Components of Literary Analysis

I especially like the way Thomas C. Foster breaks down literary analysis into components in How to Read Literature Like a Professor (2003). As an engineer, I think of it as divide and conquer: divide a problem into smaller problems and conquer each individually until a conclusion is reached. The main components Foster addresses are quests, intertextuality, patterns, symbols, and irony.

Intertextuality is perhaps the most interesting component. He explains every story is connected to every other story, past, present, and presumably future. New ideas build upon old ideas and new stories build upon old stories. Intertextuality is the connectedness among stories. New text adds, updates, and modernizes prior text. It's not copying or plagiarism, because ultimately there's only one story. This one story is the story of human experience. Everything in human experience is connected to everything else in human experience, and every story is a retelling of one part or another of this one story.

I can't help but think of an analogy to science. Man has forever been trying to understand the universe. New discoveries are made that build upon old discoveries and little by little we are figuring it out. Everything in the universe is related to everything else, but different scientists focus on different parts: physics, biology, math, etc., but ultimately there's only one universe.

Reference: Thomas C. Foster. How to Read Literature Like a Professor. Harper. 2003.