When I got into cinema there were several first-year undergraduate

my diary desu

>>9280680
literary theory is a retarded pseudo-science and a waste of time. Reading classic books, writing, and then comparing the books to your writing is the best way to get a true understanding of literature.

>>9280680
Poetics by Aristotle

>>9280691
>writing

>>9280680

Why do you want such a book, OP? Are you an aspiring writer?

>>9280680
I can't help you but can you help me and tell me the title of the book you're talking about?

>>9280691
Normally 'pseudo-science' refers to things that claim to be a science.

>>9280830
No, I'm an aspiring reader.

I don't have a vocabulary for describing literature, and I don't know how to compare literature. I don't even know what I'm supposed to compare (sentence construction? dialogue? what?) between written works to come to a conclusion about what I feel is better.

In film for example, fundamentally the same scenes and stories recur again and again in different films, because there's only so many scenes and stories. So to use scenes for example, what is judged is how the scene is directed, what decisions the director made, and to do that you have to consider the different elements previously mentioned, holistically, and of course your own tastes, to reach a conclusion about what is good and what is not.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGFer3-Aguw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fa4LaL_C6G4

Obviously though, a film is more than the sum of its parts.

Anyway, I don't see why literature would be any different.

>>9280871
I used 'Louis Giannetti - Understanding Movies' for my example text but there's plenty of others.

>>9280830
H. Porter Abbott's " Intro to Narrative Theory" (I think that's the title)

Harold Bloom's books.

There's really a whole heap. The thing that's different about literature to film, is that it's very very old. Literature is so well established that very few people write introductory textbooks, because literature has been talked about for centuries, millennia, from Aristotle to now.

There are fewer "basics" books available, because most people begin learning how to read in school, and literature becomes a matter of adding a couple extra reading skills along the way. Film is different, because most people don't learn anything formal about it until they study it as a specialised course.

"The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms" is a good place for learning about the parts and nominations of literature.

>>9280680
Try Terry Eagleton's How to Read Literature?

>>9280680
could you name a few of the books on cinema you would recommend to a complete pleb?

>>9280680
These are going to be less common because literature is harder to get into. People are already familiar with movies more than books. Also, movies function with visual cues that people use in real life. There is no real analog to books besides books. You could say speech, but speech isn't understood with the eyes.

Pudovkin and Eisenstien

>>9280924
the first scene is better by far
a third of the length, less blatant, and more evocative