Blog Response to Prompt #3

The value of intertextuality is seen in the reader's ability to make connections between novels, and pull out individual pieces of the previous novel to have a better understanding of the theme of the new novel. Foster uses the example of a scene from Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato to explain this. In the scene, the party that the novel is following falls down a hole using language similar to the famous rabbit hole scene from Alice in Wonderland. Just like in Wonderland, the party in Cacciato finds a completely new world apart from the one they had just left. The similarity only enhances the reading experience, as it brings a sense of familiarity to the new novel and allows for further comparisons of the two pieces of literature. 

Intertextuality is not something that is done consciously right away, it requires training in the form of reading. At first, a reader can only make connections to other works by chance, however it becomes easier to make these connections when more literature is added to the reader's memory banks. This is because the reader has more sources they can draw from. Archetypes, metaphors, symbols, and can all be traced back to some other work, which is what Foster means when he writes, "there's no such thing as a wholly original work of literature."

Personally I have seen intertextuality in Ayn Rand's novel, Anthem. In the story, society has lost all forms of electricity. The main character finds a working light bulb in the ruins of a subway and brings it back to the heads of the society and was subsequently exiled. After this point, he renames himself Prometheus, taking the name from the Greek titan who brought fire to the humans and was punished.