Ups and downs...
Shaping up.
Kurt Vonnegut claimed that his prettiest contribution to culture wasn’t a popular novel like “Cat’s Cradle” or “Slaughterhouse-Five,” but a largely forgotten master’s thesis he wrote while studying anthropology at the University of Chicago, Ann Swanson reports on washingtonpost
.com.
The thesis argued that a main character has ups and downs that can be graphed to reveal the taxonomy of a story, as well as something about the culture it comes from.
“The fundamental idea is that stories have shapes which can be drawn on graph paper, and that the shape of a given society’s stories is at least as interesting as the shape of its pots or spearheads,” Vonnegut said.
Sit back for some fun with Vonnegut as he shows a class what he means in this video: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/02/09/kurt-vonnegut-graphed-the-worlds-most-popular-stories/
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