How To Read Literature Like An English Professor Analysis

Chapter five of How To Read Literature Like An English Professor is about how Shakespeare is prominent in both old and current works of literature and in the media. Foster states “He’s everywhere, in every literary form you can think of. And he’s never the same: every age and every writer reinvents its own Shakespeare.” (33). So why Shakespeare? Foster states “There is a kind of authority lent by something being almost universally known, where one has only to utter certain lines and people nod their heads in recognition.” (38). People recognize parallels to his stories. Foster also writes that Shakespeare provides a character in which authors can bounce ideas off of to further develop their own stories. Some famous books and movies that parallel Shakespeare are The Hunger Games, Star Wars, and The Fault In Our Stars.
The book The Hunger Games has many parallels to Julius Caesar. For example, the names: Cinna, Caesar, Flavius, Portia, Seneca, Brutus, and Cato are names present in both works. While the characters are not exactly alike, they hold many similarities. Portia is Brutus’ wife in Julius Caesar. She loves him and supports him through everything. In The Hunger Games, Portia is one of Katniss and Peeta’s clothes

There are forces that keep the couples from having a life long relationship. Romeo and Juliet are kept apart because of their family feud. Hazel Grace and Augustus are kept from having a lasting relationship due to cancer. In both works, the women do not expect the man to die. Juliet pretends to be dead in order to run away with Romeo, not knowing that he was oblivious to her plan and would kill himself. Hazel believes that Augustus is healthy for the majority of the relationship until he tells her in Amsterdam that he has cancer. Hazel Grace and Augustus and Romeo and Juliet are all referred to as “star crossed lovers” because they can never truly be