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

Coined by Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, dialogism is the idea that meaning is created not by a single source but by the continuous dialogue between different sources and voices. According to Bakhtin, the “dialogic potential of a novel” (220) implies that novels have the capacity to carry on a conversation in the sense that they constantly call out to each other through references and echoes or allusions. Foster uses Bakhtin’s term to refer to the influence that novels exert on each other across time, contending that even adaptations talk to their predecessors, since they force readers to reassess the original work.

Diction is a narrative element that refers to a writer’s choice of words and sentences. Foster uses diction as a doorway into the literary analysis of a work: Diction reveals the narrator’s tone, their attitude toward other characters, and their relationship with the world around them.

Durational time, or la durée, is a term coined by French philosopher Henri Bergson to describe how humans experience time. While chronological time, or scientific time, passes at an even pace, in real experience some moments seem to last forever, while others zip away. A person’s consciousness can likewise travel between past, present, and future in a few moments, while chronological time is a linear concept. Modern fiction often uses the concept of durational time to expand at length on key moments, while wrapping up decades in a few pages.

Foster draws on Bakhtin and Russian philosopher Julia Kristeva to define intertextuality as the cross-references between texts. He argues that all novels contain echoes of others. As an example, Foster cites the spinoffs of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), such as Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996) by Helen Fielding, which Austen’s work heavily inspired and, like it, features a leading man named Darcy and a variation of Austen’s modern romance plot.

In language, irony is an expression that conveys a meaning opposite to what is being said, often for humorous effect. Situational irony refers to events that are contrary to one’s expectations, while dramatic irony signifies a truth that the novel reveals to readers (or an audience) but not to the characters. Foster shows how novelists use diction, tone, narrative style, and other elements to build irony in their texts, as in the case of Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel Lolita, wherein the evil protagonist Humbert’s beautiful diction ironically highlights his terrible actions.

Believed to have been first identified in Latin American literature by Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier, magical realism refers to the narrative style that introduces magical elements within a realistic setting. Magical realism is distinct from fantasy because it takes place in the real world, and magical elements illustrate or symbolize the absurdity of reality itself. Fantasy, conversely, occurs in an unreal setting in which magic is a cohesive feature. Foster shows how magical realism infuses new life into the novel genre through the works of writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Metafiction is fiction that breaks the fourth wall, drawing attention to the truth that it is a made-up entity. The term was coined by literary theorist William H. Gass in 1970. An example of metafiction is a play in which a character turns to the audience to comment on the action on stage. Foster shows how metafiction, which novelists like John Fowles used, is a “relatively new term for a very old practice” (185), given that Shakespeare and Bocaccio often reminded audiences that their works were fictional constructs.

In literature, Modernism refers to a movement that emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and was defined by radical experiments with language and narrative form, a break from Victorian conventions, and an increased focus on the psyche of the individual. Foster describes Modernism as a watershed movement in which writers like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein changed the novel forever.

Foster distinguishes between narrative point of view and voice, clarifying that the former signifies the perspective from which a story is told (such as a third-person omniscient narrator or a first-person character), while voice refers to the style in which the narrator tells the story. In a well-written work that uses multiple narrators, each has a distinct voice or style, as in Barbarba Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible (1998). The narrative voice can be similar across works for many authors, as in the case of Henry James or D. H. Lawrence.

A genre of fictional prose, the picaresque has an episodic structure in which the plot moves from one adventure to another. The picaresque novel usually unfolds from the first-person point of view of a roguish narrator who often gets into trouble. Filled with loosely connected digressions, the picaresque is an early form of the novel, of which Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605) is the most famous example.

Postcolonial novels address the experiences of a formerly colonized people or country. A robust subgenre of the novel, Postcolonial novels often examine themes such as identity, trauma, and resistance. Foster shows how the form uses individual stories to connect to the collective experiences, as in the case of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), wherein Salim Sinai’s life story becomes the story of India in the immediate decades after its independence from Britain.