Foster, How to Read Literature Like a Professor

"We recognize them in a personal calamity that is particular to its time but that has the universality of great suffering and despair and courage, of a 'victim' seeking to wrest control over his own life away from the condition that has controlled him. It's a situation, Cunningham reminds us, that differs from age to age only in the specific details, not in the humanity those details reveal. That's what happens when works get reenvisioned: we learn something about the age that produced original as well as about our own."
~page 224

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/JenniferPrex/2009/03/some_things_never_change.html

NOT Marked for Greatness?

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/CarlosPeredo/2009/03/being_marked_for_greatness.html

What Makes You Special?
http://blogs.setonhill.edu/AprilMinerd/2009/03/different.html

"Despite this nearly constant use of the last twenty-eight hundred years, the figure of the heart never overstays its welcome, because it always is welcome. Writers use it because we feel it..." (Foster 208)

Movies, Doctors, and Illness

Moulin Rouge and "This (diagnosing virtually any disease)strikes me as a case where the cure is definitely worse than the disease, at least for literature."

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/AjaHannah/2009/03/movies_doctors_and_illness.html

"If writers want us-all of us- to notice something, thry'd better put it out there where we'll find it."

Foster, page 205
Here we have Foster speaking about reasons for characters being blind, but then we realize that readers can be blind, too. How many times do readers miss important details that are right in front of them?

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/ChristopherDufalla/2009/03/do_i_need_new_specs.html

"Sameness doesn't present us with metaphorical possibilities, whereas difference--from the average, the typical, the expected--is always rich with possibility."
--page 194

Stepford Wives, anyone?

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/MatthewHenderson/2009/03/sameness_doesnt_present_us_wit.html

"Sameness doesn't present us with metaphorical possibilities, whereas difference - from the average, the typical, the expected - is always rich with possibility."
http://blogs.setonhill.edu/AliciaCampbell/2009/03/average_does_not_equal_interes.html

“Until the twentieth century, disease was mysterious. Folks began to comprehend the germ theory of disease in the nineteenth century, of course, after Louis Pasteur, but until they could do something about it, until the age of inoculation, illness remained frightening and mysterious…We’ve never really accepted microbes into our lives. Even knowing how a disease is transmitted, we remain largely superstitious. And since illness is so much a part of life, so too is it a part of literature.”
http://blogs.setonhill.edu/RosalindBlair/2009/03/medical_intrigue.html

My blog about fosters take on something that i feel is rather obscure.

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/JoshuaWilks/2009/03/blindness_and_obscurity.html

Difference makes a world rich of possibilities.

When people see the word RICH, they come running!

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/ChelsieBitner/2009/03/make_a_difference_in_the_world.html

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/NikitaMcClellan/2009/03/even_knowing_how_disease_is.html

DISEASE FOR EMOTION

In reading chapters 21-24 for this week the chapter that spoke to me the most was chapter 21, Marked for Greatness. Foster helps to understand that that is usually going to mean something if a writer gives a character a different shape, deformity, physical mark or imperfection it is going to probably have a significance to that character and what is going to come. This may seem to be obvious however I know I have read and seen many stories where characters have such, but did not think that much about them at the time.

"When the specialist arrives, he's blind, Can't see a thing in the world. As it turns out, though, he is able to see things in the spirit and divine world, can see the truth of what's actually happened, truth to which our hero is utterly oblivious" (201).

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/AndrewAdams/2009/03/the_blind_prophet_daredevil.html

"if you want your audience to know something about your character (or the work at large), introduce it early, before you need it" (Foster 205).

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/JulianneBanda/2009/03/intorduce_characters.html

Keep it Simple

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/RebeccaMarrie/2009/03/keep_it_simple.html

chapter 22

"...if you want your audience to know something important about your character (or the work at large), introduce it early, before you need it."

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/AshleyPascoe/2009/03/blue_flower_red_thorns_blue_fl.html

"How many stories do you know in which the hero is different from everyone else in some way, and how many times is that difference physically visible?" (Foster 195)

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/SueMyers/2009/03/disability-or-s.html

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/JessicaBitar/2009/03/marked_for_greatness.html

"If you read a scene in which new life was coming into being, the rain outside would almost inevitably lead you (based on your previous reading) to a process of association in which you thought, or felt (since this really works as much as this visceral as at the intellectual level): rain-life-birth-promise-restoration-fertility-continuity. What, don't you always run that cycle when rain and new life are on the table?...But then there's Hemingway."