the maxim of French literary theorist Roland Barthes that the author is dead, Foster shows that readers—rather than writers—are the real heroes of literature. He argues that a reader’s interpretation of a book gives it meaning. Furthermore, no two interpretations of a book are identical, not even when the same person reads it at different times.

Foster uses various metaphors to convey the idea of readers as creators of meaning: He compares readers to the philosopher Heraclitus, who never stepped in the same river twice, to emphasize that every reading makes readers discover something new about a novel. He also likens the process of reading a book to having a dialogue with not just the novel’s author but all other works to which it connects. These prolific metaphors show that Foster considers reading as important as writing. The footing he gives to reading has a twofold purpose: to establish reading as an original, dynamic act, and to inspire his audience to read novels closely and critically.

To show how reading is a creative and dynamic act, Foster examines a common question that students ask: what an author “meant” when they wrote a particular plotline. Foster shows that it does not matter what the author intended through a character, a motif, or an ending because “Elvis has left the building.