Back when I was teaching high school English, I came across a book that I enjoyed using with my more advanced students. The title is How to Read Novels Like a Professor.<\/i>\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
I leaned most heavily on author Thomas Foster’s first chapter: “Pickup Lines and Open(ing) Seductions, or Why Novels Have First Pages”.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
Foster maintained that in the opening paragraphs of a book, a great deal of information is revealed or at least hinted at. Stuff that shapes how one reads the rest of the book.<\/p>\n\n\n
I would challenge my students to look at the first few paragraphs of Lord of the Flies <\/i>through Foster’s lens – and by golly, what he said was true!<\/p>\n\n\n
I was reminded of How to Read Novels Like a Professor<\/i>\u00a0when I started diving into Genesis as the birth place of every important theme to span the Bible.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
Below are some quotes from Foster which pertain in his mind to the opening pages of a novel. I think they also fit the book of Genesis by and large:<\/p>\n\n\n
“The beginning of a novel is, variously, a social contract negotiation, an invitation to a dance, a list of rules of the game, and a fairly complex seduction.” (21)<\/p>\n\n\n
\u00a0“It wants to tell us what it thinks is important, so much so that it can’t wait to get started. Perhaps more importantly, it wants us to get involved.” (21-22)<\/p>\n\n\n
“The opening of a novel is an invitation to come inside and play.” (22)\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
“The opening is the first lesson in how to read the novel … narrative style, method of character presentation, revelation of consciousness, dialogue, plot.” (23)<\/p>\n\n\n
We rarely give much thought to the process of READING the Bible in the more academic sense of that word – paying attention to word choice, genre, motifs, themes and such. But we should give it some thought.<\/p>\n\n\n
I suppose this is yet another frontier where the modern church doesn’t go out of its way to truly educate the laity.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Back when I was teaching high school English, I came across a book that I enjoyed using with my more advanced students. The title is How to Read Novels Like a Professor.\u00a0 I leaned most heavily on author Thomas Foster’s first chapter: “Pickup Lines and Open(ing) Seductions, or Why Novels Have First Pages”.\u00a0 Foster maintained […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7920","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7920","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7920"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7920\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7921,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7920\/revisions\/7921"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}