Prompt #4 Response: How to Read Literature Like a Professor

This timeless quote originated in the book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible.  King Solomon, son of David, is estimated to have been one of the wealthiest people in the history of mankind.  His sheer power and prosperity led him to chase after materialistic and worldly desires.  In his pursuit for a life fulfilled with everything a man could ask for, Solomon finds himself equally as empty: an insatiable desire to find meaning in life simply could not be fulfilled by anything under the sun.  In the midst of the Preacher's desperate search for purpose, he discovered that every worldly thing will eventually rust, spoil, or fade.  One thing, however, remained a constant in Solomon's life: God's presence.  The Lord's steadfast provision for Solomon always came without delay, and for this reason, Ecclesiastes is a book meant to spare everyone the suffering of seeking after meaningless, materialistic vanity, and to offer wisdom by seeking after God's own heart.

I must preface this blog post with this biblical context so we may identify with King Solomon on a realistic, more human level.  The Preacher believes that because no worldly item will ever permanently satisfy us, nothing is ever essentially new to us.  Foster, too, believes that our stories are connected as a part of something greater.  Every piece of writing ever written, every story ever told, contributes to one greater story.  “The powerful play goes on," Walt Whitman once wrote, “and you may contribute a verse.”

In Chapter 20 of How to Read Literature Like a Professor, Foster writes, "Those stories—myth, archetype, religious narrative, the great body of literature—are always with us. Always in us. We can draw upon them, tap into them, add to them whenever we want" (192).  In this passage, Foster alludes to this one big story as an always-accessible reservoir. Initially, I was taken aback by Foster’s bold claim.  I refused to believe that all stories—knee-slapping comedies and heart-wrenching tragedies; dramatic tales from the Bard and melodramatic texts among teenage girls—contribute to the same story.  However, upon a closer analysis, his statement could not be more accurate. The powerful play does indeed go on, and everything we contribute in literature echoes the work of someone else at some point in time. Consequently, contributing a verse to the powerful play provides a new layer of complexity to the one big story.

If we are to understand and agree with Foster's concept, this transforms everything about literature and how we interact with it. To know that everything we read is connected to an infinitude of other stories means there are more archetypes, intertextual references, symbols, and metaphors than we are humanly capable of discovering.  Yes, we read to understand, and yes, we read to explore intellectual paths we never knew existed, but on a greater scale, we read to discover connections.  This is the value we seek to uncover during the reading experience, and there is no better way to accomplish such a goal than to delve right into the immense world of literature.