Notes taken from Thomas C. Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor
Intertextuality: The idea that any text is infused with memories, repetitions,
transformations, and echoes of other texts.
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Repurposing materials from older sources to accomplish the author’s own end
(Foster 29).
A glimpse into the creative process—writers can’t create stories in a vacuum (30).
Reconsider characters, situations, and events in the text (31).
Play trivial pursuit with the new text.
Think of one story as a literary model or template for other stories.
Remember: There is only one story, according to Joseph Campbell.
Stories grow out of other stories, and they don’t have to stick to genre (Foster 33).
Delight in the aha! Factor, the feeling of recognizing a familiar component from
earlier experience. The more similarities we begin to notice, the more alive the text
becomes.
“If the story is good and the characters work but you don’t catch allusions,
references, and parallels, then you’ve done nothing worse than read a good story
with memorable characters. If you begin to pick up on some of these other
elements, these parallels and analogies, however, you’ll find your understanding of
the novel deepens and becomes more meaningful, more complex” (Foster 36).
Connect the dots—fill your glass—add to your reading of the story.
When we recognize the interplay between two texts, we become partners with the
new text in creating meaning (46).
Intertextuality thus becomes less a name for a work's relation to particular prior texts than
a designation of its participation in the discursive space of a culture: the relationship
between a text and the various languages or signifying practices of a culture and its
relation to those texts which articulate for it the possibilities or even the expectations of
that culture.
History and morality are written and read within the infrastructure of texts. The
Intertextuality between a new text and an old one might take on the changing world as a
counter to the world of the original text, or the new text might suggest a return to the
values or morality of the original text.
Consider:
A comparison/contrast of the choices different authors or characters make in a work
Who is the intended audience?
What are the consequences of _____? (Causal Analysis)
What is my personal response to _____? (Reflection)