Welcome back! It has been a long and wonderful Christmas break, but now it is time to get back to work. Today we are looking at music and it's influence on the literary world.
If someone were to walk up to you on the street and ask you to describe, in your own words, what literature is, you might be quite taken aback, wouldn't you? But such a question makes one think... What is literature? Normally what comes to mind is a bunch of boring old-timey stuff that makes your head spin trying to read the first word. But literature today is so much more than that. Literature today contains everything from poems to novels to short stories to movie scripts and, you guessed it, MUSIC!!
Back in 1600-something, William Shakespeare was writing a ton of plays that consisted of what high school students thought to be super boring shit that was difficult to read and just plain terrible. What those high school kids didn't realize was that this type of stereotypical literature (Shakespeare is the first thing that popped into your mind, wasn't it?) was not only freaking vulgar and hilarious if you decode it into modern terms, but also a stepping stone into more advanced types of writing. From Shakespearean literature blossoms the Enlightenment, which brought the corrupt political regimes to the public view. The Revolutionary War flipped the literary world on it's head yet again, bringing about the Romanticism period that cleared the path for literature to develop into the exciting beast it is today.
Now how does all this tie into music? Well, very simply in fact. Music and literature are one in the same. Mainly because they can both express our deepest thoughts that we would never say in public. The plot lines of both books and songs can be described as invigorating, meaningful, and over all, emotions. That, my friends, is the simplest connection between music and literature.
That's is a nice way of thinking about what literature is and what many other subjects it is then just books.
ReplyDelete-Kristina Hendrick (Virtual TA)