Welcome to my blog! As this is my first post, I will use this opportunity to introduce myself and the nature of this blog. My name is Ellen and I am an undergraduate student of English Literature. I want to work in the publishing industry, specifically in an editorial role. That's why I think it is important to create this blog, so that I can have a showcase of my writing readily available for prospective employers. Additionally, I'm sure it will be very therapeutic to write down my thoughts.
'But what are these thoughts?' I hear you ask. Well, to tell you that, I must first tell you a little bit more about myself. I had recently been having some difficulty reconciling my love of great literature with my love of pop-culture media. How can I truly call myself a student of literature if there are some evenings I would prefer to watch some absurd anime or whatever is next on my Netflix list than go anywhere near a book? It seemed to me that this was an impossible contradiction and I was therefore a disgrace to my university's English department.
After thinking this way for several months, I eventually came to the realisation that 'high-culture' literature and 'low-' or 'pop-culture' media are not mutually exclusive. I think I knew this deep down, since I have studied Communication & Culture and Media Studies in the past, but for some reason it didn't seem obvious to me. For it is not the age or prestige of the medium that makes a story great, but the quality of the narrative and its characters. This seems like such a simple and obvious idea, but we are taught from such a young age that canon texts are somehow superior to any modern-day storytelling that it doesn't necessarily occur to some people for a long time. From King Lear to Breaking Bad, from A Tale of Two Cities to The Walking Dead by Telltale Games, the universal element that unites these cultural texts is their quality. The medium doesn't matter if the storytelling is strong and the characters are engaging. The fact is, literature is simply the oldest version of storytelling media. If it was available, who is to say Mary Shelley wouldn't love Orange is the New Black? Or that H.G. Wells wouldn't watch Star Trek or play video games? Goodness knows Tolkien would have been the greatest Dungeon Master of all time if he'd lived one more year to see the invention of Dungeons & Dragons.
In all seriousness, the point is that modern media may have evolved and moved on from the potential restrictions of literature, but they certainly still owe it as their ancestor, the original form of massively consumed narratives. And this brings me to the intention of this blog. As a lover of both literature and modern media, what is more entertaining than spotting an allusion to literature where you would least expect it? There are some films, games, and television programmes that acknowledge their debt to the written word with a silent nod in the form of a passing reference or familiar character. For students of literature such as myself, these are exciting little Easter eggs that make you feel at once knowledgeable for recognising the allusion and as though you understand the text better for it. It is the modern equivalent of Renaissance poets using classical allusions in their work, but without quite as much of the elitism and exclusivity. I will use this blog to document examples of this phenomenon that I find in everyday life and evaluate what they mean for the worlds of literature and modern media.
I already have a few examples in mind, so keep an eye out for those in the near future!
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