*** Official Shakespeare sucks thread ***

[a500lbgorilla]

I don't like the "upon the shoulders of giants" idea because I think it's really just "letting real people who live real lives write stories". It's not a coincidence that the more aristocracy-heavy the literature, the more wacky their characterizations and plotting. Deus ex machina is the kind of idea an aristocrat would unwittingly fabricate due to being too isolated from the real world

That's like saying you don't like the idea of "monkey see, monkey do."

Surviva's right, you learn the ways of the guy who succeeded before you in order to succeed even further. And it's strangely tied to that book I didn't like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and its idea of Quality. Anyone worth their salt can see what's good across many works, separate it from what's not, and combine it into something better.

[wufwugy]

That's like saying you don't like the idea of "monkey see, monkey do."

Surviva's right, you learn the ways of the guy who succeeded before you in order to succeed even further. And it's strangely tied to that book I didn't like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and its idea of Quality. Anyone worth their salt can see what's good across many works, separate it from what's not, and combine it into something better.

It is relevant in many ways, but not necessarily here. It's not like stuff like deus ex machina is a precursor to normal plotting. In fact, it seems that deus ex is more of an artificiality in the first place and the development of normal plotting didn't depend on its existence.

The overwhelming majority of classic literature was written by special people who lived special lives. It's not coincidence that after the middle class entered the arena, so much of what the aristocrats thought was so nifty became swiftly crushed by the much more capable storytellers simply by merit of not being aristocrats. Existentialism, for example, is a neat idea to an aristocrat who has never worked a day in his life, but it's par for the course for a poor laborer. The giants' shoulders we stand on today are people like Steinbeck. Modernism doesn't rely that much on classicism and its several different rebirths. What makes modernism modernism is the fact that literature is no longer just the product of the aristocracy, and we haven't expanded upon the highly limited aristocratic ways so much as we've shown why they were wrong