For those passionate English students
A Chapter by Chapter Summary of My Favorite Book
THE BOOK IN 3 SENTENCES:
Every literary work, no matter how fresh, is a product of intertexuality, meaning it’s in response to the body of literature that precedes it. Writers make use of archetypes, patterns or mythic originals on which those patterns are based, to add depth to their writing. Conventional literary signifiers with widely understood meanings and associations (a quest, a shared meal, monsters, rain, snow, violence, flight, sex, relocation, season, physical deformities, illness, etc.,) are subverted to create a foundational irony that accounts for the richness in all great literature.
CHAPTER SUMMARIES:
A journey in a book might be a quest archetype which consists of a quester, a place to go, a stated reason to go there, challenges and trials, and the real reason (pursuit of self-knowledge)
Whenever characters dine together, they are partaking in a shared experience, the implications of which are future amity, consummation of sexual desire, the characters’ desire to resolve icy distance between each other
Ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and other monsters are stand ins and symbols for various issues of common reality.
Writers often repurpose material from the western canon to drive their own stories. It’s important to look for patterns and draw connections to the original body of work, to find the archetype. This cribbing or modeling gives work shape and depth.
Writers ubiquitously draw from Shakespeare’s work and engage in a dialogue with it, often adding their own slant to the conventional play/story/character.
Writers infuse their writing with references to the bible to show that human triumphs and tribulations are unchanging. This move makes their story timeless archetypal narratives.
Writers make use of details or patterns from fairy tales, play with readers’ deeply ingrained knowledge of childhood stories, to bring out a theme, lend irony to a statement, and add depth and texture to their story.
A dysfunctional family or personal disintegration of a character usually has a Greek or Roman model. Greek mythology is another body of work that writers pull from so that their work can share in the power of myth.
Rain conveys cleansing and rebirth or is a vehicle for ironizing. Rainbows show a divine pact between earth and heaven. Snow and rain can be democratizing. Fog shows confusion, moral and ethical (miasma).
Those the hero is closest to usually suffer misfortune to prompt hero to grow, mature, and alter. This is because hero either vicariously learns or they learn their lesson through causing an accident or going too far. In literature, all characters are not created equal.
Violence in literature can be symbolic, thematic, biblical, Shakespearean, romantic, allegorical as it is personal and intimate.
Symbolic objects, images, and events house large range of possible significance that will differ depending on the reader’s individual history.
Most works engage with the world and its social realities in many ways that can be called political by touching on power structures relations among classes, issues of justice and rights, interactions between the sexes, and among racial and ethnic constituencies
Given how influenced our culture is by dominance religious systems, values and principles of religious creed will inform literary work. Consequently, literary Christ figures may emerge to push for the values of Christianity.
Flight of any kind is conventionally tied to the idea of freedom, which can manifest itself in return home, largeness of love and spirit, a refusal to conform to societal roles. Our associations between wings and freedom open up possibilities for irony through subversion.
Sex in literature and film of pre-21st century is depicted in abstract which can often be more intense and interesting than literal depictions because of the multilayeredness.
Sex in literature often means more than just the physical act, it can be pleasure, sacrifice, submission, rebellion, resignation, supplication, domination, and enlightenment
When the character is submerged in water and resurfaces, they are undergoing a symbolic baptism and a form of rebirth. difference from rain is that rain is not deliberate and therefore can be a cleansing but is not reformative.
Geography in literature can enhance or reveal the writer’s psyche, a theme, symbol, e used as a plot device, define or develop a character, act as a type of character. When used as a plot device it can get characters to sexually, psychologically, or philosophically open up. When writers send their characters South where there’s a warmer clime, it’s so that they can run amok.
Different seasons are used to convey different stages in life, moods, and human experiences.
Intertexuality is the inevitability of work connecting to other work that has preceded it. Archetype is a pattern or mythical original on which pattern is based.
In the literature of the past, scars and physical deformities were equated to moral shortcomings or divine displeasure. In today’s literature, such “imperfections” is a means of differentiation and usually signifies some other psychological or thematic point.
When literal blindness, sight, darkness, and light are introduced into a story, figurative seeing and blindness are most likely at work too.
Heart disease is usually a social metaphor regarding a character’s bad love, loneliness, cruelty, pederasty, disloyalty, cowardice, lack of determination or on a larger scale something amiss at the heart of the situation.
Importance of assuming a reading perspective that allows for sympathy with the historical moments of the story, accepting the social, historical, cultural, and personal backdrop of the work.
When private symbols (as opposed to stock symbols whose meanings can be generalized) are used in writing look to the immediate context and then try to use your personal past reading experience.
Irony, a deflection of expectation, occurs when a signifier’s cultural or literary associations are deliberately upended by the signified (what the signifier stands for). Changes and variations of the well known trope or convention play against the reader’s literary memory to create reverberations.
According to Mr. Foster, Mansfield’s the Garden Party is an archetype of the Greek myth with Persephone’s kidnapping and eventual return to the underworld. Also, archetypal of Eve’s consummation of the forbidden fruit and awakening to sex and mortality.
REFLECTION
Contrary to what the title might have you think, this book was an enjoyable and casual weekend read. Foster writes in the manner in which a jovial and chatty uncle or grandpa with extensive experience in academia would’ve talked to you over a weekend brunch in. The book contains a boatload of different frameworks of literary analysis that I found myself applying to my reading (and even movie watching) from thereon out. It transformed the way I analyze literature and film. Highly recommend to anyone passionate about literature.
*Essay recommendation: The Death of the Author by Roland Berthes.
