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

This book deals with many individual elements of literature in an effort to teach analytical skills to readers, but the overarching theme that ties them all together is Foster’s assertion that one story encapsulates all of human existence. Foster says as much several times in the book, and he devotes an entire chapter (the second Interlude, following Chapter 20) to this theme. When referring to stories, he writes that “[t]hey all take from and in return give to the same story, ever since Snorgg got back to the cave and told Ongk about the mastodon that got away” (194). He has some difficulty defining the story in specific terms because the story is so nebulous and all-encompassing, finally settling on the description of something akin to all of human existence.

This theme is meant to be reassuring to readers because it means that everything readers take in and process is connected to everything else. This phenomenon is part of what literary scholars refer to as intertextuality and archetypes. Foster explains those terms but also keeps it simple for the average reader, writing that intertextuality encompasses “a pretty loose category, which could include novels, stories, plays, poems, songs, operas, films, television, commercials, and possibly a variety of newer or not-yet-invented electronic media we haven’t even seen” (52).