Which Artistic Medium is Best To Understand The World Better??

Is it the Short Story, the Poem, the Novel, the Play or the Movie????

Novelist Don DeLillo says:

"It [the novel] is the form that allows a writer the greatest opportunity to explore human experience....For that reason, reading a novel is potentially a significant act. Because there are so many varieties of human experience, so many kinds of interaction between humans, and so many ways of creating patterns in the novel that can’t be created in a short story, a play, a poem or a movie. The novel, simply, offers more opportunities for a reader to understand the world better, including the world of artistic creation. That sounds pretty grand, but I think it’s true."

taken from the source for "Don DeLillo" in Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_DeLillo

One could probably use all of these from a socionomic perspective. Or maybe use socionomics to predict what is likely to sell. My suspicion is that we should get more gratuitous violence today with a negative social mood. That would be reflected in all forms of literature. It is not so much reading literature to try to understand the world, but analyzing what sells to understand the world. We would also get better sales from fantasy and magical writing rather than realism. I haven't done this analysis myself, but I think there are trends that one should be able to correlate with negative and positive (bearish and bullish) social mood.

All art forms have their benefits.

Milton and Shakespeare show us what poetry can do (Shakespeare in the dramatic world, Milton with epic).

The lyric poets like Donne, Shelley, Keats, are amazing for their beauty.

Novelists like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Dickens, Eliot, Hugo, Proust - they have their way of capturing the sheer fullness of life.

Any art form has its special value in my opinion.

I think novels are the best way. Then you can have characters thinking. Surely thought is the end product of our world in many regards. The horror stories of Ramsey Campbell involve a lot of internal reactions to the visible world.

RT, I am inclined to vote for the novel as my choice.

It takes all the artistic mediums in the world to understand the world

Quote:

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Originally Posted by tonywalt

It takes all the artistic mediums in the world to understand the world

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Word!

It is a bit like asking if one can achieve more out of a symphony or a string quartet. Or is it concerto versus sonata? Most great writers are particularly known at some particular form. I guarantee there are fewer epic poets than novelists these days.

For myself, great literature is so rare that I am willing to take it in any form where it appears, though I am not without biases of form I would prefer. We cannot expect a short story to have the same scope as a novel, or epic poetry to be as readable as a short story. Some forms require more effort from the reader.

You will not like everything, in fact only a very few will remain downright memorable. This could be anything from a play by Williams to a poem by Yeats. You do not have complete control over what you will love, or the form it will be found in, either.