Genres

[Lilith]

and if y'all don't knock it off you'll find out exactly why ziggurats may be harmful to your health

[nikki.]

Originally Posted By: Lilith

and if y'all don't knock it off you'll find out exactly why ziggurats may be harmful to your health

this is why lilith is the gal with the golden pun.

[Dantius]

Originally Posted By: Lilith

and if y'all don't knock it off you'll find out exactly why ziggurats may be harmful to your health

You've made that pun before.

Lilith, I am disappoint. Surely you can do better!

[keira]

Dantius can't believe it's not better.

[The Mystic]

Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba

Originally Posted By: Nikki

(quote pyramid ftw)

Two wrongs don't make a right, you know.

Dikiyoba.

But three lefts do.

[Harehunter]

I don't care how many times I hear that one, that's plain funny.

 

But what do I know? Hang on, I need to fish the dormouse out of the cream pitcher again.

[Student of Trinity]

Originally Posted By: The Mystic

But three lefts do.

Don't count on that in Boston.

[Harehunter]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

Originally Posted By: The Mystic

But three lefts do.

Don't count on that in Boston.

Which reminds me of one area of San Fransisco, where the only way to make a left was to take three rights.
And no, I'm not talking politics .

[nikki.]

Originally Posted By: Resolute, waiting, and bored

Nevertheless, the art of writing hasn't changed for thousands of years. You come up with ideas, set words down, and you're done. It's not easy, and the kinds of things written have changed, but the art itself is fairly similar. And while there have been some expansions on the experimental fringes in the last hundred years, by and large poetry is still recognizable as roughly the same poetry as a few hundred years ago (more free verse, more odd spacing, but still the same poetry) and novels are still novels. Plays are even still plays.

Huh. I think I'd have to disagree. If we focus briefly on just novels, that particular genre hasn't even been around for three hundred years yet (we can split hairs about dates, but I'm in the camp of Defoe really finialising the genre), and during that time there have been phenomenal changes. Moll Flanders is worlds apart from modernist texts like Ulysses, and there are far less extreme examples (and of course, since Joyce has been credited as an influence on pretty much everybody, I don't think it's fair to call him an experimental fringe).

If we look at how stories are told in novels, that's changed too; stream-of-consciousness narration, which the world and its wife are aware of now is an invention of the past century or so. Instead of looking to give the reader every detail in the most true-to-life way, like George Eliot does, literature has moved on to showing one reality in a sea of possible realities. Even the way time and chronology are handled has changed - it seems obvious now, but leaps forward and back in time, or flashbacks occuring at the same time as current events, are recent inventions too.

That's not the whole of it though, I think the biggest change has been putting the personal into literature. It wasn't really until Romanticism that the individual was heralded as supreme. Before that, we were the Everyman. Now we get to wander lonely as clouds, or take odysseys through Dublin. To say that writing hasn't changed is unfair to it as an artform, I think, considering that, in my opinion, it wasn't until the late 1800s that painting really changed from just reproduction, by which time, of course, oodles had happened with the written word.

(I will do anything to get out of writing papers, though really, this subject deserves MUCH more of my time; I've only briefly outlined a handful of changes of the past couple of hundred years, never mind the last thousand or three, but hopefully it gives some indication that the form has changed in more meangingful ways than anybody here may think.)

---
*partial credit goes to Diki for this, too.

Edit: I think, once evil assignment season is over, I might spend a week or two writing an essay on this for funsies, because honestly, lots to say!

[Alorael at Large]

Things have changed, but how much? Look at The Iliad from antiquity the 11th century Tale of Genji, the early 17th century Don Quixote, and current best-sellers. They're all recognizably written, in words. The process of making those words happen was likely similar (except probably for Homer, who wrote in verse and probably just codified an oral tradition). The structure of language has changed, the formality of writing has changed, the more daring edges of fiction have changed... but it's all the same thing.

 

Compare music, where orchestras have gotten up to immense size, the instruments used have changed dramatically or even been replaced entirely by computers, the styles varied widely, and I think it's not the same.

 

—Alorael, who doesn't think painting has changed all that much. Paint is still recognizably paint, applied to similar surfaces. Really, it's just the popularity of abstraction/experimentalism that's gotten bigger for painting than for writing. But he'll stand by his assertion that the novel is many centuries old and despite flourishes and minor changes it's the same art form today.

[nikki.]

Originally Posted By: Solemn mien and antic mask

They're all recognizably written, in words. The process of making those words happen was likely similar (except probably for Homer, who wrote in verse and probably just codified an oral tradition). The structure of language has changed, the formality of writing has changed, the more daring edges of fiction have changed... but it's all the same thing.

Compare music, where orchestras have gotten up to immense size, the instruments used have changed dramatically or even been replaced entirely by computers, the styles varied widely, and I think it's not the same.

I do agree with you to some extent, but I think the above post really says what I was floundering around at; you're saying writing hasn't changed because it's still one person putting ink to paper; it's one person telling the story, in more-or-less the same way stories have been told for however long they've been told for (which I disagree with, but I won't crash the thread by posting some gutenberg books as evidence ). But then isn't music still the work of one composer? Do writers of music sit down and compose songs the same way that Bach or Beethoven did? Yes, orchestras are larger, and instruments can be replaced with computers, but how are those changes different to the changes to stylist devices used by authors?

(And sure, play me two different pieces of music and I'll agree that they sound completely unalike. But I can show you two novels that read completely dissimilarly too).

[Harehunter]

I think that, just as evolution occurs in our language, it is reflected in our arts. Compare the special effects of two movies that came out in the same year; "Sinbad, Eye of the Tiger" vs "Star Wars". I think both are equally interesting stories, but special effects have made a significant turn toward CGI. Even animated cartoons have moved quite a distance from "Steam Boat Willie" to "Shrek". True, advancements in technology make this possible, but how many movies still use stop action techniques (besides "Chicken Run") vs CGI?

 

Music is probably the most expressive art form that delineates one era from another. Not only the instrumentation has evolved, but the variety of different styles that have emerged. There is a distinct difference between Charlie Daniels and Gladys Knight. What is most fascinating about music, to me anyway, is how durable it is. Music that was the cornerstone of the Renaissance era is still quite popular today.

 

I have read somewhere that music is the basis for much of how languages evolved.

 

I'll not take up paintings, since I haven't had much interest in the medium, so I know nothing of value.

[Men are from Slars]

How does music delineate eras? The world's music has undergone multiple groundshaking changes in the last hundred years. Have we gone through multiple eras of civilization that quickly?

[Dikiyoba]

Originally Posted By: Alorael

Things have changed, but how much?

This is War and Peace, originally published in 1869:



This is part of the Six-Word Memoir series, originally published in 2008.

They are both literature, and they are both written words, but they are not similar at all. You might as well argue that all music, from the earliest tribal chants to Lady Gaga, is the same because it's all sounds with a rhythm. It'd be no less silly, and at least your statements about change in music and literature would be consistent.

Dikiyoba.

[Randomizer]

There has been a shift in what is popular as literature. Modern literature has shifted to have greater emphasis on what sells, sex.

 

Defoe's Robinson Crusoe spends pages telling you how Crusoe builds items to survive much like a Tom Clancy novel describes modern weapons. But a romantic relationship let alone sex doesn't appear.

 

Shakespear can spend 4 acts leading up to the major battle, but if you tried that in a modern novel the reader would dump it 50 pages in and look for something more interesting. The reader wants action and soon. I blame it on TV since the remote makes it easier to switch channels if you are bored.

[Men are from Slars]

Originally Posted By: Randomizer

There has been a shift in what is popular as literature. Modern literature has shifted to have greater emphasis on what sells, sex.

...Shakespeare...

The statement is completely not true. Popular literature has always focused on sex. This goes all the way back to Gilgamesh, which revolves around rape, enduring love, rejection, and funeral wails. We know sex was a popular topic in the classical world. Medieval courtly romances, the Tale of Genji... it goes on. And dude. Have you READ Shakespeare? Always about sex, and more innuendo than anything else short of Moby Dick.

[Actaeon]

If you think "A Game of Thrones" is sordid, try "Titus Andronicus".

[Ceiling Durkheim]

@Randomizer: Sorry, my attention drifted and I just read all that as "you kids get off my lawn."

 

As Slarty and Actaeon said, sex in literature is about as old as literature is. As for books getting shorter and snappier, have you read Infinite Jest lately? It's moderately popular, and so long as to nearly merit its name.

 

Seriously though, I think the actual reason that there are more relatively simple books is because rates of literacy have increased tremendously in the last few centuries. There's almost always been some sort of intellectual class who consume a lot of highbrow written material, but for most of human history they were among the few who could read at all. 99% of the US population can read and write. 50% is on the low to average range for a developing country; it's also a threshold France (certainly one of the more wealthy and 'civilized' countries of the epoch) crossed a little before its revolution. Since the substantial majority of people who can read these days are not highbrow academic types, we should probably not expect them to desire primarily highbrow academic literature.

 

@Actaeon: That's true. I haven't encountered much in the way of cannibalism in G.R.R. Martin's work.

 

Yet.

[Randomizer]

Originally Posted By: Illegal Furniture

As Slarty and Actaeon said, sex in literature is about as old as literature is. As for books getting shorter and snappier, have you read Infinite Jest lately? It's moderately popular, and so long as to nearly merit its name.

Yes, I read it back 20 odd years ago after reading about the lawsuit trying to get it banned when it was published. The dispute was on whether the readers would interpret "the staff of life" as bread or something more sordid.

[keira]

Completely unrelated, but there appears to be an error in the UBB's poll render thing. "%%NUMBER%% choices allowed 3 (109 total votes)"

[Callie]

Yeah I think polling in the old UBB system was arguably better. Then again, it's been awhile.

[Harehunter]

My apologies Slarty, I was originally thinking of the evolution of music over the centuries, and then I made an inappropriate comparison between genres from the present era. What I was trying to convey was the way that music of say the first century B.C. differs significantly from that of say the 14th century. Country rock and Motown while widely disparate in style are actually too closely related to be delineating.

But even across centuries, the appreciation of the music of an era still persists. Who doesn't get goose bumps during the Hallelujah Chorus of Handel's Messiah?