Lydia Gore-Jones

I'm an academic, and a lover of literature.

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    Latest Articles

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    Can the Artificial Be Art?

    Artificial Intelligence has already caused changes in the way we conduct our lives. Will it change the way we make and perceive art? It has been predicted, for example, that AI will replace many jobs in the film industry. AI has been used in many types of writing and "artwork" already: legal and business documents, advertising, students' assignments …
    What is your definition of art? Can something created by AI be called art? How would AI affect the creation and appreciation of the arts, especially visual and verbal arts? Would anyone want to explore this topic, philosophically and prophetically?

    • Can't wait to write about this. I have thoughts. – Sunni Ago 6 months ago
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    • The thing about AI art, from my perspective, is that a lot of it is very boilerplate. An AI program can write a story or draw a picture if given a prompt, but there will always be something about it that marks it as computer-generated. I know that, in my experience, if I'm reading an essay that was written partly using AI, I can immediately tell where the AI sections begin and end. This is why I'm skeptical of AI's ability to ever truly replace human creativity. The more rote and repetitive stuff, on the other hand, I can see AI taking over (which I know from experience has many of my programmer friends worried). – Debs 4 months ago
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    Alice Munro - her mastery of the short story genre

    Any Alice Munro fans out there? It is due time to honour her memory with an article on her mastery of the short story genre. Your article could focus on one aspect of her story telling. For example:

    Her narrative techniques.
    The Nobel Prize committee characterised her writing thus: "A brief short story can often cover decades, summarising a life, as she moves deftly between different periods. No wonder Alice Munro is often able to say more in 30 pages than an ordinary novelist is capable of in 300. She is a virtuoso of the elliptical and … the master of the contemporary short story."
    What techniques does she use to create scope, depth and complexity in a short space of 30 pages?

    Her characters.
    To quote the Nobel Prize presentation speech again, "Munro writes about what are usually called ordinary people, but her intelligence, compassion and astonishing power of perception enable her to give their lives a remarkable dignity – indeed redemption – since she shows how much of the extraordinary can fit into that jam-packed emptiness called The Ordinary."
    In particular, Munro writes about women and family relationships. What kinds of female characters end up in her stories? What do they have in common? What about her characters that leaves an impression on the reader?

    Her favourite themes.
    Are there certain major themes that emerge across the large number of her stories? What are they? Did her treatment of the themes change over the decades of her career and did they reflect changes and transformations of Canadian society?

    You could do a thematic or character study across the corpus of her works, or offer a literary analysis of one or two particular stories.

    • Unfortunately, her knowledge of the abuse her daughter suffered at the hands of her step-father may recontexualize some of her works that may be important to consider. A link to an article about the abuse: https://www.npr.org/2024/07/08/nx-s1-5032827/alice-munro-daughter-abuse-stepfather – Siothrún 3 months ago
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    17th century poetry - the Metaphysicals

    The Metaphysicals refer to a loose collective of poets such as John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Abraham Cowley, Richard Crashaw and Henry Vaughan, who represent some of the highest achievements of the 17th-century English literature. A most conspicuous feature of their style can be described as using images concrete and tangible, richly appealing to human senses and emotions. The label, “Metaphysical,” was attached to them by later generations. “Metaphysical,” as a style label, refers to the so-called “figures of thought” marked by the use of conceits, witticism and paradoxes. But the term still fails to capture the ‘physical’ side of the Metaphysicals – that is, the corporeality, even fleshiness, in their using concrete images and metaphors on the one hand, and expressing sensational feelings and emotions on the other. How, then, do the ‘physical’ and the ‘metaphysical’ meet in 17th century Renaissance poetry? What makes the Metaphysicals 'metaphysical'? This topic can be explored either by studies of common characteristics of these poets' works or by close criticism of individual poets.

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      Latest Comments

      Not only TV shows and movies about AI, I find the entire Sci-Fi fiction genre, both in books and film/TV, is overall marked by a pessimism about the future. Humans are both obsessed with new technology of the future and fearful of their own demise because of technology. I wonder what the hidden truth there is beneath that psychological paradox.

      Movies & Media as the Source of AI Phobia

      Talking about adaptation of Tolkien’s world, I think there’s a crucial element that is lacking in the Rings of Power series. And that is, a story in the form of an adventure, a journey, a quest. Both the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit are greatly loved mainly because of the adventure. Everything unfolds as part of the protagonists’ encounters in their adventure. The readers also share their experience of the adventure. But that element is missing in the story of the new TV adaptations.

      The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is a Fascinating Case Study in the Challenges of Adaptation

      Thank you for this great article! I wish more comments were on the topic of this article, about the issue of adaptation — adaptation of literary work for television, a work of the past for a contemporary audience, etc.— and not on how they love or passionately hate the show. 😀

      The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is a Fascinating Case Study in the Challenges of Adaptation

      That’s a lovely image, “burnished into a soft, many-sided glow”. 🙂

      To the Lighthouse and Virginia Woolf's Rebellion against the Traditional Novel

      Thank you kindly!

      To the Lighthouse and Virginia Woolf's Rebellion against the Traditional Novel

      This is lovely writing! … although I haven’t seen any of these films. I can’t help but think that the theme of your article brought to surface a deep human instinct— the association of banishment and exile, forced or self afflicted, with transgression, pain and death. They are almost synonymous.

      "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs" and the nature of Death

      Yes, they are all modernists, difficult but satisfying reads.😀

      To the Lighthouse and Virginia Woolf's Rebellion against the Traditional Novel

      I certainly agree!

      To the Lighthouse and Virginia Woolf's Rebellion against the Traditional Novel