We all seem to have hunger for stories that we can find among other in literature. The desire to get more stories grows and now we are surrounded by them everywhere. But surprisingly we cannot fully understand, on the one hand, to what extent and how exactly stories told in books impact our lives, and the technology, on the other hand, can be very smart but still not smart enough to tell a good impactful story. My colleague Joris van Zundert calls it a Reversed George Lucas Paradox, meaning that Lucas knew how he wanted to make the “Star Wars” but the technical things didn’t work good enough, but we have beautiful technology and face the challenge of analysing and synthesising the narrative. It’s always better to fill the gaps in research by common effort so we gathered in beautiful ZiFcenter in Bielefeld to contribute to literary studies en get inspiration from each other. With special thank to J. Berenike Herrmann and Federico Pianzola for organising this event and to my colleagues Marijn Koolen and Joris van Zundert for collaborative thinking and support.
Tag: fiction
Impact of Style
When reading a book we mention a lot: the plot, the characters, different narrative perspectives, and also style. Everyone can more or less “feel” style, but that is why it is so difficult to define. Speaking about style from a linguistic and literary perspective we should think about choice of words, length and complexity of… Continue reading Impact of Style
A Tiny Cartography of Mapping Literature
My guess is that almost any reader will recognize the map from figure 1, just above. It is a map of Middle Earth. This image was reproduced from the 1993 paperback edition of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. The map and its various siblings that have adorned some of the first pages of… Continue reading A Tiny Cartography of Mapping Literature