Is Your Favorite TV Show Literature? Redefining Storytelling in the 21st Century

Okay, think about this. Can a 60-hour television series, you know, with all its sprawling character arcs, its really complex look at institutional failures, can that actually be considered more literary than, say, a very tightly focused 400-page novel? It’s a great question. And, uh, how about this one? How did a comic book, of all things, dealing with the intense trauma of the Holocaust, manage to redefine its entire medium? I mean, in winning the highest literary honors and proving that sequential art, pictures and words together, is actually a powerful language for, well, serious thought.

Right. And what if you’re playing a video game and you have to make just a morally devastating choice? Like, maybe sacrificing the entire world for the one person you love, or you’re just, you know, passively consuming entertainment there? Or you may be becoming something like a co-author. A co-author of a really profound tragedy, yeah.

Forced to live with the, uh, the ethical weight, the heaviness of your own decision within that story. These are the kinds of questions we’re getting into today. We’re going to be diving deep into the, um, the assumptions, the sort of gatekeeping, really, that separates what we traditionally call literature from what gets dismissed as entertainment.

And our mission, really, is to untag what we think are the three essential ingredients. The things that truly define great storytelling now, in the 21st century. And it doesn’t matter if that story comes bound in leather, or if it’s streaming on your TV, or, you know, rendered in a digital, interactive world you can explore.

Welcome to a new MagTalk from English Plus Podcast. So let’s start where this whole conversation usually gets, well, stuck. Let’s talk about that intimidating image of literature itself.

If I ask you right now to close your eyes and just picture the word literature, what comes to mind? Yeah, for most of us it’s a very specific thing, isn’t it? Almost, um, intimidating, like you said. It’s probably that heavy, leather-bound book. Maybe a bit dusty.

Sitting very precisely on a, you know, dark wood shelf. Right. Very serious.

It probably has that certain smell, too. Old paper, serious thought. And we instantly think of the classics.

The canon. Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Jane Austen. Works that have been, you know, vetted and stamped with approval over centuries by academics and tradition.

And it feels respectable. Definitely essential in many ways, but maybe also a bit static. Yeah.

Like something that belongs more in a museum. Something preserved from the past rather than something that’s, you know, alive and kicking and evolving right now, talking to our modern lives. Exactly.

And that feeling, that sort of respectability, it’s really upheld by what you could only call cultural gatekeeping. The problem, the friction, comes down to this historical requirement that for a story to get that fancy literary status, it absolutely had to arrive in one specific physical package. The codex.

The bound book. The codex, exactly. The physical object, the binding, somehow became the absolute prerequisite for intellectual seriousness.

So if it looked like a serious book, it could be treated as serious literature. Pretty much. If the story is packaged like that, it gets like automatic entry into the literary club.

But if it shows up in any other form, maybe it’s that amazing TV series you binged last weekend, or a graphic novel crafted with incredible detail, or even that video game that kept you up wrestling with moral choices. And then gets pushed aside. Right.

Automatically relegated to a different, and let’s be honest, historically lesser category. Just mere entertainment. Look, while that was maybe a neat and tidy distinction for, I don’t know, centuries, if you’ve engaged with any really ambitious stuff lately, any medium, you just know that distinction feels, well, kind of laughable now.

Obsolete. Completely obsolete. The stories being told on streaming platforms or through game consoles, they’re wrestling with themes just as deep, just as complex as anything written in the 19th century.

Sometimes more so, arguably. So that’s the essential shift, isn’t it? The one we need to encourage you, the listener, maybe consider making with us. We have to challenge this whole idea that literature is defined purely by its medium, by its container.

Yes. The core question really shouldn’t be, is it a book or what’s it bound in? It should be, what’s the quality of the story being told here? What if literature isn’t a fixed medium at all, but it’s actually a quality, a standard of, let’s say, complexity and insight? So the focus has to move away from the packaging, beyond the binding, and onto the bones of the story itself. Literature isn’t dying in the digital age.

Far from it. No, it’s absolutely thriving. It’s just changing shape.

It’s constantly evolving, adapting into these new technologically infused forms to tell really profound, really complex stories. It’s metamorphosing. Metamorphosing.

I like that. OK, let’s unpack this then. Let’s try and define what those essential bones, those core qualities really are.

If we’re going to ditch the book format as the only definition, how do we objectively identify a truly literary work, no matter the form? Right. We need some objective criteria, yeah. Things that work across different formats.

Now, academics could debate this forever, of course. I bet. But I think we can actually distill the shared traits.

The things that universally acclaimed literary works tend to have in common, whether they’re on a screen or in a book or played with a controller, and I think it comes down to three core ingredients. OK, lay them out for us. What’s the first essential ingredient for a story to really earn that literary label in this new view? OK, criterion one, complex characterization.

Literary stories, I mean, the really great ones, they are fundamentally obsessed with the messy, contradictory, often just baffling nature of being human. They tend to reject simple good versus evil archetypes. You know, the hero in the white hat, the villain twirling his mustache.

Instead, their characters are these tangled, sometimes painful webs of desire and fear and memory and just profound inconsistency. Yeah, I think we all recognize that in real life, right? Nobody is purely good or purely evil. We’re complicated.

We make compromises. We contradict ourselves all the time. So a great literary character has to kind of mirror that messiness.

Exactly. But think of classic characters like Hamlet or maybe closer to our time, a TV protagonist like Don Draper from Mad Men. Oh, yeah.

Profoundly flawed. Right. And their internal contradictions, their struggles are what actually drive the narrative forward.

If a character is just flat or static or only there to like move the plot along, the story rarely gets above just being escapism. Real depth needs those contradictions. OK, complex characters.

Got it. What about the story itself? Does it just need a really gripping plot? Well, that brings us nicely to criterion two, thematic depth. A story needs to be about something, well, significantly larger than just its plot mechanics.

If the plot is simply what happens, you know, someone robs a bank, a character wants revenge. The theme is what the story means, what it’s saying about the human condition. Oh, OK.

So the plot is like the container, maybe. And the theme is the really important philosophical stuff inside. Precisely.

That’s a good way to put it. Literary works tend to wrestle with the big questions, don’t they? The nature of love, the inevitability of death, the limits of morality, the search for meaning in what often feels like a chaotic universe. All the easy stuff.

Yeah, exactly. They use a specific personal story, maybe a character navigating a tough divorce to explore something universal, like that tension between duty and desire, perhaps. The story has to offer some kind of compelling, sustained commentary on our shared experience as humans.

It can’t just be stuff happens. OK, so we need complex characters wrestling with big themes. That covers a who and a why.

What’s the third criterion you mentioned that’s often tied more closely to the medium itself? Right. Criterion three, artful use of the medium. Think about a great novel.

It doesn’t just tell you a plot. It masterfully uses the specific tools of prose, the sentence structure, the syntax, the metaphors, the control of point of view to maximize its emotional and intellectual punch. So following that, a truly literary work, whether it’s a book or a game or a streaming series, it has to know how to exploit the unique strengths, the unique grammar of its own format.

The how of the telling becomes just as important as the what is being told. That feels like a really crucial distinction because suddenly the question for us and for you listening, it completely shifts, doesn’t it? It’s no longer just, hey, is this thing a book? Right. It’s now, does this story, whatever form it takes, actually meet these three criteria? Does it have complex characters? Does it explore deep themes? And is it using its specific medium words, images, interactivity, whatever, in a really masterful, deliberate way? And if we accept that new lens, if we start looking at things that way, well, suddenly a whole host of art forms that were previously kind of dismissed as lesser can step forward and they demand to be judged on their quality, not just their format.

So where should we start? Which medium first broke through that traditional literary wall? Well, I think the clearest first breach came from graphic novels. For decades, right, the comic book was seen as, well, disposable, juvenile fun. Yeah, Sunday funnies, superheroes in tights.

Exactly. Simple power fantasies, mostly. The idea that, you know, sequential art pictures and boxes could handle really weighty, serious topics like history or philosophy, that was just summarily dismissed by most traditionalists.

Too childish. But something definitely changed over the last, what, 30, 40 years. The revolution feels pretty complete now.

The comic book evolved, got rebranded as the graphic novel, and it definitely secured a kind of literary recognition you just can’t argue with anymore. Oh, absolutely. And there was one moment, one specific event that really shattered that cultural barrier.

It was undeniable. You’re talking about Masos, aren’t you? I am. The publication and then the subsequent Pulitzer Prize win for Art Spiegelman’s Mouse back in 1992.

That was seismic. It wasn’t just a remarkable story in itself. It was like a formal argument for the legitimacy of the entire medium.

Winning a Pulitzer? Yep. For a comic book. That must have sent shockwaves.

Huge shockwaves. The Pulitzer is kind of the ultimate stamp of literary authority in the U.S., right? And for it to go to a book that depicted the Holocaust experience with Jews as mice and Nazis as cats, I mean, that was utterly unprecedented. It forced people to sit up and take notice.

And the power wasn’t just in that central allegory of the mice and cats, which was incredibly daring. It was also in the structure, wasn’t it? It was so formally inventive. Totally.

It masterfully weaves together two timelines. There’s the story of Spiegelman interviewing his father, Ledeck, in the present day, trying to understand his experiences. And then there’s Ledeck’s story itself, his harrowing journey through the concentration camps during the war, telling both stories at once, decades apart, showing the inherited trauma.

Right. The past literally haunting the present on the page. And the genius was how Spiegelman used the specific tools of the medium, the comics form, to enhance those themes.

Like, think about how he deliberately shifts away from the sequential art panels when he shows actual historical documents or photographs from the time. Oh yeah, he uses a different style for those, doesn’t he? More like traditional illustration. Exactly.

And that visual shift powerfully emphasizes the difference between subjective memory, the story being drawn, recalled, and objective documentation. The static, factual evidence. That’s Criterion 3 right there.

Artful use of the medium in action. Using the form itself to make a point. And once Mayes kicked the door down, proving the medium could handle that kind of seriousness, the floodgates kind of opened, right? You started seeing other works that demanded really sophisticated reading.

We absolutely did. Think about Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Givens. On the surface, it’s a superhero story.

But it doesn’t just tell a superhero story. It uses the genre conventions to completely deconstruct the whole idea of superheroes. Right.

It digs into Cold War paranoia, complex moral philosophy. Utilitarianism versus individual rights, all that heavy stuff. It used the familiar tropes to ask incredibly deep questions.

Or think about Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. Oh, beautiful book. Isn’t it? A really poignant autobiographical account of growing up during the Iranian Revolution.

And she uses this deceptively simple, almost stark black and white art style. But that simplicity actually heightens the sense of childhood confusion, political chaos, and cultural displacement. It’s incredibly effective.

So let’s spend a bit more time on that third criterion here. The artful use of the medium. What is it specifically about graphic novels that makes them uniquely literary? It’s clearly not just a book with pictures.

It feels like a whole different language. Well, what’s fascinating here, I think, is the unique grammar of sequential art. Especially something the legendary comic artist Will Eisner called the gutter.

The gutter. You mean the literal blank space between the panels on the page. That’s exactly it.

That empty space, that gap. That’s where so much of the real magic, the literary friction, actually happens. How so? It’s just empty space.

Ah, but it’s not passive space. The author and artist, they give you the key frames, right? Maybe the beginning and the end of an action. Or two moments in time that aren’t directly connected.

But your brain, the reader’s brain, has to do some serious cognitive heavy lifting in that gap. You have to mentally connect those dots. You infer the action that happened between panels.

You deduce how much time has passed. You essentially stitch those frozen visual moments together into a fluid narrative in your own mind. Right.

So if a novelist might write, you know, she slammed the door shut and then sank onto the floor weeping uncontrollably, the graphic novelist might just give you one panel of the door slamming. Yeah. And the next panel is her on the floor weeping.

And it’s you, the reader, who fills in the blanks. You provide the syncing motion, the emotional transition, the sound, all in that gutter space. Precisely.

And that necessity for active participation, where the reader basically functions as a silent director, filling in the sequence, it creates this incredible narrative efficiency and also often a real emotional immediacy that prose sometimes struggles to replicate on its own. Because you’re involved in creating it. You become complicit in completing that transition, which definitely deepens your investment in the moment.

It’s a very dynamic, very participatory way of reading. And that makes the graphic novel a distinct, and I’d argue increasingly essential, literary art form in its own right. That idea of active mental participation, that feels like a really good bridge to our next case study.

Prestige television. You know, for so long, TV was seen as the lowest common denominator. Disposable episodic stuff designed mainly to sell soap or cars.

The idiot box. Exactly. But then something changed, mainly thanks to cable channels and now streaming services.

Yeah. We’ve definitely entered what people are calling a golden age, where the sheer narrative ambition on television is seriously challenging and maybe even surpassing a lot of contemporary fiction. And if we want to elevate this discussion, maybe we shouldn’t just talk about them as television shows.

Maybe we should think about them as long-form narrative serialization. Which, perhaps surprisingly, kind of brings us back to the 19th century again. Ah, are you setting up the Dickens analogy here? I think I am.

Charles Dickens, right. Quintessential literary giant. He didn’t usually publish novels like Oliver Twist or the Pickwick Papers as single, big, complete books initially.

No, they came out in parts, didn’t they? Exactly. Serially. Often in monthly or weekly installments in magazines.

His audience would be on tenterhooks, waiting anxiously for the next chapter, the next cliffhanger. And that structure, that slow burn, the delayed ratification, the structured suspense over time, that’s precisely the model for modern shows like The Sopranos or Breaking Bad or even something like Succession. Yeah, that makes sense.

But the big difference, as we touched on earlier, is just the sheer scale, isn’t it? Dickens might have had dozens of chapters, but these modern series, they often have this sprawling 60-, 70-hour canvas spread across maybe five, six, seven seasons. That allows for just a monumental depth of characterization. It really does.

It potentially allows for the equivalent of, I don’t know, a dozen novels’ worth of space dedicated solely to character development. Right. Just think about how much of a life a single 400-page novel can capture versus the cumulative effect of spending maybe 70 hours watching a character evolve or decline or transform over almost a decade of narrative time.

And that long-form structure, it allows for changes in character that feel really slow, really complex, almost agonizingly realistic sometimes. Absolutely. Take Walter White in Breaking Bad.

We don’t just see his transformation from, you know, meek high school chemistry teacher into this monstrous, ego-driven drug lore happen overnight as some kind of sudden plot device. No, it’s gradual, painful even. It’s a slow, agonizing slide.

We witness it one compromise value at a time, season after season. The audience is made privy to this slow accretion, this buildup of moral compromises that eventually lead to his complete downfall. It’s an incredibly detailed psychological study that would be really hard to sustain outside of that massive novelistic structure TV offers.

Or think about the decade or so we spent essentially living inside Tony Soprano’s head. Watching him try, and mostly fail, to reconcile the intimate, loving details of his family life with the brutal necessities of being a mob boss, all while grappling with his own actions in therapy sessions. Right.

That is sustained, complex characterization. It easily meets our criterion one. Deeply flawed, contradictory, evolving over time.

Okay, let me push back a little here. Let’s introduce some friction, as you say. We often associate great literature, classic literature, with a single authoritative, authorial voice, right? The genius writer locked away in a room crafting their vision.

Mm-hmm, the lone auteur. Exactly. But prestige TV is almost always the result of a collaborative process.

You’ve got a writer’s room, multiple directors, producers. Does that need for, say, six seasons, or just the inherent collaborative nature of making TV, does that somehow dilute the singular vision we usually associate with a classic? That’s a really fair challenge. And traditionally, yes, that idea of the sole author has been paramount in defining literature.

But I think in this new, evolving literary form, the auteur role maybe shifts. It becomes the showrunner, that key writer or director who holds the reins, maintains the overall vision, the narrative coherence, across all those years and through dozens of contributing writers. So the showrunner is like the chief architect.

Kind of, yeah. And that chief architect uses the collaborative medium, all its resources, to explore incredibly deep, often systematic themes. A prime example, maybe the prime example, is The Wire.

Ah, yes. The Wire. Yeah.

Often called the great American novel of the 21st century, even though it’s a TV show. And for very good reason. It’s so much more than just a police procedural.

It’s this sprawling, multi-seasonal, truly novelistic examination of the modern American city, specifically Baltimore, and all its interconnected, failing institutions. Each season tackled a different system, right? Exactly. Season one was the drug trade on the street corners.

Then you had the docks and the blue collar unions. Then city hall and local politics. Then the deeply flawed school system.

And finally, the media’s role in covering it all, or failing to. And the characters often felt like they were serving the exploration of those systems. Precisely.

The show illustrated, often tragically, how these large institutions inevitably crushed the individual caught within them. It wasn’t really about simple heroes and villains. It was this sustained, incredibly detailed argument about systemic decay, about entropy in urban life.

It absolutely nails Criterion 2 thematic depth with massive impact. Okay, so that’s the sprawling, systemic end of the scale. But then you can have a show like Fleabag, which is much more intimate, much smaller in scope, but relies incredibly heavily on that third criterion.

Artful use of the medium. Oh, Fleabag. Yeah, what a masterpiece.

Razor sharp, hilarious, and absolutely gut-wrenching, often all at the same time. It’s this intense exploration of grief and female rage and loneliness. And it uses that breaking the fourth wall thing constantly, talking straight to the camera.

Right. But crucially, it’s not just used as a clever gimmick. It’s deployed as a very deliberate narrative device, and it’s deeply tied to the character’s psychology.

It feels like her defense mechanism, doesn’t it? She uses us, the audience, almost like a shield against the world, against real connection. Exactly that. By having the main character, Fleabag, speak directly to the camera, the writer and creator, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, she completely implicates us, the viewer, in the character’s innermost vulnerability.

And also in her darkest, often most humiliating thoughts and actions. We kind of become her secret confidants, her co-conspirators in her own isolation. Until maybe we’re not anymore.

Right. And the medium itself, the camera, the direct address, becomes the tool she uses to keep the world, and genuine intimacy, at bay. That is an incredibly sophisticated, truly literary technique, built entirely around the possibilities of the camera and the screen.

These series, shows like The Wire or Fleabag, they’re not just entertaining us, they are making sustained, complex arguments about the state of our world and the nature of the human soul. Okay, so we’ve tackled the visual language and reader participation of graphic novels, and the sprawling structure and character depth of prestige TV. Now, let’s confront what is often, I think, the toughest hurdle for traditionalists.

Video games. Can a medium that many people still associate primarily with, you know, space marines and cartoon plumbers, can it genuinely achieve literary status? Yeah, this definitely requires perhaps the biggest mental shift for some people. But I think the answer has to be a resounding yes.

The most ambitious modern video games are crafting narratives that are not only complex and emotional, but they possess a storytelling tool that no book, no film, can ever truly replicate. And it’s a tool that, when used well, forces the player into a state of reflection that feels deeply, profoundly literary. You must be talking about player agency.

The element of choice. Precisely. Player agency.

That’s the game changer. Think about it. In a book or a film, you are fundamentally a passive observer.

You watch the events unfold, you might empathize deeply with the characters, you might analyze the tragedy, but you witness it from the outside. Right, you’re watching it happen to someone else. Exactly.

But in many narrative-driven games, you are an active participant. And that fundamentally shifts the entire ethical and emotional weight of the story. You move from a position of somewhat detached observation to one of, often, visceral complicity.

Visceral complicity. Okay, let’s focus on that idea. That feels like maybe the most potent, unique thing the medium brings to storytelling.

Can you give us a prime example of how that visceral engagement works? Well, the example that always comes up, and for good reason, is The Last of Us. Especially the ending of the first game. Okay, without giving away too many spoilers.

All right, I’ll try. The game tells this incredibly intense post-apocalyptic story, focusing really tightly on the relationship between the main protagonist, Joel, and this young girl, Ellie, who’s essentially his ward. The entire narrative builds towards Joel having to make just a devastating moral choice.

A choice with huge consequences. Massive consequences. Basically, sacrificing the potential salvation of all of humanity to save the one person he has come to love like a daughter.

Now, if that were a movie, we’d watch the character, Joel, make that choice. We’d see the anguish on his face, maybe hear his internal monologue, and we’d reflect on his motivations, his trauma. Exactly, we’d analyze it.

But in the game, the player doesn’t just watch Joel walk into that operating room and commit that incredibly consequential morally gray act. The player is physically walking Joel down those hospital corridors. The player is the one pushing the buttons on the controller to, well, take the lives necessary to ensure Ellie’s safety.

So you’re not just witnessing the choice, you’re executing it. You are executing it. And because of that, the choice, and especially the horrifying consequences that follow, they feel deeply, personally, like your actions.

You performed them. You feel the weight, the burden of having possibly doomed the world, not just having witnessed its potential doom. It lands differently.

Wow, yeah, that level of ethical entanglement, that’s something totally unique to interactive media, isn’t it? It forces the player’s own conscience directly into the narrative fabric. So it’s hitting criterion one, complex characterization, because you feel Joel’s dilemma, and criterion two, thematic depth, the needs of the many versus the needs of the few, through the actual gameplay mechanics. Absolutely, and it’s not just about those big dramatic choices either.

If we look at the overall narrative scope, many games easily meet the criteria we set out. Think about something like Red Dead Redemption 2. Huge game. Beautiful game.

Incredible game. It offers this sprawling, deeply elegiac story about the dying days of the American frontier, the end of the outlaw era. And the protagonist, Arthur Morgan, undergoes this incredibly complex, nuanced, and ultimately tragic arc of moral redemption over like 100 hours of gameplay.

You really live with him through his choices. You do. The game spends dozens and dozens of hours developing his relationships, his loyalties, forcing him, and by extension you, to confront his past violence and his shifting values.

The result is easily a novel-sized exploration of themes like loyalty, the impact of changing civilizations, the price of freedom, the nature of honor among thieves. It’s incredibly rich. Okay, so the character depth and thematic scope are there in the best examples.

What about that third criterion, the artful use of the medium? How do games use their unique interactive tools beyond just presenting the player with a branching choice? That’s where things get really interesting, actually. The best games use the mechanics themselves, the very act of playing, as a form of narration. A brilliant and quite moving example of this is a game called What Remains of Edith Finch.

I’ve heard of that one. It’s structured differently, right? Very differently. It tells this heartbreaking story about the strange, tragic history of a family exploring how each member died through a series of interactive vignettes.

But here’s the genius part. In each chapter, focusing on a different family member, the gameplay mechanics change completely. How so? They change to reflect the personality, or the state of mind, or even the specific tragic flaw of the person whose story is being told.

Wow. Okay, so the way you play mirrors the character’s experience. Exactly.

For instance, there’s one sequence where you control a character working a monotonous job in a fish cannery. You’re performing these repetitive, mundane tasks with one analog stick on the controller. Chopping fish heads, basically.

Sounds gripping. Huh. But simultaneously, in the corner of the screen, this elaborate, colorful fantasy story starts unfolding.

And you control that fantasy sequence with the other analog stick. So you’re literally performing the drudgery of the real world and the escapism of fantasy at the exact same time, with two different parts of your hands. That’s incredible.

So the controller itself is shaping the emotional experience, mirroring the character’s divided mind. Precisely. The monotony of the real job, the desperate desire for imaginative escape.

They’re married perfectly through the dual mechanic of the controller. The how of the telling, the physical input, the movement becomes absolutely, inextricably linked to what the character’s yearning and eventual fate. That’s using the medium masterfully.

So in these kinds of powerful examples, it feels like the player really does become, well, maybe not the sole author, but a genuine co-author of the story’s moral texture, its emotional impact. We aren’t just consuming the narrative, we’re actively shaping its tragic outcomes or its moments of beauty, and then feeling the weight of that responsibility. That’s it, exactly.

And that represents, I think, a truly monumental shift in how we can experience, and therefore how we should probably define, a profound narrative in the 21st century. If we sort of zoom out from these three big case studies, graphic novels, prestige TV, video games, and connect this back to the bigger picture, it feels like it confirms that the whole space, the idea of what constitutes literature, has become truly dynamic. Yeah, it’s definitely no longer just a fixed text created by one singular person, printed and bound and unchanging.

In many of these new forms, it’s more like a negotiated experience, a conversation almost between the original creator’s vision, the technology being used, and the actively participating individual, the reader, the viewer, the player. Which makes you wonder, if these three big media forms are maybe taking on the bulk of the really ambitious, complex storytelling today, where else are we seeing these tendrils of sophisticated narrative reaching? Are there other evolving forms? Oh, definitely. The fundamental human hunger for complex, meaningful narratives, it’s migrating everywhere that technology opens up new channels.

We see it very powerfully, for example, in long-form narrative journalism. Like the new journalism tradition. Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion.

Exactly that tradition, but updated for today. You have modern reporters who are using all the sophisticated techniques we usually associate with fiction, really detailed scene setting, deep psychological portraits of their subjects, careful narrative pacing and structure, but they’re using them to tell breathtaking, deeply researched true stories. So they intentionally blur that line between rigorous fact-based reportage and compelling narrative mastery.

They do. And the best examples demand the same kind of sustained intellectual and emotional attention from the reader as the greatest fictional works. They use literary tools to make factual reality resonate more deeply.

And what about audio? Yeah. We’re talking on a podcast right now. Right.

And then you have the rise of narrative podcasts. Consider a deep dive audio narrative, like say, S-Town. Oh, yeah.

Incredible piece of work. Isn’t it? It unfolds over seven chapters, but it’s not structured like a typical documentary or interview show. It feels meticulously constructed, like a character-driven Southern Gothic novel, complete with secrets, eccentricities and tragedy.

And it’s delivered with this incredible intimacy directly into your ears. Yeah, it really focuses entirely on complex characterization, trying to understand this one incredibly enigmatic man. And it touches on these deep themes of isolation, environmental worries, mental health.

And it utilizes the unique intimacy and immersiveness of audio to create what feels undeniably like a profoundly literary experience. You live with that story in your head for days afterwards. So it seems like the cultural gatekeepers, the ones clinging to the old definitions, they can absolutely hold on to their leather-bound books if they choose.

Yeah. But it feels like they’re fighting a losing battle against both technological innovation and audience demand, doesn’t it? I think so. That fundamental human hunger for deep, meaningful, complex stories, stories that help us understand ourselves, understand each other, understand the world we live in, that hunger seems stronger than ever.

It hasn’t gone away. Which brings us maybe to the final synthesis, the big takeaway here. Yeah, I think it’s this.

Literature isn’t ultimately defined by its format, by the package it comes in. It’s defined by its function. It’s what happens when a story, regardless of the medium it chooses to employ, successfully manages to hold a mirror up to our shared humanity.

And shows us something true. Shows us something profoundly true about ourselves, about each other, maybe about the complex systems we inhabit. It offers insight, complexity, maybe even a little bit of wisdom.

And that core function, that’s not fading away at all. It’s just flowing. It’s migrating into the most technically sophisticated, the most culturally relevant, the most accessible channels of our particular time.

The printed bound book wasn’t the final destination for storytelling. Not at all. It was merely the beginning of what’s turning out to be a magnificent, messy, constantly evolving new chapter.

We just need to keep our focus purely on the quality of the work itself. Demanding those complex characters, asking for those probing deep themes, and appreciating a masterful, deliberate, artful use of whatever medium the creator has chosen. And when we apply that objective metric, suddenly the literary world feels, well, kind of limitless again.

Exciting and maybe truly reflective of our complex, sometimes overwhelming modern existence. Exactly. It opens things up.

Okay, so here’s a final provocative thought for you, the listener, to maybe chew on after this. Given this fluidity we’ve been talking about, especially the technical requirements of some modern literary forms like video games needing constant updates to even run, or the complex licensing and streaming rights that make TV shows appear and disappear, or even just the shift to digital formats for graphic novels, does the inherently fluid, maybe even ephemeral nature of digital-first storytelling actually change how we define a classic? Can something primarily digital truly endure for generations in the same way a physical book can? That’s something to consider as you reflect on this deep dive into the world of literature unbound. And this was another MagTalk from English Plus Podcast.

Don’t forget to check out the full article on our website, englishpluspodcast.com for more details, including the Focus on Language section and the Activity section. Thank you for listening. Stay curious and never stop learning.

We’ll see you in the next episode.

Welcome to the debate. Today, we’re tackling something pretty significant. Really a definition crisis facing culture.

What does literature even mean anymore? For generations, the word’s been tied to the heavy leather bound book, the codex, that text sort of sanctified by academic tradition. But that image is being seriously challenged by these powerful, technologically infused ways of telling stories that, frankly, demand our attention. Indeed.

And the traditional assumption that, you know, a profound narrative has to live exclusively within the pages of a book. Well, it just feels intellectually limiting, doesn’t it? Given the sheer scope of modern media. Which brings us, yeah, directly to our central question today.

Should the term literature, the category itself, be expanded? Should it include new media forms like say graphic novels, prestige television, even complex video games based purely on shared quality, things like thematic depth, complex characterization? Or must that unique fixed formal structure of the prose codex remain the absolute exclusive standard? While I maintain that we really must preserve the distinction, while these other forms definitely possess immense narrative power, no one’s denying that, the specific grammar, the fixed purely textual nature of the prose codex, that defines true literary art. And I think we lose something vital, something important, if we blur that boundary too much. And I’m going to take the opposing view here.

That literature is fundamentally, it’s a function of the story’s quality and the intellectual engagement it demands. It’s entirely independent of the medium used to deliver it. If a narrative possesses the depth to really wrestle with the big questions, morality, meaning, the human condition, it deserves the classification, whether it’s in print or on a screen or even interactive.

I see why you think that, you know, focusing on the historical context and the physical object. But let me give you a different perspective. Literature isn’t dying.

I think it’s undergoing this massive metamorphosis. If we can agree that literary merit rests on things like complex characterization, deep thematic exploration, and the artful mastery of whatever medium is chosen, well, then the classification has to expand. Just restricting the definition to the, you know, the dusty old book feels like cultural gatekeeping.

We really have to judge by the enduring quality of the narratives, the bones of the story itself. Honestly, many ambitious stories today, whether they’re sprawling long form investigative journalism pieces or these huge prestige TV series, they’re capturing the moral weight of our, you know, 21st century anxiety with a complexity that frankly, few contemporary novels managed to match. We risk just ignoring the most profound stories of our time if we focus only on the binding.

I come at it from a different way, though. Look, I freely concede the staggering narrative depth you can find in modern media. I mean, look at the psychological complexity of a character like Tony Soprano, right? Or the incredible world building in a really ambitious video game.

But equating that with literature as traditionally defined, I think that compromises the necessary definitional precision, the constraints and the tools that are unique to the codex, syntax, a specific fixed point of view, metaphor, the total reliance on textual construction, they force a unique mode of cognitive labor on the reader. The reader must supply the visual, the auditory, the whole physical landscape entirely through language. That is the medium-specific mastery, the precision of prose that defines literary art.

And it is, I believe, fundamentally distinct from engaging with an image-based or an interactive medium. Okay, let’s test that idea then, that notion of medium specificity. Let’s start with forms that kind of bridge text and visuals, graphic novels.

I mean, they really illustrate a clear evolution, don’t they? From, you know, ephemeral comic books to these really sophisticated permanent literary forms. When you look at something like Art Spiegelman’s Maz. Which won a Pulitzer Prize, yes.

Exactly, a Pulitzer. Or Alan Moore’s incredible deconstruction of the superhero myth in Watchmen. The narrative effect there, it’s achieved through what Scott McCloud calls the grammar of the gutter.

Right. You’ll probably have to elaborate on that term, the gutter, for listeners maybe not familiar. Certainly.

Yeah, the gutter is simply the blank space between the panels on the page. And the brilliance of it is that the reader is forced to actively infer the passage of time, the action, what happens between those fixed images. So the reader isn’t just passively observing, they’re actively synthesizing the narrative sequence.

They become, in a way, kind of like the director, making these visual elements function much more like complex literary syntax. It forces a specific interpretive engagement that, you know, we traditionally reserve for pure prose description. That’s a compelling argument, I grant you, about the synthesis involved.

But have you considered that the grammar of the gutter, however sophisticated it might be, still fundamentally relies on explicit visual implication? That’s intrinsically the province of sequential art, of visual art, not literary art in the purest sense. The core definition of a novel rests on the deliberate, relentless use of pure prose, words alone. The very power of prose lies in its economy, its ability to conjure entire worlds using only, you know, black marks on a page, demanding the reader’s own mind supply the visual.

Once you introduce explicit fixed imagery, like in Persepolis or Maus, you shift the fundamental method of engagement. You trade that interpretive freedom of pure text for the, well, the fixed constraint of the drawing. And while these are absolutely masterpieces of their medium, they are not, I would argue, masterpieces of prose.

I think maybe you’re defining literature there by the historical accident of the tool, the pen, basically, rather than the cognitive engagement it actually demands. I mean, the narrative structure in Maus is fixed. It’s authored.

Its thematic ambition is unquestionable. But OK, let’s pivot then to a medium where the structural difference is even starker, video games. If visual parsing challenges the text definition, then interactive media surely challenges the definition of a fixed authored text.

That’s a valid distinction. Yes. So what separates a game from a novel in terms of literary structure, in your view? Well, they introduced this unique tool of player agency.

Think about truly ambitious character-driven narrative games like The Last of Us or maybe Red Dead Redemption 2. The player doesn’t just read about the protagonist making some morally devastating choice. The player is the one physically pushing the buttons, you know, to enact that fatal decision. Take, say, the ending decision in The Last of Us to save Ellie, but at the potential cost of humanity’s future.

That forces a kind of visceral, ethical, and emotional complicity that no passive medium, whether it’s a book or film, can really replicate. The player is burdened with the moral weight, becoming in a sense a co-author of their own tragedy or their character’s tragedy. I’m not convinced by that line of reasoning because, look, the core literary merit often lies precisely in that fixed authored structure.

The power of a novel, or even a great play for that matter, is that the author presents a sustained, complex, and often unavoidable argument about human nature. The narrative explores an inevitable outcome, a specific psychological path towards, say, tragedy or perhaps enlightenment. Introducing player choice fundamentally shifts the focus.

You’re essentially trading the author’s controlled specific artistic constraint for a dynamic space that’s really designed more to explore consequence. But isn’t that artistic constraint exactly what feels limiting now? Why must literature only explore inevitability? Isn’t the exploration of moral consequence, especially when it’s based on the player’s or reader’s complicity, isn’t that an even more profound way to hold up that mirror to the human condition you mentioned? Well, because once the narrative meaning is partially generated by the subjective choices of the reader-slash-player, it ceases to be a singular, fixed, authored critique. The experience becomes fundamentally experiential, which arguably pulls it outside the boundary of literature as a precise, authored work of textual art designed to present a definitive thesis or perspective.

The power gets lost, perhaps, in the diffusion of authorship. Well, okay, but if we look at the historical progression of narrative forms, literature has always adapted to new, serialized forms that allow for greater breadth, and sometimes even distributed authorship. Which brings us neatly to prestige television.

I’d draw some strong parallels between these long-form series like, say, The Wire, which is just this sprawling, truly novelistic examination of failing American institutions, where you could argue the institutions themselves are the main characters, and the way authors like Charles Dickens published serially. You know, Dickens published in monthly installments, sometimes shaping and reshaping his narrative based on audience reception, much like modern showrunners manage complex television seasons. That’s an interesting point, though I would frame it differently.

While the sheer length and the narrative scope of a, say, 60-hour series certainly resembles a novel, allowing for that unparalleled depth of character development you mentioned, like the slow, tragic arc of Walter White in Breaking Bad, television is still, fundamentally, a collaborative industrial medium. The definition of literature, traditionally, typically requires the singular, consistent vision and control of the author over the language itself, the prose, the syntax on the page. But couldn’t you argue the showrunner, someone like Vince Gilligan or David Simon, acts as the literary auteur? Their sustained vision over multiple seasons is what gives the work its thematic gravity.

It functions like a singular controlling voice, doesn’t it? But they’re controlling the production, not necessarily the sentence structure, not every single word choice, in the way a novelist does. They direct a writer’s room, they manage actors, they rely heavily on visuals, on performance, on editing to convey meaning. The novel’s unique power is its solitary, text-based artistry.

That dependence on a collaborative framework, even with a strong auteur figure at the helm, fundamentally differentiates television’s aesthetic goals from the text-based art of the novel. I mean, the novel author controls every single comma, the showrunner controls the whole production apparatus. That distinction, for me, is crucial if we are to maintain any kind of integrity in the category of I don’t accept that solitary authorship is an absolute prerequisite for quality, or even for categorization.

I mean, did the ancient Greek playwrights function in total solitude? Or did they rely on collaborative performance, on masks, on audience feedback? The essential job of literature holding that mirror up to humanity is simply finding its way into the most dominant popular formats we consume today. The definition, I believe, must follow the quality, not arbitrarily cling to a specific historical format. Look, I absolutely acknowledge that these new media offer extraordinarily sophisticated narrative experiences.

They challenge us, they engage us deeply, and they certainly deserve their own high art classifications, like perhaps sequential art or interactive drama. But I still maintain that the medium of the codex, based purely on fixed authored text, remains essential for the unique category we call literature. Preserving that distinction allows us to appreciate the specific artistry and the necessary constraints of the book, the particular craft of pure prose, while still fully recognizing the, yes, staggering depth that can be found in non-book narratives.

Well, it’s clear the conversation regarding what truly constitutes literature and where exactly we draw these boundaries in our current digital age is, well, it’s far from settled. Indeed. It seems there’s still much more to explore and probably debate regarding the bounds and the definitions of narrative in this rapidly shifting landscape.

Thank you for listening to the debate. Remember that this debate is based on the article we published on our website, EnglishPlusPodcast.com. Join us there and let us know what you think. And of course, you can take your knowledge in English to the next level with us.

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Character Tropes: The Faces We All Recognize

These are the blueprints for characters, defining their roles and journeys in a story. You saw some of the biggest ones:

• The Chosen One and The Reluctant Hero represent two different paths to heroism. The Chosen One is defined by destiny, their greatness foretold. This creates a sense of epic scale and importance. The Reluctant Hero, however, is defined by their doubt. They are an ordinary person forced into extraordinary circumstances, which makes them incredibly relatable to the audience. We see our own fears in their hesitation.
• The Mentor is the guide. This character’s job is to pass on wisdom and prepare the hero for the trials ahead. They represent the importance of experience and leaning on those who came before us.
• The Anti-Hero and The Insufferable Genius allow us to explore more complex, morally gray characters. They aren’t perfect, and that’s why they’re so fascinating. They show us that you don’t have to be a saint to be the protagonist or to achieve great things.
• The Found Family is one of the most emotionally resonant tropes. It tells us that the family we choose can be just as powerful, if not more so, than the family we’re born into. It speaks to a universal human need for belonging and connection.

Plot Tropes: The Roads of Storytelling

These tropes are all about structure and the journey the characters take. They are the familiar roadmaps that give a story its shape and momentum.

• Good vs. Evil is the most fundamental conflict imaginable. It provides clear stakes and a moral compass for the narrative, giving the audience someone to root for and a villain to despise.
• Enemies to Lovers and the Redemption Arc are about transformation. They are deeply satisfying because they show us that people can change. An enemy can become a soulmate; a villain can become a hero. These journeys are filled with conflict and emotional payoff, making them incredibly compelling to watch.
• The Call to Adventure is the starting gun for nearly every quest story. It’s the moment of disruption, when the hero’s ordinary world is turned upside down, forcing them onto a new and dangerous path.
• The MacGuffin might seem like a lazy trick, but it’s an elegant tool. It gives the characters a clear, tangible goal, driving the plot forward without needing to get bogged down in complicated explanations. The story isn’t about the glowing briefcase; it’s about the characters trying to get it.

Subverting Tropes: Playing With Expectations

The truly great storytellers don’t just use tropes; they play with them. This is called subversion, and it’s when a writer sets up a familiar trope and then twists it in an unexpected way. The film Shrek is a masterclass in this. It sets up the “Damsel in Distress” trope, but then reveals the princess is a skilled martial artist who can save herself. It sets up the “Prince Charming” hero, only to reveal he’s a cowardly, selfish villain. By subverting our expectations, the story feels fresh, funny, and clever. Spotting a well-subverted trope is one of the great joys of being a media-savvy consumer.

So, why do we keep coming back to these patterns? Because they work. Tropes tap into universal human experiences, emotions, and desires. We understand the satisfaction of a Redemption Arc, we feel the warmth of a Found Family, and we thrill to the journey of The Chosen One. They provide a common language between the storyteller and the audience.

From now on, as you watch a movie, play a game, or read a book, keep your eyes open. See if you can spot the trope. Is it a Reluctant Hero being given a Call to Adventure? Are you watching a classic Enemies to Lovers story unfold? You’ll find that seeing the building blocks doesn’t make the house any less beautiful. It just makes you appreciate the architecture all the more.