How do memory, symbol, and pattern affect the reading of literature? How does the recognition of patterns make it easier to read complicated literature? Discuss a time when your appreciation of a literary work was enhanced by understanding symbol or pattern.

1. A quester

2. A place to go

3. A stated reason to go there

4. Challenges and trials

5. The real reason to go—always self-knowledge

List the five aspects of the QUEST and then apply them to something you have read/viewed in the form used on pages 3-5.

1. Whenever people eat or drink together, it’s communion

2. Not usually religious

3. An act of sharing and peace

4. A failed meal carries negative connotations

Choose a meal from a literary work and apply the ideas of Chapter 2 to this literary depiction.

1. Literal Vampirism: Nasty old man, attractive but evil, violates a young woman, leaves his mark, takes her innocence

2. Sexual implications—a trait of 19th century literature to address sex indirectly

3. Symbolic Vampirism: selfishness, exploitation, refusal to respect the autonomy of other people, using people to get what we want, placing our desires, particularly ugly ones, above the needs of another.

What are the essentials of the Vampire story? Apply this to a literary work you have read or viewed.

1. There is no such thing as a wholly original work of literature—stories grow out of other stories, poems out of other poems.

2. There is only one story—of humanity and human nature, endlessly repeated

3. “Intertexuality”—recognizing the connections between one story and another deepens our appreciation and experience, brings multiple layers of meaning to the text, which we may not be conscious of. The more consciously aware we are, the more alive the text becomes to us.

4. If you don’t recognize the correspondences, it’s ok. If a story is no good, being based on Hamlet won’t save it.

Define intertextuality. Discuss two examples that have helped you in reading specific works.

1. Writers use what is common in a culture as a kind of shorthand. Shakespeare is pervasive, so he is frequently echoed.

2. See plays as a pattern, either in plot or theme or both. Examples:

3. Hamlet: heroic character, revenge, indecision, melancholy nature

4. Henry IV—a young man who must grow up to become king, take on his responsibilities

5. Othello—jealousy

6. Merchant of Venice—justice vs. mercy

7. King Lear—aging parent, greedy children, a wise fool

Discuss a work that you are familiar with that alludes to or reflects Shakespeare. Show how the author uses this connection thematically. Read pages 44-46 carefully. In these pages, Foster shows how Fugard reflects Shakespeare through both plot and theme. In your discussion, focus on theme.

1. Before the mid 20th century, writers could count on people being very familiar with Biblical stories, a common touchstone a writer can tap

2. Common Biblical stories with symbolic implications

3. Garden of Eden: women tempting men and causing their fall, the apple as symbolic of an object of temptation, a serpent who tempts men to do evil, and a fall from innocence

4. David and Goliath—overcoming overwhelming odds

5. Jonah and the Whale—refusing to face a task and being “eaten” or overwhelmed by it anyway.

6. Job: facing disasters not of the character’s making and not the character’s fault, suffers as a result, but remains steadfast

7. The Flood: rain as a form of destruction; rainbow as a promise of restoration

8. Christ figures (a later chapter): in 20th century, often used ironically

9. The Apocalypse—Four Horseman of the Apocalypse usher in the end of the world.

10. Biblical names often draw a connection between literary character and Biblical charcter.

Discuss a work you’ve read or listened to that mentions a biblical allusion and how it affected the piece.

1. Explain a piece that connects to or parallels a “Kiddie Literature” fairy tale or storyline. Hansel and Gretel: lost children trying to find their way home

2. Peter Pan: refusing to grow up, lost boys, a girl-nurturer/

3. Little Red Riding Hood: See Vampires

4. Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz: entering a world that doesn’t work rationally or operates under different rules, the Red Queen, the White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat, the Wicked Witch of the West, the Wizard, who is a fraud

5. Cinderella: orphaned girl abused by adopted family saved through supernatural intervention and by marrying a prince

6. Snow White: Evil woman who brings death to an innocent—again, saved by heroic/princely character

7. Sleeping Beauty: a girl becoming a woman, symbolically, the needle, blood=womanhood, the long sleep an avoidance of growing up and becoming a married woman, saved by, guess who, a prince who fights evil on her behalf.

8. Evil Stepmothers, Queens, Rumpelstilskin

Prince Charming heroes who rescue women. (20th c. frequently switched—the women save the men—or used highly ironically)

1. Myth is a body of story that matters—the patterns present in mythology run deeply in the human psyche

2. Why writers echo myth—because there’s only one story (see #4)

3. Odyssey and Iliad

4. Men in an epic struggle over a woman

5. Achilles—a small weakness in a strong man; the need to maintain one’s dignity

6. Penelope (Odysseus’s wife)—the determination to remain faithful and to have faith

7. Hector: The need to protect one’s family

8. The Underworld—an ultimate challenge, facing the darkest parts of human nature or dealing with death

9. Metamorphoses by Ovid—transformation (Kafka)

10. Oedipus: family triangles, being blinded, dysfunctional family

11. Cassandra: refusing to hear the truth

12. A wronged woman gone violent in her grief and madness—Aeneas and Dido or Jason and Medea

13. Mother love—Demeter and Persephone

Describe an example of a work that draws on a story from a much older myth and explain why the author makes this comparison.

1. Rain

2. fertility and life

3. Noah and the flood

4. Drowning—one of our deepest fears

5. Why?

6. plot device

7. atmospherics

8. misery factor—challenge characters

9. democratic element—the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike

10. Symbolically

11. rain is clean—a form of purification, baptism, removing sin or a stain

12. rain is restorative—can bring a dying earth back to life

13. destructive as well—causes pneumonia, colds, etc.; hurricanes, etc.

14. Ironic use—April is the cruelest month (T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland)

15. Rainbow—God’s promise never to destroy the world again; hope; a promise of peace between heaven and earth

16. fog—almost always signals some sort of confusion; mental, ethical, physical “fog”; people can’t see clearly

17. Snow

18. negatively—cold, stark, inhospitable, inhuman, nothingness, death

19. positively—clean, pure, playful

Discuss the importance of weather in a specific literary work, not in terms of plot. Consider what the weather represents in the story.

1. Violence can be symbolic, thematic, biblical, Shakespearean, Romantic, allegorical, transcendent.

2. Two categories of violence in literature

3. Character caused—shootings, stabbings, drownings, poisonings, bombings, hit and run, etc

4. Death and suffering for which the characters are not responsible. Accidents are not really accidents.

5. Violence is symbolic action, but hard to generalize meaning

6. Questions to ask:

7. What does this type of misfortune represent thematically?

8. What famous or mythic death does this one resemble?

9. Why this sort of violence and not some other?

Present examples of the two kinds of violence found in literature. Show how the effects are different.

1. Yes. But figuring out what is tricky. Can only discuss possible meanings and interpretations

2. There is no one definite meaning unless it’s an allegory, where characters, events, places have a one-on-one correspondence symbolically to other things. (Animal Farm)

3. Actions, as well as objects and images, can be symbolic. i.e. “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost

4. How to figure it out? Symbols are built on associations readers have, but also on emotional reactions. Pay attention to how you feel about a text.

Use the process described on page 106 and investigate symbolism in any scholastic text you have read.

1. Literature tends to be written by people interested in the problems of the world, so most works have a political element in them

2. Issues:

3. Individualism and self-determination against the needs of society for conformity and stability.

4. Power structures

5. Relations among classes

6. issues of justice and rights

7. interactions between the sexes and among various racial and ethnic constituencies.

Foster loves political writing that “addresses the rights of persons and the wrongs of those in power…” Choose a novel, play, or poem which addresses the type of political writing Foster enjoys. Explain how the writing “engages in the realities of its world…human problems…social and political”.

1. Characteristics of a Christ Figure:

2. crucified, wounds in hands, feet, side, and head, often portrayed with arms outstretched

3. in agony

4. self-sacrificing

5. good with children

6. good with loaves, fishes, water, wine

7. thirty-three years of age when last seen

8. employed as a carpenter

9. known to use humble modes of transportation, feet or donkeys preferred

10. believed to have walked on water

11. known to have spent time alone in the wilderness

12. believed to have had a confrontation with the devil, possibly tempted

13. last seen in the company of thieves

14. creator of many aphorisms and parables

15. buried, but arose on the third day

16. had disciples, twelve at first, although not all equally devoted

17. very forgiving

18. came to redeem an unworthy world

19. As a reader, put aside belief system.

20. Why use Christ figures? Deepens our sense of a character’s sacrifice, thematically has to do with redemption, hope, or miracles.

21. If used ironically, makes the character look smaller rather than greater

Apply the criteria on page 119 to a major character in a significant literary work. Try to choose a character that will have many matches. This is a particularly apt tool for analyzing film -- for example, Star Wars, Spartacus, Gladiator, etc.

1. Daedalus and Icarus

2. Flying was one of the temptations of Christ

3. Symbolically: freedom, escape, the flight of the imagination, spirituality, return home, largeness of spirit, love

4. Interrupted flight generally a bad thing

5. Usually not literal flying, but might use images of flying, birds, etc.

6. Irony trumps everything

1. Female symbols: chalice, Holy Grail, bowls, rolling landscape, empty vessels waiting to be filled, tunnels, images of fertility

2. Male symbols: blade, tall buildings

3. Why?

4. Before mid 20th c., coded sex avoided censorship

5. Can function on multiple levels

6. Can be more intense than literal descriptions

When authors write directly about sex, they’re writing about something else, such as sacrifice, submission, rebellion, supplication, domination, enlightenment, etc.

State a novel or text in which a character has a “freeing of spirit” (133). State the nature of the flight (metaphorical, literal, verbal, mental etc.). What was the “imprisonment” that he/she was escaping?

1. Baptism is symbolic death and rebirth as a new individual

2. Drowning is symbolic baptism, IF the character comes back up, symbolically reborn. But drowning on purpose can also represent a form of rebirth, a choosing to enter a new, different life, leaving an old one behind.

3. Traveling on water—rivers, oceans—can symbolically represent baptism. i.e. young man sails away from a known world, dies out of one existence, and comes back a new person, hence reborn. Rivers can also represent the River Styx, the mythological river separating the world from the Underworld, another form of transformation, passing from life into death.

4. Rain can by symbolic baptism as well—cleanses, washes

5. Sometimes the water is symbolic too—the prairie has been compared to an ocean, walking in a blizzard across snow like walking on water, crossing a river from one existence to another (Beloved)

6. There’s also rebirth/baptism implied when a character is renamed.

Think of a "baptism scene" from a significant literary work. How was the character different after the experience? Discuss.

1. What represents home, family, love, security?

2. What represents wilderness, danger, confusion? i.e. tunnels, labyrinths, jungles

3. Geography can represent the human psyche (Heart of Darkness)

4. Going south=running amok and running amok means having a direct, raw encounter with the subconscious.

5. Low places: swamps, crowds, fog, darkness, fields, heat, unpleasantness, people, life, death

6. High places: snow, ice, purity, thin air, clear views, isolation, life, death

Discuss at least four different aspects of a specific literary work that Foster would classify under "geography."

1. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter=youth, adulthood, middle age, old age/death.

2. Spring=fertility, life, happiness, growth, resurrection (Easter)

3. Fall=harvest, reaping what we sow, both rewards and punishments

4. Winter=hibernation, lack of growth, death, punishment

5. Christmas=childhood, birth, hope, family

6. Irony trumps all “April is the cruelest month” from The Wasteland

Discuss the importance of a season in a specific literary work, not in terms of plot. Using Foster’s notes, consider what the season represents in the story. Please use an example different from chapter 10’s prompt.

1. There's only one story

2. Intertextuality

3. Archetype, allusions, and the collective unconsciousness

4. Carl (C.G.) Jung

1. Physical marks or imperfections symbolically mirror moral, emotional, or psychological scars or imperfections.

2. Landscapes can be marked as well—The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot

3. Physical imperfection, when caused by social imperfection, often reflects not only the damage inside the individual, but what is wrong with the culture that causes such damage

4. Monsters

5. Frankenstein—monsters created through no fault of their own; the real monster is the maker

6. Faust—bargains with the devil in exchange for one’s soul

7. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—the dual nature of humanity, that in each of us, no matter how well-made or socially groomed, a monstrous Other exists.

8. Quasimodo, Beauty and the Beast—ugly on the outside, beautiful on the inside. The physical deformity reflects the opposite of the truth.

Refer to a novel, (other than Harry Potter characters) or text in which a character was “marked for greatness”. How was this “deformity” significant and what “greatness” was this character destined to?

1. Physical blindness mirrors psychological, moral, intellectual (etc.) blindness

2. Sometimes ironic; the blind see and sighted are blind

3. Many times blindness is metaphorical, a failure to see—reality, love, truth, etc.

4. darkness=blindness; light=sight

Examine a work in which a character has a visual impairment and/or faces a moment of literal or metaphorical “blindness” (personal or within the environment).What does the loss of this sensory device mean for the character?

1. Heart disease=bad love, loneliness, cruelty, disloyalty, cowardice, lack of determination.

2. Socially, something on a larger scale or something seriously amiss at the heart of things (Heart of Darkness)

Refer back to a text in which there was an affliction of “the heart”. In other words, you must think of a work where the character has an issue with his/her heart, such as heart disease, a heart attack, heart failure, etc. What was plaguing this heart literally and metaphorically?

1. Not all illnesses are created equal. Tuberculosis occurs frequently; cholera does not because of the reasons below

2. It should be picturesque

3. It should be mysterious in origin

4. It should have strong symbolic or metaphorical possibilities

5. Tuberculosis—a wasting disease

6. Physical paralysis can mirror moral, social, spiritual, intellectual, political paralysis

7. Plague: divine wrath; the communal aspect and philosophical possibilities of suffering on a large scale; the isolation an despair created by wholesale destruction; the puniness of humanity in the face of an indifferent natural world

8. Malaria: means literally “bad air” with the attendant metaphorical possibilities.

9. Venereal disease: reflects immorality OR innocence, when the innocent suffer because of another’s immorality; passed on to a spouse or baby, men’s exploitation of women

10. AIDS: the modern plague. Tendency to lie dormant for years, victims unknowing carriers of death, disproportionately hits young people, poor, etc. An opportunity to show courage and resilience and compassion (or lack of); political and religious angles

11. The generic fever that carries off a child

Refer back to the play read in English 10 Honors, Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller (if you have not read this play, refer to a different text in which a character struggles with disease). Identify the “disease” that plagues the main character, Willy Loman. Consider how his death reflect the "principles governing the use of disease in literature" (215-217). Discuss the effectiveness of the death as related to plot, theme, or symbolism.

**Your answer should be very different from chapter 23 since no character in Death of a Salesman has a heart issue..**

1. You must enter the reality of the book; don’t read from your own fixed position in 2005. Find a reading perspective that allows for sympathy with the historical movement of the story, that understands the text as having been written against its own social, historical, cultural, and personal background.

2. We don’t have to accept the values of another culture to sympathetically step into a story and recognize the universal qualities present there.

After reading Chapter 25, choose a scene from a novel, play or epic written before the twentieth century. Contrast how it could be viewed by a reader from the twenty-first century with how it might be viewed by a contemporary reader. Focus on specific assumptions that the author makes— assumptions that would not make it in this century.

1. Irony trumps everything. Look for it.

2. Example: Waiting for Godot—journeys, quests, self-knowledge turned on its head. Two men by the side of a road they never take and which never brings anything interesting their way.

3. Irony doesn’t work for everyone. Difficult to warm to, hard for some to recognize which causes all sorts of problems. Satanic Verses

If “irony trumps everything”, discuss an ironic work and how the irony is extremely significant to the meaning of the piece.