What are the influences of modern literary fiction?
Surely movies are the best well to influence literary fiction.Well, most of the time.
Can Aristotle’s Elements of Theatre be applied to modern plays, or even modern TV and film scripts?
Sure. The six Elements (Spectacle, Character, Fable (Plot), Diction, Melody, and Thought) are really just guidelines for good storytelling; They’re not specific to any medium.The Unities are harder, but not impossible to heed in film and television. The closest examples are probably found in television bottle episodes, but there’s no reason that couldn’t be expanded to a whole series or film.Well there are reasons having to do with producers and executives telling you you won’t be able to maintain an audience’s interest by sticking to one story, one day, and one location. But I was taught that the very purpose of The Unities is to challenge the writer to do away with non-essential gimmicks and distractions and focus purely on telling a great story. It might be hard to sell a project like that, but I think it making it would be a wonderful experiment.
Why is modern Indian literature obsessed with elements of mythology and history?
Thank you for asking, Poumita Paul.India is, for the most part, a conservative country.The conservative impulse causes people to look at the world through the lens of our past. The liberal impulse is more future-oriented and fuels exploration and innovation.Because India is past-oriented, even liberal narratives find themselves going through the past-lens in order to be heard and to find public acceptance. Politicians who want to rebuild a city have to talk about restoring the place’s ancient glory. Doctors talk about how the science of India was way more advanced than anything we have today. Even philosophers and freethinkers have to put on semi-religious labels in order to make sense.Creators and writers do the same. Their message travels in the envelope made of old messages. It is easier for audiences that way. Novelty has mostly not worked in Indian markets.Whether you want to put forth an empowering narrative about India, or chastise it for its social ills, most books of influence have done it by calling upon the past. I personally find it disappointing that almost the entire body of Indian speculative fiction is fantasy (mythological) and not science fiction.I am not really dissing the way things are. Just saying we are like this only.There is however, plenty of scope within mythological and historical narratives to present new stories and ideas. Indian storytellers have been doing it for a long time and failing less and less as time passes.Maybe in the years to come, we will see genuinely new stories.
What are some characteristics of modernity?
Since the term "Modern" is used to describe a wide range of periods, any definition of modernity must account for the context in question. Modern can mean all of post-medieval European history, in the context of dividing history into three large epochs: Antiquity, Medieval, and Modern. Likewise, it is often used to describe the Euro-American culture that arises out of the Enlightenment and continues in some way into the present. The term "Modern" is also applied to the period beginning somewhere between 1870 and 1910, through the present, and even more specifically to the 1910-1960 period. One common use of the term, "Early Modern" is to describe the condition of Western History either since the mid-1400's, or roughly the European discovery of moveable type and the printing press, or the early 1600's, the period associated with the rise of the Enlightenment project. These periods can be characterized by: Rise of the nation state Growth of tolerance as a political and social belief Industrialization Rise of mercantilism and capitalism Emergence of socialist countries Discovery and colonization of the Non-Western world Rise of representative democracy Increasing role of science and technology Urbanization Mass literacy Proliferation of mass media The Cartesian and Kantian distrust of tradition for autonomous reason In addition, the 19th century can be said to add the following facets to modernity: Emergence of social science and anthropology Romanticism and Early Existentialism Naturalist approaches to art and description Evolutionary thinking in geology, biology, politics, and social sciences Beginnings of modern psychology Growing disenfranchisement of religion Emancipation
What is post-modernism?
Jean-François Lyotard coined the term. One should start their travails in postmodernism with what he thinks. For, many who have been lumped into a post-modern attitude have also denounced their affiliation. Likewise with existentialism: if you want to know what it stands for, you should go to the source, vis., Jean-Paul Sartre, before uncovering all the other 'sources' to his understanding. What Lyotard has to say, more or less, is that the modernist goals of universality in science, meaning, ethics is unrealizeable and false. The 'myth of progress' is readily discounted as a 'meta-narrative' -- a story about the stories we tell ourselves, a dissimulation that attempts to suppress the anti-foundationalist, interpretive, perspectival elements of this age. Postmodernism opposes modernism (arguably). Modernism is an extension of the enlightnement project to discover through reason, true justice, utopia, progress for mankind, better technology, a theory of everything, etc. Postmodernism opposes the idea of reason & progress (the 20th century was a war-ridden disaster, aided by reason), is wary of totalitarian ideology, takes issue with all things transcendental, questions everything reified as "natural" (such as gender identity), shows the limits of translatability, opens texts to multiplicity of readings (a la Derrida: "there is nothing outside the text"), denies essence (with the existentialists), and denies originary thinking -- which seeks to explain in reference to foundations that always have a slippery, historical basis. Whether post-modernism relishes in valueless nihilism, or is over-laden with so much skeptical analysis and jargon as to be mostly useless seem to be available criticisms-- and most likely why no one learns about it without looking for it.
Postmodernism?
any of a number of trends or movements in the arts and literature developing in the 1970s in reaction to or rejection of the dogma, principles, or practices of established modernism, esp. a movement in architecture and the decorative arts running counter to the practice and influence of the International Style and encouraging the use of elements from historical vernacular styles and often playful illusion, decoration, and complexity.
Can all modern music be traced back to experiments in European Classical music? Which genre has had the most influence on music in recent times?
There's a lot more to modern music than just European Classical music. To a degree we can track down one lineage to European music but also in today's music world there are many branches of styles that conglomerated to form music as we know it today.Think minimalism coming from the US. Experimentalism and 12-tone/atonalism coming from Modern Europe and the US. Jazz, influenced by Afro-American culture.World music such as pentatonic scales, raga, quarter tone scales, Latin American music.There was also lots of European folk styles that pre-dated the traditional classical style such as Spanish music and Spanish scales, Greek modes etc.Pop music obviously evolved out of Jazz and a conglomeration of these other styles.Many of these elements can be traced back to different lineages however the one unifying thing that binds them all is the notation system we use and the harmony - equal temperament which remains the most dominant form of harmony to date.Overall, the most influential thing to happen to Western music (I will exclude music form other countries because they all have very different demographics in taste/sound and influences) is probably Renaissance music, the period that started it all, the period that made Europe the centre of musical advancement until the modern era really.The most recent however is probably Jazz. There are other contenders such as minimalism or experimental but those two genres are very niche in what they influenced. For example minimalism influenced lots of pop and electronic music and experimentalism influenced modern classical. However, Jazz was the 'birth-genre' for not only all pop styles which evolved progressively through the 20th century but also to modern classical music which borrows many harmonic elements from Jazz such as parallel harmonies.But now you I mention parallel harmonies we could actually say that Jazz was influenced a lot by impressionism so could that be the most influential genre? But then that was influenced by classical music before and so on. So it's hard to choose but I would say Jazz. Jazz can legitimately be called the birthplace of pop because it evolved into blues, rock n' roll, swing, rockabilly, rock and so on; All while Jazz went on to become a separate genre itself with far more experimentalism than the early days of Jazz.That's my choice anyway.
What is postmodernism in literature?
What I mean is what kind of traits are there in postmodern literature? Why would you define a certain story to be postmodern? I find it very hard to find anything as postmodenism seems quite hard to define.