Thomas C. Foster

 Professor of English, University of Michigan at Flint

 A quester  A place to go  A stated reason to go there  Challenges and trials en route  A real reason to go there

 Educational; self-knowledge  The questers are often young, inexperienced, immature, sheltered

 Whenever people eat or drink together, it’s communion; breaking bread  Sharing, sense of community

 Early lit: sex was taboo…couldn’t write about sex, couldn’t openly show sex …eating scenes with chomping, gnawing on bones, licking fingers, slurping, moaning, groaning…sexual meaning  not all communions are holy  …or even decent

 Dracula  Lestat  Edward

 Vampirism is about selfishness, exploitation, a refusal to respect the autonomy of other people  Evil has to do with sex since the serpent seduced Eve

 Young  Preferable virginal female  A stripping away of her youth, energy, virtue  Life force of old male, death or destruction of the young woman

 Ghosts and vampires are never only about ghosts and vampires

 Ghosts are about something besides themselves  Hamlet: not simply to haunt his son but to point out something drastically wrong in Denmark’s royal household  A Christmas Carol: Marley’s ghost is a lesson in ethics for Scrooge  Dr. Jekyll’s other half: respectable man may have a dark side  Frankenstein

 Do not begin by counting lines or looking at line endings  Enjoy the experience, then see how the poet worked his or her magic on you  Look for literary techniques and analyze and how and why

 There’s no such thing as a wholly original work of literature

 Stories grow out of other stories, poems out of other poems

The ongoing interaction between texts and poems Everything’s connected

 Your understanding of the novel deepens; it becomes more meaningful, more complex

 He’s everywhere, in every literary form you can think of  Every age and writer reinvents its own Shakespeare

 Loss of innocence, “the fall,” Adam & Eve  A serpent, an apple, a garden, plagues, flood, parting of water, loaves, fishes, forty days, betrayal, denial, slavery and escape, fatted calves, milk and honey  East of Eden, Beloved, Paradise Lost, The Divine Comedy, Song of Solomon, Go Tell It on the Mountain…

 Hansel and Gretel: children lost from home  Alice in Wonderland, Treasure Island, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Wind in the Willows, The Wizard of Oz

 Christian story: two great celebrations  C & E coincide with dates of great seasonal anxiety  The story of the birth of Jesus, and of hope, is placed almost on the shortest and therefore most dismal, day of the year  The crucifixion and resurrection come very near the spring equinox, the death of winter and beginning of renewed life

 Myth is a body of story that matters  Part of our society  The Spartans, The Trojans, Troy, Athens, Romulus, Sparta, Rome

 Parental attempt to save the child and the grief at having failed; the cure that proves as deadly as the ailment; the youthful exuberance that leads to self-destruction; the class between sober, adult wisdom and adolescent recklessness; the terror involved in the headlong descent into the sea

 Every story needs a setting; weather is a part of the setting  Weather is never just weather – it’s never just rain Rain, major flood, ark, dove, olive branch, rainbow Drowning; one of our deepest fears

 Rain: mysterious, misery, cleansing, restorative (spring);  Rain literary associations: chills, cold, pneumonia, death  Rain mixes with sun to create rainbows (pots of gold, leprechauns, divine promise, peace between heaven and earth  Fog: mental, ethical, physical (can’t see clearly)  Snow: clean, stark, severe, playful, suffocating,

 Is everywhere in literature  One of the most personal and even intimate acts between human beings  Cultural and societal implications  First type: shootings, stabbings, drownings, poisonings, bludgeonings, rape, bombings, hit-and-run accidents, starvations, etc.  Second type: characters are responsible

 Writers kill off characters to make action happen, cause plot complications, end plot complications, put other characters under stress

 It’s everywhere…

 Stands for one thing: allegory  Symbols have a range of possible meanings and interpretations  River: danger, safety, freedom

 The story is meant to change us and through us to change society

 Freedom  Self-determination

 Crucified, wounds in hands, feet, side and head  In agony  Self-sacrificing  Good with children  Good with loaves, fishes, water, wine  33 years of age when last seen  Employed as a carpenter  Known to use humble modes of transportation, feet or donkeys preferred

 Believed to have walked on water  Often portrayed with arms outstretched  Known to have spent time alone in the wilderness  Believed to have had a confrontation with the devil, possibly tempted  Last seen in the company of theives  Creator of many parables, aphorisms  Buried, rose on the third day

 Had disciples, 12 at first, not all equally devoted  Very forgiving  Came to redeem an unworthy world

 They don’t all hit them marks. They don’t have to be male. They don’t have to be Christian. They don’t have to be good.  No Christ figure can ever be as pure, as perfect, as divine as Jesus Christ.  Look for a character’s sacrifice similar to the greatest sacrifice we know of.  Redemption, hope, miracle

 If it flies, it isn’t human If he/she is one of the following:  A superhero  A ski jumper  Crazy (see #2)  Fictional  A circus act  Suspended on wires  An angel  Heavily symbolic

 Flying is freedom, escape, wonder, magic  Freedom from specific circumstances but also from those general burdens which tie us down  Flight of imagination  Soul as taking wing

 Tall buildings…male sexuality  Rolling landscapes…female sexuality  Smutty minds…maybe  Knight with his lance…phallic symbol  Holy grail…empty vessel waiting to be filled

 Authors and filmmakers didn’t always write about/show sex/sex scenes  Authors subtle  Movie directors cut to waves on the beach or train going into a tunnel

 Male: lances, swords, guns, keys  Female: chalices, grails, bowls, locks

 Literary characters get wet  Water: death, rebirth, reborn, baptism  Milkman Dead in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon gets wet three times…  …Father, son and holy ghost

 What does geography mean to a work of literature?  Hills, creeks, deserts, beaches, moors, rivers, etc.  William Faulkner: Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi

 Geography is setting but it can be psychology, attitude, finance, industry – anything that place can forge in the people who live there

 Geography in literature can be a part of theme, symbol, plot…  Can define or develop a character

 When writers send characters south, it’s so they can run amok

 Low: swamps, crowds, fog, darkness, fields, heat, unpleasantness, people, life, death  High: snow, ice, purity, thin air, clean views, isolation, life, death

 Spring: rebirth, childhood, youth  Summer: love, adulthood, romance, fulfillment, passion  Fall/autumn: change, middle age, decline, tiredness, harvest  Winter: old age, anger, resentment, hatred, death  Daisy Miller, Frederic Winterbourne

 Not just agricultural but personal harvests, the results of our endeavors, whether over the course of a growing season or life  …we reap what we sow…we reap the rewards and punishments of our conduct

 woo6M woo6M  yN0 yN0

 Look at physical imperfection in symbolic terms  Frankenstein: is the monster or man?  Harry Potter (why does he have a scar, where is it, how did he get it, what does it resemble?)

 …a glass eye, harelip, badly scarred, amputations, deaf, limbs missing, etc.  We don’t get through life without being marked by the experience  Don’t judge by appearances…

 The “Indiana Jones” principal: if you want your audience to know something important about your character (or work at large), introduce it early, before you need it.  (Indy is afraid of snakes.)

 Pump that keeps us alive…symbolic repository of emotion  What shape were your childhood Valentine’s cards? Last year?  Fall in love…we feel it on our hearts  Lose a love…heartbroken  Overwhelmed by emotion…our hearts are full to bursting

 Bad love  Loneliness  Cruelty  Disloyalty  Cowardice  Lack of determination  Something seriously amiss at the heart of things

 Not all diseases are created equal  Cholera: unsightly, painful, smelly, violent  TB: picturesque (Poe “The Masque of the Red Death”)  Syphilis, gonorrhea near epidemic late 19 th century: Henrik Ibsen put STDs on the map  STD = Moral corruption  Diseases could be mysterious  Plague = social devastation = champion

 Picturesque?  Mysterious?  Symbolic?  Political angle?

 Irony tops everything. Period.