Prompt 2

When Foster claims that, “Writing and telling belong to one big story.”  he means that all of literature build off of itself managing to tell new stories with old ideas and characters.  A rather famous example of this idea is the original Star Wars which takes the classic hero's journey and retells it in a science fiction setting.  Much like J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit it follows all of the steps in a hero’s journey and is entertaining because of it.
By knowing that all literature builds off of itself the reader can begin to recognise characters and story arcs that they have seen previously in their reading.  This allows them to focus less on the surface level story and characters, as they already know what happens, and more on the deeper analysis of the text.  
Personally this principle became clear to me one day when I was driving with a friend.  We were talking and the topic of the new Spiderman movie came up and naturally I asked him if he wars excited to see the new film, and his response was much like Foster’s claim albeit a bit more cynical.  He said, “No I’m not excited, do you know why?  Because I can tell you exactly what's going to happen, he’s going to save the day and get the girl the end.”  When he said this he surprised me because of how right he was, because in most superhero movies similar in tone to Spiderman: Homecoming that's what happens.  This really opened my eyes to exactly how similar so many of these stories are whether they are movies, television, books, plays, or even painting.  Stories borrow elements from one another constantly and this lets everyone relive their favorite stories in an entirely new way.

Comments

  1. UnknownJuly 31, 2017 at 9:11 PM

    I love the point and fact that we get to relive our favorite stories in different ways like you mentioned. I agree that it lets people find the deeper meaning to the book/movie. Foster is correct about nothing being new and I believe that he means it in a good way. Foster mentions many times about how things are connected and use one another to create new stories. One thing that really stands out about this is how Foster shows how two stories, that seem different to a regular reader, are just a like with things in different places. For example, he takes the story about the boy getting bread from the store for his mom and relates it to a night on a quest.

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  2. UnknownAugust 1, 2017 at 6:15 PM

    Bringing up the fact that many stories are created from the same few archetypes is a great way of illustrating the point that all literature shares a common roots, even when they have differing genres; like you said, J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Hobbit" and George Lucas' "Star Wars" are very similar when you look at their plots from a broad view, because they both come from "The Quest" archetype. Your point that by knowing this, that you can skim over the blatant details and begin to delve into the deeper themes and ideas of the story, was absolutely great as well.

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