Thursday, April 01, 2010

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Plots

A post at Strange Maps chronicles the progression in time and space of four classic tales that we know best as Pygmalion, Faust, Leviathan, and Oedipus.
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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Your earlier post about musical forms comes to the same thing as these "strange maps" are about stories. We are limited creatures. Not so much in our vocabulary, but in our structures. Four stories out of not so many more. Therefore there must be a sisterhood (and brotherhood, for the boys).

As to story points, Cecil Adams observes, "My point is, never mind the 36, 20, 7, or whatever basic plots--take out sex, violence, and death and you lose 90 percent of literature right there."
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2366/what-are-the-seven-basic-literary-plots

In musical forms, the only new form, aside from meandering around, that the twentieth century seemed to have come up with is chain form. So maybe, forms in lit or forms in music are not what we are stuck with, but who were are?

And it has all been done before, so the real challenge is simply to do it better or more interestingly.

1/4/10 10:30 AM

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