In reading specific literary works, it is very helpful to notice the parallels between the specific piece and what other work it is alluding to. This is intertextuality, which literature professor Thomas C. Foster defines as 'the ongoing interaction between poems or stories'. For example, when I watched the movie Back to the Future in one of my English classes, we were told to notice the correlations between the book we read ("Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" by Johnathan Safran Foer). We were supposed to find the parallels between the two coming of age stories. This helped my understanding of the book immensely. After viewing two stories that on the surface are very different, if you can detect the similarities in the stories, you will notice more of the specific details.
Another example would be the movie The Lion King, which is directly alluding to the Shakespeare play "Hamlet". I have only read pieces of this play, but if you have seen the movie, it helps to understand the literature. To see the simple movie makes the very advanced literature not so hard to understand. You can see the parallels in the stories, even though they seem very different.
The novel "1984" by George Orwell is a story written about the future and the corruption that he predicts will occur because of the amount of power given to the government. It is a dystopian story about people with no freedom and their lives as prisoners to the government. I had read this book after reading "The Hunger Games" by Suzanne Collins. The two seemingly different stories actually are very similar. There are many allusions and parallels between the two books. I was able to notice this while reading the texts, which helped considerably in understanding the pieces as well as obtaining a deeper knowledge about both stories. It seems that we live in an age of intertextuality in all areas of art.
Another example would be the movie The Lion King, which is directly alluding to the Shakespeare play "Hamlet". I have only read pieces of this play, but if you have seen the movie, it helps to understand the literature. To see the simple movie makes the very advanced literature not so hard to understand. You can see the parallels in the stories, even though they seem very different.
The novel "1984" by George Orwell is a story written about the future and the corruption that he predicts will occur because of the amount of power given to the government. It is a dystopian story about people with no freedom and their lives as prisoners to the government. I had read this book after reading "The Hunger Games" by Suzanne Collins. The two seemingly different stories actually are very similar. There are many allusions and parallels between the two books. I was able to notice this while reading the texts, which helped considerably in understanding the pieces as well as obtaining a deeper knowledge about both stories. It seems that we live in an age of intertextuality in all areas of art.