Prompt Four-One Story

Before reading and mostly questioning Thomas Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor, with each story I read, I concluded that it functioned in one realm, in which the author intended it to be. Once reading Foster’s book, I soon realized that in truth, literature is only one story, with each story drawing parallel to each other. Foster argues that “there is only one story.” At first look, this theory was highly preposterous because how can an authorial intent from similar stories be the exact same? My answer was soon found after I read the bold print on page 27; they do not have to be. By studying social archetypes, the concept of intertextuality in books, novels, and myths is merely one in the same. Under the archetypal lens, Foster’s statement is entirely valid. People who support and believe in the archetypal lens claim that what happens in the world happens in patterns. His theory that all literature falls under the same story, certainly follows a pattern. A personal example with intertextuality in literature comes in recent readings of the past year. In The Iliad, the main character Achilles is entirely dualistic in what he is perceived as, a brutal warrior and what he actually is in relations with his mother, and the death of Patroclus, a softer, more human like personality. In Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho”, his main character, Norman Bates, also maintains a dualistic personality when he is his nicer self when talking and associating with people he likes, and then when he feels the urge to kill someone, he becomes truly psycho. The authorial intent was subconsciously the same, and that is what is fascinating about Foster’s one story theory.