/lit/ - Literature

>>16724243
Nice one OP

>>16706650
>then again he was a Leibniz specialist so I dunno
Fuck I laughed

>>16636807
>academia
>relevant

Ambiguity is the heart of literature. While films can retain ambiguity with regards to their themes, their characters' motivations, and even to some degree their plots, they cannot retain the semantic ambiguity which defines good poetry or the good novel. When we read a line from a good poem, we must construct its meaning for ourselves from only the words, and we must confront each possibility and select from among them (or perhaps retain the tension). When watching a film, by contrast, the filmmaker has already narrowed the range of ambiguity considerably.

To use a fairly trivial example, characters in novels are described in more or less detail. We are able to picture the character ourselves, within the limitations of that description. That is, if we know that Mrs. So and So is a hot piece of ass mommyfu, we are free (nay, we MUST) transform that description into something else in our minds. This does not necessarily mean picturing some specific hot maternal bitch; rather, it means taking agency to hold the contradictions of the medium within our own minds. In a film, however, the filmmaker revolves the ambiguity for the viewers, selecting one and only one sexy milf which the audience has no choice but to accept.