When I was a
freshman, I was told that there was no new idea possible and that any idea thought
of is connected to an already existing thought. As Foster stated, all stories
have a connection to another one, making parts of the story already existing.
With this, Foster means that parts of a story can relate back to an already
existing story, such as the plot of Grease
and High School Musical. In both
stories the audience sees that the two main characters have a summer fling at
the very beginning that ends when the two have to go back to school. The female
lead shows up to the male leads school as a transfer student and they still
show those feelings for each other. However, peer pressure forces them to not
get back together immediately, and then they sing and dance to show their angst
and the love they share for the other character. At the very end, they end up
together and everything is well. This is a prime example that stories and plots
become recycled over time and that no ideas are original.
By realizing
that most stories correlate, the readers are able to possible figure out future
actions in the book or get a better understanding of what plot the book is
based around. By Foster explaining this in How
to Read Literature Like a Professor, he lets his audience know that there
is always more meaning to the story and there is more than one version to the
story than what the reader thinks.
I liked your comment about "High School Musical" and "Grease" really being the same story, it reminded me of the way "Romeo and Juliet" has been done over and over again in only slightly varying ways. But each change introduces another idea into the mix. Take for example "West Side Story" which is set in the Upper West Side of New York City in the late 1950s and certainly offers a different background situation than Elizabethan Italy, complete with musical numbers and underlining racial tensions.
ReplyDeleteI was intrigued by the point you made in the second paragraph that by reading other versions of the same story a reader is able to infer the future actions of the characters. This made me think about the way an author can shock their readers by making small changes in a well-known story in order to make the readers think about the far reaching implications of those seemingly simple changes.