Our most popular stories today are teeming with characters having face-to-face relationships in a very real world, however fantastic its vampires or wizards might be. What's more, criticism of the novel as an outmoded ego trip, which might be narrowly justified in a narcissistic time, doesn't grasp that book-length fiction nowadays pushes the reader away from the kind of glorified navel-gazing that ruled the novel in its Proustian heyday. That's not enough for snob appeal, which ultimately cares much more about the joys of idolizing Art than it does the dangers of idolizing Self. But they are often iconic, frequently arresting, fundamentally timeless, and occasionally shot through with genius (think of the Face Punch film-within-a-film in Twilight). Are they Art? Not hardly, most of the time. It fails to grasp how easily epic poetry is reproduced in the form of multi-volume paperbacks, and how easily those paperbacks in turn are converted into highly watchable films and television shows.
Worse, from the standpoint of cultural criticism, it fails to understand the tremendous flexibility and fertility of book-length fiction.
#EPIC POEM FORMAT FREE#
This superficially intriguing point, I think, must end up as an assault on all art made by free and equal human beings. We are in thrall to the narrative of selves that do not really exist in the way we imagine, a fabrication in which most novel-writing connives.Įt cetera, et cetera. If we asked the question of, for example, a Buddhist priest, he or she would probably tell us that it is precisely this illusion of selfhood that makes so many in the West unhappy. At the New York Review of Books, Tim Parks turns around and critiques Franzen's social criticism which the oddball claim that novels are needless because by necessity they're ego porn:ĭo we actually need this intensification of self that novels provide? Do we need it more than ever before? I suspect not. Superstar literary novelist Jonathan Franzen insists there is an "enormous need for long, elaborate, complex stories, such as can only be written by an author concentrating alone, free from the deafening chatter of Twitter," but seems not to realize that this is not the same as a need for literary novels. This is a hugely bottom-up affair.Īnd it's leaving elite critics looking clueless. The big budgets and star-making studios surrounding the adaptations of these tales create the illusion that their success is ultimately a top-down phenomenon, but it's not.
Instead of one old blind guy memorizing colossal tales, we're crowdsourcing our favorite myths, characters, themes, and narratives.
Yes, epic poetry is back - and it's going to continue to make billions because it's gone viral. and Fox to talk about purchasing the film rights. It’ll be published as a paperback later this year and, according to reports, the author and producers are currently setting up meetings with studios such as Paramount, Universal, Warner Bros.
#EPIC POEM FORMAT SERIES#
Originally posted online as a riff on the Twilight fan-fiction series Masters of the Universe, the story soon got picked up as an eBook, spawned two sequels and sold over a quarter of a million copies online. James, is about the sexual escapades of two twenty-year olds.
0 kommentar(er)
