Okay, so the reader is no Leonard Teale whose resonant baritone voice was known to my generation from the long-running police drama "Hpmicide", but this video clip about literature is a huge intellectual effort. [Buy the transcript]
By the end of this video, you will know all the great works of literature, literary movements, as well as some of the most literary minds from around the world. The video has 3 major parts and 11 sections.
Part 1 gives the answer the most fundamental question. Why are humans the only species who tells stories? What functions do stories have in our evolution? It also highlight some important events in history that shaped the way we tell stories, and the literary movements of the last 4,000 years.
Part 2 deals with the origin of storytelling and how it is rooted in nature. The most fundamental event in a human life is death or the awareness of it. So this part discusses storytelling in four segments each on the topic of death, wars, sex and laughter. In other words, humans woke up to the realisation of death, so the first stories are stories of mortality and immortality. Then we humans moved to wars and wrote epics that lamented the demise of an empire or celebrated their triumphs. Since the victors got the spoils and we moved to tell stories of sex and mating, romance became an important topic of storytelling. In other words, how boys meet girls. With sex came laughter, so storytelling entertained us through comedy.
Part 3 moves away from nature-inflicted tales towards human-centred stories, as in when storytelling meets rationality and humanism. So instead of gods and nature, we humans became in charge of our own destiny. The age of reason also resulted in a counter-enlightenment movement of romanticism which took us back to nature. Then came realism, in which ordinary people became the heroes of stories, not some king or general. Then we moved to naturalism in which evolutionary biology became the window through which stories are told. This was followed by modernism in which we told stories through psychology. And finally magical realism which took us back to the early humans when gods and demons interfered with our stories.
Part 4 again moves away from humanism into what's termed as post-humanism. Here the whole idea of truth telling is questioned. If humanism tried to clarify and solidify things that humans are the only gods on earth, posthumanism, and postmodernism partly fuelled by quantum physics, muddied the water so we no longer know what's going on, despite our scientific and technological advancement, or in some cases because of that.
In this course, the real hero is literature or storytelling itself. Human mortality gave birth to storytelling. Conflicts gave it its fuel and energy. Sex added flavour. Laughter made it reflective. Then came reason to dominate storytelling, through physical reality, biological truths, psychological depth, and finally quantum magical thinking. And today literature seems a bit muddled as it has questioned truth-telling. You could say literature is suffering from old-age Alzheimer. So the question is can literature and storytelling survive robots?
