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I'd call that further than cosplay, at that point they were literally just larping
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Apr 4, 2021 12:12
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I mean, the Pope also tried banning cannons, which also didn't work so well
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Apr 4, 2021 12:14
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Libluini posted:I mean, the Pope also tried banning cannons, which also didn't work so well
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Apr 4, 2021 12:28
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if arthur was given to be saxon, wouldn't that have been blackface?
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Apr 4, 2021 14:48
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They also did Robin Hood cosplay, as I covered briefly in my Robin Hood thread:quote:On 18th January 1510, Henry VIII and twelve of his men disguised themselves as outlaws, or Robin Hood and his merry men, and surprised Queen Catherine and her ladies. Chronicler Edward Hall records this event: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3934938&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=4#post507894858
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Apr 4, 2021 15:11
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I'm just picturing LARP drama with real swords, how many knights fought over who got to be their favourite character, which nerds dressed up as obscure side characters, who was Merlin
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Apr 4, 2021 15:46
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Just to clarify on some questions related to novel chat as a coda to the derail: I've read neither The Tale of Genji or Gargantua and Pantagruel, so I'm only working with my general impressions thereof (though I know a little more about G&P via osmosis). The Tale of Genji is pre-printing press, so regardless of its content I'd argue that it couldn't be a modern-style novel because it couldn't have been produced for a commerical reading public. It looks from what I see that it has a really rich MS tradition with a whole assload of surviving copies. But survival does not imply popularity or wide readership (weirdly enough, usually the opposite). I'd be open to counter-arguments on that, but widely-copied literary (i.e. non-devotional) manuscripts (especially novel-length ones) are a rare enough historical phenomenon that no general commercial market for them ever emerged. There was no way that an author could try to write a story to become a "best seller" before the possibility of mechanical reproduction. That commercial condition is key because puts immense pressure on the form and genre of the novel. A reading public broadly speaking wants to see themselves in a novel, and booksellers want stories of a certain scale to maximize profits. Look at airplane novels - they're almost always the same thickness and length. That's not because everyone has the same scale of ideas. It's because the publishers buy stories of a certain scale, and that's because readers have certain expectations of how much book they will get for their money - too thin is a ripoff and too thick is intimidating. Gargantua and Pantagruel sometimes gets called a novel but from what I understand that's usually a later, retrospective label. As I understand, it doesn't have a unified plot or realistic human psychology (it's more of a grotesque parody). I see the term "burlesque" applied to it sometimes, and that is a genre of its own. I'm splitting hairs, but that's the path to better understanding. Now this is the tricky thing with genre arguments: there are always exceptions and grey areas, and often people conflate "I think we should think about it this way" with "no you're wrong shut up." There are always critics questioning conditions such as the ones I identify here. The notion of a "unified plot" is challenged by the novel form of the short story cycle (e.g. Sherwood Anderson, Alice Munro, Steven Leacock) which is the kind of thing that makes people go back and ask "well, we said it isn't, but maybe we should think of Gargantua and Pantagruel as a novel?" And the more that these things get discussed, the more that artists try to challenge and undermine them (see: high modernist novels).
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Apr 4, 2021 16:20
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It makes sense for the aristocracy to go off doing wacky things because even though they haven't developed into the idle rich yet, they probably got a lot of free time on their hands.Fuschia tude posted:I'm not sure I would call trashy anime this generation's Bushido. It does tend to be a lot more directly explicit about extolling morals or philosophies, which is either a translation quirk, a cultural difference, or a consequence of shows actually being targeted at much younger audiences. I feel like a lot of modern American media is often frustratingly coy about whatever values they're trying to push, which is either being embarrassed about directly stating morals or the result of a literary movement that is against directly moralizing or going off on philosophical monologues.
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Apr 4, 2021 19:25
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I'd be more likely to blame the fact that half of America has very different values from the other half, so if you want mass appeal you have to either be coy or focus on values in the overlap
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Apr 4, 2021 20:00
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SlothfulCobra posted:the result of a literary movement that is against directly moralizing or going off on philosophical monologues. Well, yeah. This is probably more of a discussion for somewhere else, though (TBB? CD? D&D?). Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 21:11 on Apr 4, 2021 |
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Apr 4, 2021 21:00
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SlothfulCobra posted:I feel like a lot of modern American media is often frustratingly coy about whatever values they're trying to push, which is either being embarrassed about directly stating morals or the result of a literary movement that is against directly moralizing or going off on philosophical monologues.
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Apr 4, 2021 23:58
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Siivola posted:Great Courses has two lecture series by Dorsey Armstrong, one on King Arthur and one on the "great minds" of the medieval world, and I really recommend them. Should be available on Audible. I looked this up on the Great Courses site and whoa, they're asking for $150 for the audio version, $235 for streaming video, and $270 for DVD. That's an insane price differential between their site and Audible's $35. Also apparently Great Courses Plus is $20 for a subscription, and that includes video. What the hell is going on with this pricing. Pricing aside do folks generally consider the stuff on Great Courses to be decent? Like, if I just pick up a random lecture series about the Tudors or something, am I gonna have to worry about whether or not the stuff they're putting out might be outdated/fringe?
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Apr 5, 2021 00:33
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Audible gives you one free credit per month, or 11 dollars per extra credit though only in packs of three, and the 12 hour lecture is one credit.
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Apr 5, 2021 00:46
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Nessus posted:That said you also have the issue, especially with older literature, that you're keeping "what got popular enough to be kept active or recorded, plus some stuff that got saved by accident" and comparing it to "pretty much everything currently being produced." "Who else could wade through the sea of garbage you people produce?"
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Apr 5, 2021 01:14
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https://twitter.com/TheAncientWorld/status/1378937050448031744
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Apr 5, 2021 06:19
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Is the implication that the "Kaškan enemy" were the Israelites? Ḫatti was basically the middle of Anatolia, so seems pretty far afield. Also it sounds like the concept of the twelve tribes didn't come about until at least 500 years later.
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Apr 5, 2021 07:11
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Lead out in cuffs posted:Is the implication that the "Kaškan enemy" were the Israelites? Ḫatti was basically the middle of Anatolia, so seems pretty far afield. Also it sounds like the concept of the twelve tribes didn't come about until at least 500 years later. Why would that be the implication? Dude's probably doing a podcast series about the Hittites.
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Apr 5, 2021 07:20
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Kaskans were tribal people who lived to the north and east of the Hittites, who were never able to subjugate or pacify them. The Kaskans even sacked the Hittite capital Hattusa at one point. They were a constant threat that whenever Hittite kings were campaigning abroad. That they're reckoned as having 12 tribes here is probably just a coincidence and has nothing to do with the Israelites. Interestingly there are laws about how to deal with animals of friendly Kaskan tribes mixing with animals of Hittites while on pasture, so the relationship with them wasn't always hostile. Many thanks to CrypticFox for recommending Life and Society In The Hittite World by Trevor Bryce in this thread (or the cspam ancient history thread, I don't remember)! Grevling fucked around with this message at 07:42 on Apr 5, 2021 |
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Apr 5, 2021 07:38
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CommonShore posted:There was no way that an author could try to write a story to become a "best seller" before the possibility of mechanical reproduction. I'm just spitballing here but before the growth of the middle class your market is mostly just the aristocracy, so selling alot less copies at a higher price point seems to be a valid way of meeting this criteria. IMO the criteria itself is bad though, it implies you could have two identical works produced for different reasons and one would be a novel and the other not, which flies in the face of the death of the author. I'm just some idiot though.
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Apr 5, 2021 10:42
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Death of the author isn't the unified theory of literary criticism, you aren't forced to always reflexively, blindly apply it, and neither should you.
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Apr 5, 2021 13:39
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If that's the stumbling block for you just pretend I left out that part, it's not really central to the argument.
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Apr 5, 2021 14:37
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Weka posted:I'm just spitballing here but before the growth of the middle class your market is mostly just the aristocracy, so selling alot less copies at a higher price point seems to be a valid way of meeting this criteria. Naw it's a good question. Consider that the conditions of production also include the motivations of the people doing the production, not just the author, and those commercial pressures have a ton of subtle influences on art. In this case it's more about whether there's even a commerical book-buying public. Before the press, almost all books were made to order (big exceptions were things like psalters, which scribes knew that they could reliably sell). Broadly speaking, it wasn't possible to hear about a book, walk into a stationer's shop, and buy it. Books mostly went into private libraries and stayed there. Actually, the fact that Don Quixote could amass a collection of books is one of the characterization points that Cervantez seems to make about his modern world compared to that of his protagonist's ancestors. The number of books being produced went up orders of magnitude in the late 16th century for a handful of reasons including more refined printing/paper production processes and increased literacy. There are a few hundred manuscripts of The Tale of Genji produced over centuries - more copies of Don Quixote would have been produced in the very first run on the press. Here's the other part of the argument: when we read these proto-novels there actually is something different about them from the modern novel genre as we're accustomed to it. Sidney's Arcadia and Don Quixote were written at close to the same time, and they use entirely different kinds of prose storytelling. E.g. If a reader gets to read one story out of Mallory, that's self-contained and satisfying in itself. Even the eponymous death of Arthur can stand alone. Don Quixote has a greater narrative unity. Mallory and Arcadia are also about fantastical worlds and super-human heroes, whereas Don Quixote is about our world, even at its most fantastic. The best analogy I can think of is comparing extremely early film (maybe The Great Train Robbery?) to something like Metropolis - sure they're both the same form, but there are different artistic conventions driving Metropolis, which is much more like our modern expectations for a "movie." (think about the different expectations that "movie," "film," and "cinema" all produce). So what historians of the novel see is that in the century following Don Quixote we have a rapid growth of commercially-backed prose storytelling which correlates with the rise of modern liberalism. They call this kind of storytelling "the novel" because in all of recorded history before Don Quixote there are like 5 stories that people argue as being maybe novels, and in the century following it there are more than it's worth bothering to list in pretty much every European language that was producing literary texts. Admittedly there is some circular logic here - namely that "Don Quixote is the first novel because we base our definition of the novel on Don Quixote," but the differences between prose romance and ~novels~ are real. My personal stakes in this discussion aren't deep, though I find it super interesting. When I'm teaching people about this stuff I want them a) not to call any prose fiction text a "novel," and b) I use Don Quixote because it was the first "novel" that tons of people actually read and that people care about. Maybe there were "novels" before that, but that's when I say "ok, do an analysis of both texts and make your argument."
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Apr 5, 2021 15:58
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MuffiTuffiWuffi posted:I looked this up on the Great Courses site and whoa, they're asking for $150 for the audio version, $235 for streaming video, and $270 for DVD. That's an insane price differential between their site and Audible's $35. Also apparently Great Courses Plus is $20 for a subscription, and that includes video. What the hell is going on with this pricing.  (she can afford to drop three hundo on some DVDs and it makes her happy and keeps her 90-year-old brain busy, but I always want to turn her onto the cheap subscription models and hook her laptop up to her tv for output...)
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Apr 5, 2021 16:59
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I feel like the 'commercial' criteria is a problem because it's way too loosey goosey and requires you to prove something about the author's economic situation external to the book. Moreover, I think it excludes a vast number of things that are definitely novels. Does it have to be for a profit at all? Are none of the novels in National Novel Writing Month actually novels until someone buys a copy? What about other people who write novels as hobbies, it's one of the generic things for Retired People to do? If you're being paid by a rich patron does that count as 'commercial' or not? What about if you have a patreon? Or if you're employed by a university - does it matter the details of how and why the university allocates funds? Does Lucian of Samosata count as writing 'commercially'? What's the historical evidence for him getting/not getting compensation for his works? Tunicate fucked around with this message at 18:10 on Apr 5, 2021 |
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Apr 5, 2021 18:04
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steinrokkan posted:Death of the author isn't the unified theory of literary criticism, you aren't forced to always reflexively, blindly apply it, and neither should you. Someone did say 'Death of the Author was a suggestion, not a divine commandment.' The mediums available do influence the kind of stories told and sold in them, I'd wager. People who grow up reading full-length novels rather than short stories or self-contained tales are likely to try to write more novels than short stories. Same for people who watch plays at the ampitheatre, puppet shows at the fair, animal cruelty at the circus, etc.
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Apr 5, 2021 18:42
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Tunicate posted:I feel like the 'commercial' criteria is a problem because it's way too loosey goosey and requires you to prove something about the author's economic situation external to the book. Moreover, I think it excludes a vast number of things that are definitely novels. Keep in mind that the "DQx is the first novel" conversation is a genre question ("novel" is a genre, especially in the historical context, "extended prose fiction" is the form), and genre 100% of the time is a loosey-goosey discussion. "Is it a novel?" is the exact same kind of question as "is it science fiction or fantasy?" The commercial aspect isn't about profit, as much as it's about the implied reader: appealing to a commercialized, literate reading public mediated by booksellers. Patronage is the best example of the difference - if you're writing to please a patron you're looking to please one person, vs writing to please the public sphere, or at least writing with the public sphere in mind as an implied reader. There are also lots of situations where authors produced literary works for private or coterie consumption as opposed to public consumption. We don't need to know much about the author's economic situation to establish this. Sidney was obviously not concerned with the public because he didn't bother to get his prose romance Arcadia printed and it seems to have been produced for his household - it stayed in a manuscript until after his famous death, when it went public and people made money off of it. Other authors walked their poo poo down to a bookseller and got it printed so that lots of people could read it, and they got paid for it. That shows intention right there. Then we can look at situations like your NaNoWriMo example where prose fiction was produced that, even if it wasn't destined for publication, it was written following the examples of texts that were produced to that end.
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Apr 5, 2021 18:50
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"Death of the author" just means that the author's extra-textual interpretation of their own work isn't inherently privileged, or, if you prefer, that meaning is introduced by the act of reading. That is to say: what matters isn't what the author meant to say, but what they did say. It's a principle that's not applicable when talking about the creative process itself, where the whole point is the relationship between what the author means to say and the results of their attempt. Expectations about the audience definitely influence the formal aspects of art. Some attributes of the novel can be understood as a response to the author's knowledge that they are able to present their work to mass audiences, provided it conforms to certain technological and economic limitations.
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Apr 5, 2021 18:52
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So, intended audience is the general public, and also written with the intent of profiting materially from it. Then Bellum Gallicum definitely qualifies as a novel, of the 'fictional events loosely based on a true story' sort.
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Apr 5, 2021 19:26
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Tunicate posted:So, intended audience is the general public, and also written with the intent of profiting materially from it. Then Bellum Gallicum definitely qualifies as a novel, of the 'fictional events loosely based on a true story' sort. Someone could make the argument perhaps. It feels like a stretch to me because it doesn't seem to be participating in any kind of genre tradition. Note that "non-fiction novel" is a 20th century concept, and it doesn't really work as a Roman a Clef narrative either. Consider as well that there are lots of eighteenth-century novels (by e.g. Sara Fielding) that take classical narratives and rewrite, and restructure them, as novels. But I stand by my position that mechancial reproduction is a necessity for the act of writing extended prose narratives directly to the public. For something like Bellum Gallicum it's more likely that Caesar is writing to an elite audience of senatorial and military-class readers with the hope of his points passing from them through patronage and military networks to influence public opinion (compare to Martin Luther's methods of courting public opinion). It's just a different context and constraint. Pre-press writing for the public sphere tends to be shorter - so it's cheap and easy to copy - and written for oral presentation. But I'm not going to shout anyone down. If you write an essay examining Bellum Gallicum through the lens of novel criticism, I'll read it. We might learn something interesting by the attempt.
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Apr 5, 2021 19:44
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My understanding is that Caesar had his supporters (or slaves? idk) read his works aloud in the forum, to make sure his exploits stayed fresh in the minds of the citizens who he was trying to woo. Definitely not the same as printing a hundred thousand copies for all the middle class inhabitants of the city, but it was a mass market work.
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Apr 5, 2021 19:49
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cheetah7071 posted:My understanding is that Caesar had his supporters (or slaves? idk) read his works aloud in the forum, to make sure his exploits stayed fresh in the minds of the citizens who he was trying to woo. Definitely not the same as printing a hundred thousand copies for all the middle class inhabitants of the city, but it was a mass market work. In a similar vein, Ancient Greek works (generally poetry) were frequently read aloud at festivals to large crowds. This wasn't just limited to a couple of classic works like the Iliad either, although those were probably the most popular and most common. There was one philosopher who's name I am forgetting (possibly Xenophanes but I can't find a citation for that), who complained that the Olympic festival was filled with bad poets trying to get you to listen to readings of their works. The ancient world had a mass media culture, it was just experienced in a very different way than a modern person who sits down to read a novel.
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Apr 5, 2021 20:48
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It has to be from the nouvelle region of France otherwise it's sparkling long-form prose.
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Apr 5, 2021 21:01
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Grevling posted:Many thanks to CrypticFox for recommending Life and Society In The Hittite World by Trevor Bryce in this thread (or the cspam ancient history thread, I don't remember)! That was this thread, I never venture into cspam for any reason.
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Apr 5, 2021 21:03
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I bet Caesar-style prose fluff pieces were very common for politicians a long way from home who wanted to stay fresh in the mind of the populace. Caesar's just got preserved because he's one of the most important figures in western history and a master of latin prose to boot.
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Apr 5, 2021 21:04
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That and I imagine a significant issue was that far less of your potential audience could actually read. And even those who could may prefer to listen to readings and watch performances.
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Apr 6, 2021 05:33
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Ghost Leviathan posted:That and I imagine a significant issue was that far less of your potential audience could actually read. And even those who could may prefer to listen to readings and watch performances. This really depends on time and place, Late Republic-Early Imperial urban Rome was a highly literate society. And they had some pretty novel-like works that were not really written for the aristocracy; I don't think the Satyricon was aiming for a patrician audience, for example. I do have a question though, could the use of slave copyists made ancient "books" more affordable than their medieval equivalents?
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Apr 6, 2021 06:16
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Guildencrantz posted:Honestly it's not even an anachronism, that's just not how ruling-class ideologies work ever. It's extremely rare for the people who benefit to be truly cynical about this stuff. Of course knights genuinely believed in chivalry, precisely because it said they were special and good and badass protectors of the common folk, even when they did nothing to uphold its theoretical tenets. If there's an appealing worldview that not only justifies your privileged position in the social order, but makes you feel good about it, why wouldn't you buy into it? I agree with you, I was thinking about something I read recently about 19th century traditionalists who believed that organized religion shouldn't be questioned as an institution because it's useful for keeping society together, while privately they as a select elite could be atheists. In general I think you're completely right. CrypticFox posted:That was this thread, I never venture into cspam for any reason. Sorry for insinuating that, I do obviously.
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Apr 6, 2021 08:20
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FishFood posted:This really depends on time and place, Late Republic-Early Imperial urban Rome was a highly literate society. And they had some pretty novel-like works that were not really written for the aristocracy; I don't think the Satyricon was aiming for a patrician audience, for example. What I've understood, the monks employed at copying works weren't really much different from Roman educated slaves.
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Apr 6, 2021 11:50
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ChubbyChecker posted:What I've understood, the monks employed at copying works weren't really much different from Roman educated slaves.
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Apr 6, 2021 12:11
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ChubbyChecker posted:What I've understood, the monks employed at copying works weren't really much different from Roman educated slaves. I mean yeah, it's not like monks were paid as such in terms of, like, coins. They got food and board. Unlike a slave there was nothing theoretically stopping them just, you know, leaving, though what would they do then in order to live? Even talking about people getting paid (for most people) is something that only starts becoming significant rather later on.
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Apr 6, 2021 12:44
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