“Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it…”*
Today we revisit James– “DawnPaladin” on Deviant Art— and his handy reference for readers, viewers, and listeners: The Periodic Table of Storytelling.
Click here for James’ explanation, again on the image there for a larger version; and click here for the source material at our old friends TV Tropes… which has been materially updated/expanded since our last visit.
* Hannah Arendt
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As we prepare to tell tantalizing tales, we might send pious but modern birthday greetings to Laurence Sterne; he was born on this date in 1713. An Anglican clergyman known in his own time for his published sermons and memoirs, Sterne is surely best remembered these days for his novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.
Tristram Shandy was roughly received in England on its publication. It parodies accepted narrative form, playing with narrative time and voice, and includes a healthy dose of “bawdy” humor– which led to its being largely dismissed by the likes of Samuel Johnson as being too corrupt. But it was a hit on the Continent; indeed, Voltaire declared it “clearly superior to Rabelais.” That said, Sterne’s real influence had a longer fuse. As Italo Calvino observed, Tristram Shandy is the “undoubted progenitor of all avant-garde novels of our century,” one that, in its challenges to the formal concept of the novel, had powerful influence on Modernist writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, and more contemporary writers like Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace.
Joshua Reynolds’ portrait of Sterne (1760)