Tuesday, January 19, 2016

Does the 6-part Lucas Star Wars series constitute a ring?

That's what Mike Klimo argued back in October of 2014. After noting all sorts of relationships among different episodes he asserts:
Because here’s the thing: The “intertextual patternings,” while critical to reading the films the way Lucas intended, are actually small pieces of a much larger, more complex puzzle. And while many have unknowingly stumbled upon some of the pieces over the years, no one has discovered the underlying pattern and discussed how all of the pieces fit together and what the completed picture looks like (and possibly represents)—until now.

And it starts with a little-known ancient literary form that scholars have identified as “ring composition.”

From millennia-old Chinese writings to the epic poetry of Homer to the Bible, ring composition is a structure commonly found in ancient texts all over the globe—transcending time, culture, and geography. Social anthropologist Mary Douglas explains the technique in her book Thinking in Circles: An Essay on Ring Composition. And for starters, she writes that the form “comes in many sizes, from a few lines to a whole book.”
That's less than a quarter of the way into the first of eight essays.

I've not read them, nor do I know the Star Wars films well enough to judge the plausibility of the argument.

Note that John Granger has argued that the Harry Potter books form a ring.

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