It is a tempera on panel painted in Milan in It is one of many images created in response to Biblical teaching and creates a visual representation of the written world, a theme that we will further explore as both art and literature grow in popularity. Ophelia, by Sir John Everett Millais, was created as a visual representation of the character Ophelia depicted in Shakespeare's Hamlet.
This scene shows Ophelia singing while floating in the river Denmark before she drowns, a scene well known to those who have read and studied Hamlet. Procession of Characters from Shakespeare's Plays , Formerly attributed to Daniel Maclise, —, Irish, unknown artist, nineteenth century, ca. Because Shakespeare is considered to be the greatest poet and play write of all time, it seems appropriate that more than one of my selected works be devoted to him.
This, much like the previous painting, is a representation of all of the major characters of Shakespeare's most famous plays. Done on oil and canvas by an unknown artist, it shows how these characters can be imagined and seen on stage.
This sculpture done by Rodin depicts images from the 14th century epic, "Inferno" by Dante. I've worked as a short-order cook, construction laborer, crab fisherman, janitor, bartender, pedi-cab driver, copyeditor, and more. I've written and ghostwritten several published books and articles, but no matter where I've gone or what I've done to earn my living, there's always been literature and learning as the constant in my life. This is so interesting! As an artist, graduated in Art from UW- Madison you make such a great point.
When I first started writing, this is exactly how I thought of it, only in a more subconscious way. Your post puts what I have been trying to do into a clearly stated form and gives me a lot to think about.
In word flash fictions, I am limited to the amount of words I can use to set up the story and move the protagonist through a space usually to a cliffhanger. Your post makes me think that I should take the exercise one step further and update the post after improving on it. Even if no one comes back to read. We live in a time where definitions are one click away.
Thanks for this! Terrific post and topic! My brother is an artist, with paint as his medium. Hi August. Art is definitely communication and I am very much aware that the proper word in our writing can make a major difference in understanding the concept we convey.
What say you? I see it as the long game — a dialogue with the subsequent generations who will hopefully learn from our mistakes of the past. What would be proactive is helping others develop strong voices so that we citizens are no longer just arguing fallaciously on Facebook and Twitter over the daily outrage, while unsatisfactory leaders ride our division towards the next election.
The antidote to impunity is accountability. We all know that. But accountability can only be demanded if our voices have consequence.
A lone voice, or the voices of the educated elite, cannot legitimately speak for the voiceless, and so cannot be truly consequential. If a voice is a vote, then they must be raised, as a majority, in demanding truer representation and better leadership. So there is clearly work to be done.
Not all art must be inclusive, but no art should be exclusive. Neither literature nor creative writing must ever be privileged as a luxury, for our story will be too easily controlled that way.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum. Of all the museums, the Louvre was the most visited. If we are to solve the great issues of our time, design fiction and futures-thinking are necessary to change existing systems and structures and to improve quality of life in a sustainabl I accept. With everything that's going on in the world, it's easy to question the value of telling stories or making sculptures.
Take action on UpLink. Explore context. Explore the latest strategic trends, research and analysis. Why are we here? Why was I created?
As a creative writing practitioner and teacher, I wrestle with this constantly. The answers, perhaps, are found in art itself. One success proves the potential of all the rest. Egyptian scribes, Soviet bureaucrats, and junior executives in New York City live and respond to life in the same ways; the lives of farmers or miners or hunters vary only within narrow limits.
So the themes of literature have at once an infinite variety and an abiding constancy. They can be taken from myth, from history, or from contemporary occurrence, or they can be pure invention but even if they are invented, they are nonetheless constructed from the constant materials of real experience, no matter how fantastic the invention.
As time goes on, literature tends to concern itself more and more with the interior meanings of its narrative, with problems of human personality and human relationships. This can be presented explicitly, where the characters talk about what is going on in their heads; either ambiguously and with reserve, as in the novels of Henry James, or overtly, as in those of Dostoyevsky.
Literature, however, is not solely concerned with the concrete, with objective reality, with individual psychology, or with subjective emotion. Some deal with abstract ideas or philosophical conceptions.
Much purely abstract writing is considered literature only in the widest sense of the term, and the philosophical works that are ranked as great literature are usually presented with more or less of a sensuous garment. In short, most philosophical works that rank as great literature do so because they are intensely human.
Sometimes the pretense of purely abstract intellectual rigor is in fact a literary device. Relation of form to content. Throughout literary history, many great critics have pointed out that it is artificial to make a distinction between form and content, except for purposes of analytical discussion.
Form determines content. Content determines form. The issue is, indeed, usually only raised at all by those critics who are more interested in politics, religion, or ideology than in literature; thus, they object to writers who they feel sacrifice ideological orthodoxy for formal perfection, message for style. But style cannot really be said to exist on paper at all; it is the way the mind of the author expresses itself in words.
Since words represent ideas, there cannot be abstract literature unless a collection of nonsense syllables can be admitted as literature. Even the most avant-garde writers associated with the Cubist or Non-Objective painters used language, and language is meaning, though the meaning may be incomprehensible.
Sometimes an author, under the impression that he is simply polishing his style, may completely alter his content. As Flaubert worked over the drafts of Madame Bovary, seeking always the apposite word that would precisely convey his meaning, he lifted his novel from a level of sentimental romance to make it one of the great ironic tragedies of literature.
Yet, to judge from his correspondence, he seems never to have been completely aware of what he had done, of the severity of his own irony. Literature may be an art, but writing is a craft, and a craft must be learned. Talent, special ability in the arts, may appear at an early age; the special personality called genius may indeed be born, not made.
But skill in matching intention and expression comes with practice. They wrote spontaneously whatever came into their heads; but they wrote constantly, voluminously, and were, by their own standards, skilled practitioners. Objective-subjective expression. These structures are, however, quite simple and so cannot be said to determine the content. Yet their plays, and the poetry in which they are written, differ completely. Racine was a great romantic long before the age of Romanticism.
His characters are confused and tortured; his verse throbs like the heartbeats of his desperate heroines. He is a great sentimentalist in the best and deepest meaning of that word. Verse on any subject matter can of course be written purely according to formula. The eighteenth century in England saw all sorts of prose treatises cast in rhyme and metre, but this was simply applied patterning.
A similar revolution in taste was taking place all over Europe and also in China where the narrow pursuit of formula had almost destroyed poetry. Each had his own personal form. Time passes and the pendulum of taste swings. All form in literature is expressive. All expression has its own form, even when the form is a deliberate quest of formlessness.
The automatic writing cultivated by the Surrealists, for instance, suffers from the excessive formalism of the unconscious mind and is far more stereotyped than the poetry of the Neoclassicist Alexander Pope. Form simply refers to organization, and critics who attack form do not seem always to remember that a writer organizes more than words.
He organizes experience. Thus, his organization stretches far back in his mental process. Form is the other face of content, the outward, visible sign of inner spiritual reality. Folk and elite literature. In preliterate societies oral literature was widely shared; it saturated the society and was as much a part of living as food, clothing, shelter, or religion. In barbaric societies, the minstrel might be a courtier of the king or chieftain, and the poet who composed liturgies might be a priest.
But the oral performance itself was accessible to the whole community. With the invention of writing this separation was accelerated until finally literature was being experienced individually by the elite reading a book , while folklore and folk song were experienced orally and more or less collectively by the illiterate common people. Elite literature continuously refreshes itself with materials drawn from the popular.
Almost all poetic revivals, for instance, include in their programs a new appreciation of folk song, together with a demand for greater objectivity. On the other hand folk literature borrows themes and, very rarely, patterns from elite literature. Many of the English and Scottish ballads that date from the end of the Middle Ages and have been preserved by oral tradition share plots and even turns of phrase with written literature. A very large percentage of these ballads contain elements that are common to folk ballads from all over western Europe; central themes of folklore, indeed, are found all over the world.
Whether these common elements are the result of diffusion is a matter for dispute. They do, however, represent great psychological constants, archetypes of experience common to the human species, and so these constants are used again and again by elite literature as it discovers them in folklore. Modern popular literature. There is a marked difference between true popular literature, that of folklore and folk song, and the popular literature of modern times. Popular literature today is produced either to be read by a literate audience or to be enacted on television or in the cinema; it is produced by writers who are members, however lowly, of an elite corps of professional literates.
Thus, popular literature no longer springs from the people; it is handed to them. Their role is passive. At the best they are permitted a limited selectivity as consumers. Folk songs and folk tales began somewhere in one human mind. They were developed and shaped into the forms in which they are now found by hundreds of other minds as they were passed down through the centuries. Folk song has always been popular with bohemian intellectuals, especially political radicals who certainly are an elite.
Since World War II the influence of folk song upon popular song has not just been great; it has been determinative. Popular fiction and drama, westerns and detective stories, films and television serials, all deal with the same great archetypal themes as folktales and ballads, though this is seldom due to direct influence; these are simply the limits within which the human mind works. The number of people who have elevated the formulas of popular fiction to a higher literary level is surprisingly small.
Examples are H. The latter half of the twentieth century has seen an even greater change in popular literature. Writing is a static medium: that is to say, a book is read by one person at a time; it permits recollection and anticipation; the reader can go back to check a point or move ahead to find out how the story ends. In radio, television, and the cinema the medium is fluent; the audience is a collectivity and is at the mercy of time.
It cannot pause to reflect or to understand more fully without missing another part of the action, nor can it go back or forward. Marshall McLuhan in his book Understanding Media became famous for erecting a whole structure of aesthetic, sociological, and philosophical theory upon this fact. Even the most transitory television serial was written down before it was performed, and the script can be consulted in the files.
In a sense it was more fluent than music, because it was harder to remember. Man in mass society becomes increasingly a creature of the moment, but the reasons for this are undoubtedly more fundamental than his forms of entertainment. Social and economic conditions. Literature, like all other human activities, necessarily reflects current social and economic conditions.
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