Prompt 5

     After reading Foster’s book, it is now apparent that even small elements, such as weather, heart disease, geography, and sex have meanings to them. Thus, it is important for a person to pay close attention to what they are reading. For example, books often allude to different works to add to the central meaning within them. Foster discusses the fact that writers often use Christ figures within their works. He also shows the audience whether or not they are dealing with a Christ figure through a checklist (Chapter 14, Paragraph 11). This showed me that there are books that I have read which have references to Christ, however, I overlooked them while reading. He mentions that there are countless reasons for the use of this strategy, and in the end, Foster puts it, “the writer is up to something” (Chapter 14, Paragraph 20). While it is vague, a person could figure out the purpose of the Christ reference through close reading, however, without the knowledge of the reference in the first place, a person is quite obviously incapable of doing so. In addition, Foster mentions a long list of popular Shakespeare quotes and accurately states that the audience likely is unaware that these quotes were from Shakespearean works or from which work they were taken (Chapter 5, Paragraph 8). I personally was familiar with 10 out of 16 quotes, however, I only knew where 3 of the quotes were from. The usage of Shakespearean quotes also relates to Foster’s idea of “intertextuality” as the writers seem to acknowledge each other and add onto their stories. It seems that when people refer to another work, they are reminding the reader that each of the works happen in the same world, which Foster calls the “big story”. Being literate is to be capable of catching onto references such as the Christ parallels or the Shakespearean quotes or understanding why certain elements are used within a book, and this relates to being human as people read books to shape them. People use books to show them how to live or how humans lived previously (Bible, Torah, Quran, history books, biographies, etc.). These books are read so that individuals are capable of having a better grasp on how they should feel or what their ideologies should be. What I will take from this book is books are extremely important to our lives and the effort should be put in while reading to understand their meanings.