On Thu, 18 Mar 2010, Doug Henwood wrote:
> Like I said, I'm usually allergic to these implied Golden Age
> narratives, but I think he's got a point. It's not just big money
> stuff like the movies. It's fiction too, isn't it?
Sidestepping both the film and literature discussions for the moment, I would just like to point out in passing that if you really wanted a fictional Picture of Society at this Moment in History in the Dickens/Balzac/Tolstoy mode with a cast of dozens, the best place to look today would probably be TV, things like The Sopranos or The Wire. Nowadays maybe Mad Men, which is doing the same with recent history, showing us the enormous gulf of the little details. The long-arc fiction series is an art form that has combined both innovation and seriousness in recent decades.
Maybe part of the problem is asking the same form to fulfill the same function in a different era.
Michael