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Why did books start being divided into chapters? A new history

sydneyreviewofbooks.com

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Re: Why did books start being divided into chapters? A new history

#11

Post by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF »

lopsotronic wrote: post #10

If you've ever waded hip deep into publication technology, you can see how the 2nd CE heading has moved down, down, down, down all the way to the individual word level, in something like a DITA `conref` where the individual word is a reference. Even though DITA pays my checks, I've always been apprehensive about functionality like `conref`[1] in a general-purpose document. You can only fuss with natural language for…

I like the verses.

How else could I deep-link to a total banger line like Matthew 25:40?

Re: Why did books start being divided into chapters? A new history

#12

Post by red369 »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #5
ldmosquera wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I hate about modern TV shows is that they have been further sliced into ~5-10min sequences between ad breaks, and even if you watch them without ads, you get narratively unnecessary cliff hangers just before a break, complete with dramatic music and a closeup of some dramatic gesture, trivially resolved in the next 5 seconds after the break. You're constantly yanked out of the narrative in service of ads ev…

>One thing I hate about modern TV shows is that they have been further sliced into ~5-10min sequences between ad breaks, If it is on a broadcast tv network, it's not really worth watching. Sure, there are the one or two exceptional shows, but with so much premium content, why would you want to watch that?

I assume you mean it's not really worth watching if it's currently on broadcast TV?

Surely there's a huge list of old broadcast TV network shows that are worth watching, and that still suffer from the ad-break problem to various degrees.

Obviously I'm pulling from a wide time-period, and I'll probably get some of these wrong because I'm not in the the US and don't quite grok the network/cable divide, but off the top of my head, I think these are/were all worth watching: Seinfeld, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Freaks and Geeks, Arrested Development, 30 Rock, Community, Schitt's Creek, The Office, The X-Files, various Star Trek series, Cheers

That list could be easily improved on, but I assume it's missing your point anyway if you were only talking about current broadcast network TV (if it exists :) )

Re: Why did books start being divided into chapters? A new history

#13

Post by red369 »

ldmosquera wrote: post #3
lqet wrote: post #2

> It was the Victorian novel that made the chapter seem natural. Key to the reality effects of nineteenth-century British fiction is its synchronisation of novel time with the natural rhythms of life. As a result, novelistic chapters lose their theatrics, their posturing and posing, even those unstable amalgamations surveyed in Equiano and Goethe, and instead become regular and ‘tacit’, receding into the background.…

One thing I hate about modern TV shows is that they have been further sliced into ~5-10min sequences between ad breaks, and even if you watch them without ads, you get narratively unnecessary cliff hangers just before a break, complete with dramatic music and a closeup of some dramatic gesture, trivially resolved in the next 5 seconds after the break. You're constantly yanked out of the narrative in service of ads ev…

I agree with your feeling that those mini cliff-hangers break the immersion, especially when watching without ad-breaks, although I can mostly deal with it. I agree with some of the other replies though, that it is more prevalent in older shows.

I find that laugh-tracks are the aspect of older shows which I find harder to ignore. Still worth bearing with for some old shows though, especially as I gradually stop hearing them.

Re: Why did books start being divided into chapters? A new history

#14

Post by Telemakhos »

The Latin quoted is wrong ("de nomine deferundo iduibusque legundeis" should be "de nomine deferundo iudicibusque legundeis") and the Greek "kephalaia" is plural while the Latin terms with it are singular. "Titlos" is the Greek way of writing the Latin "titulus," which is a weird thing to have in a list like that; the only place I can remember seeing it is the Bible.

This comes across as sloppy work from someone in an English department who didn't have the language skills to work outside English but decided to try anyway.

Re: Why did books start being divided into chapters? A new history

#15

Post by thaumasiotes »

red369 wrote: post #12
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>One thing I hate about modern TV shows is that they have been further sliced into ~5-10min sequences between ad breaks, If it is on a broadcast tv network, it's not really worth watching. Sure, there are the one or two exceptional shows, but with so much premium content, why would you want to watch that?

I assume you mean it's not really worth watching if it's currently on broadcast TV? Surely there's a huge list of old broadcast TV network shows that are worth watching, and that still suffer from the ad-break problem to various degrees. Obviously I'm pulling from a wide time-period, and I'll probably get some of these wrong because I'm not in the the US and don't quite grok the network/cable divide, but off the top…

> I'll probably get some of these wrong because I'm not in the the US and don't quite grok the network/cable divide

Almost all of those are broadcast shows. I strongly suspect that all of them are, but I don't have personal knowledge of the entire list.

As far as I can tell, the divide is pretty straightforward:

Cable: nudity

Broadcast: everything else

In theory there's no requirement for a cable show to have nudity, but since they're allowed to, they all do.

Re: Why did books start being divided into chapters? A new history

#16

Post by galaxyLogic »

lqet wrote: post #2

> It was the Victorian novel that made the chapter seem natural. Key to the reality effects of nineteenth-century British fiction is its synchronisation of novel time with the natural rhythms of life. As a result, novelistic chapters lose their theatrics, their posturing and posing, even those unstable amalgamations surveyed in Equiano and Goethe, and instead become regular and ‘tacit’, receding into the background.…

I think it is simply because the writer needs to take a pause afteer writing some amount. And the reader also prefers to take pause. Having chapters aligns the interests of both readers and the writer.

Re: Why did books start being divided into chapters? A new history

#17

Post by pests »

crazygringo wrote: post #7
ldmosquera wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I hate about modern TV shows is that they have been further sliced into ~5-10min sequences between ad breaks, and even if you watch them without ads, you get narratively unnecessary cliff hangers just before a break, complete with dramatic music and a closeup of some dramatic gesture, trivially resolved in the next 5 seconds after the break. You're constantly yanked out of the narrative in service of ads ev…

I think you've got it backwards. That was the hallmark of old TV, on networks. Since the start of TV in the 50's. There are tons of modern TV shows that don't do anything you're talking about because they're made for streamers or paid TV without ads. It sounds like you watch different shows than I do, but I watch a lot of TV and haven't seen what you're talking about in many, many years. Not with Squid Game or Strang…

This is mostly an issue for content produced to still be on regular tv and streaming, like on Paramount. Star Trek Discovery and Strange New Worlds, for example, are not as dramatic as described above but you can always spot where the adbreak would have been. Cut to black and a re-establishing shot at the least. These are modern shows like you describe but still the TV medium has some influence.

One thing I do notice more and appreciate from streaming (sense8 in particular) is that shows are more varied in their runtime. Episodes being 40 minutes to 75 in length just depending on the needs of the plot, not even finale related or anything

Re: Why did books start being divided into chapters? A new history

#18

Post by andrewflnr »

bdunks wrote: post #4
lqet wrote: post #2

> It was the Victorian novel that made the chapter seem natural. Key to the reality effects of nineteenth-century British fiction is its synchronisation of novel time with the natural rhythms of life. As a result, novelistic chapters lose their theatrics, their posturing and posing, even those unstable amalgamations surveyed in Equiano and Goethe, and instead become regular and ‘tacit’, receding into the background.…

I read Isaac Asimov’s foundation series a few years ago (side note for anyone who hasn’t read it: it still holds up incredibly well with a small suspension of disbelief and some grace for when it was written). In the preface to the 4th or 5th book (which were written 30+ years after the “original” trilogy) he discussed how the originals parts of the trilogy were published as a set of short stories in a SciFi publicat…

Weird. I bounced off Foundation immediately because it felt like a series of short stories instead of a novel (and also I couldn't take psychohistory the least bit seriously). I'm kind of kicking myself for not predicting that it actually did start that way.

Re: Why did books start being divided into chapters? A new history

#19

Post by thaumasiotes »

Telemakhos wrote: post #14

The Latin quoted is wrong ("de nomine deferundo iduibusque legundeis" should be "de nomine deferundo iudicibusque legundeis") and the Greek "kephalaia" is plural while the Latin terms with it are singular. "Titlos" is the Greek way of writing the Latin "titulus," which is a weird thing to have in a list like that; the only place I can remember seeing it is the Bible. This comes across as sloppy work from someone in a…

Can you point to something with the text of the tablet? I was curious, but all I could find were references to an 1863 attempt at reconstructing it by Theodor Mommsen.

I'm not sure why "language skills" are necessary for this piece - these questions are fundamentally about what the words inscribed on a document are, not what those words mean. It could easily be true that Latin scrolls started labeling something "capitulum" while Greek scrolls called the same thing "kephalaia".

Re: Why did books start being divided into chapters? A new history

#20

Post by andrewflnr »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #16
lqet wrote: post #2

> It was the Victorian novel that made the chapter seem natural. Key to the reality effects of nineteenth-century British fiction is its synchronisation of novel time with the natural rhythms of life. As a result, novelistic chapters lose their theatrics, their posturing and posing, even those unstable amalgamations surveyed in Equiano and Goethe, and instead become regular and ‘tacit’, receding into the background.…

I think it is simply because the writer needs to take a pause afteer writing some amount. And the reader also prefers to take pause. Having chapters aligns the interests of both readers and the writer.

Nah, as a writer who talks to other writers with wildly different processes, I don't think that's how it works for anyone. Time spent writing is almost unrelated to visible time markers in the text. It's not a big deal to stop writing in the middle of a scene or stop one and start another in the same session (assuming we're writing linearly at all). Scene and chapter boundaries are something we specifically think about in their own right to optimize the reading experience.
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