How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines

In this chapter, the reader learns about the importance of patterns in literary analysis. The trick to identifying any of the elements lies in finding a pattern, which is based on other stories readers may know. Foster asserts that nothing in literature is original because it’s based on everything in human existence. Much of literature references other literature, but the idea cuts across genres so that “[p]oems can learn from plays, songs from novels” (28). In other words, there is just one big story. As a result, everything readers have previously encountered can be brought to bear on what they are currently reading.

Connections between texts are referred to as intertextuality. Foster notes that students often say they have trouble making connections, and this difficulty stems from not having read enough; nobody has read everything and reading and analyzing gets easier over time as readers read more. Besides, a story has to work at face value first: “If a story is no good, being based on Hamlet won’t save it” (31). To Foster, if the obvious story is all readers get out of a particular work, that’s fine; everything else is proverbial icing on the cake.