I’ve now read ten or twelve Icelandic sagas, and what’s fascinating is, despite being translated by different people, they don’t vary much stylistically.
Side note but there is a pretty good novel that does Groundhog Day at a larger scale (if not everybody being in on it)--Ken Grimwood's Replay, which I really enjoyed.
I think you're definitely on to something about why sprawling franchise universes and "clomping foot" world-building have their pleasures for readers and viewers. When world-building as a conscious strategy for writing works, I think it's because it enables the writer or creator to tell a story where lived-in detail is present and *different* from the world we inhabit. Where it fails is when a world-builder feels obliged to info-dump all the details they've imagined or sketched out or where the world-builder's imagination of the lived-in details either doesn't make sense or is just a dull copy-paste of another world (or our world with names that have funny apostrophes and so on).
But in some ways it's even better when world-building happens as an emergent accident of a lot of stories being told within the same setting, and there I think the second pleasure of it is that it lets any dedicated reader achieve the feeling of critical mastery--essentially emergent world-building that grows from a set of incidentally connected stories converts a reader into an expert. When you read all the Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys stories, you start to intuitively understand how they were written (and even spot where there were slight variations in the corporate style). You start to see the patterns and intentions in the writing and marketing. You start to think about the unspoken stories of minor characters, and appreciate the difference between an adventure where the protagonists really did something clever and where they merely went through the motions. You start to understand a larger fictive universe that included a bunch of other series--Tom Swift or the Three Investigators or Famous Five--and all their cousins and descendants and ancestors. It's a function of coherent predicate--the stories all coming from the same place, with a similar style--but also that the stories all connect and intermesh, both deliberately and serendipitously.
And I think that experience of being expert is enticing, exciting, interesting. To me this is a better way towards Felski's "limits of critique"--not that we have to "love literature", but that academic literary critics can relate to "emergent expertise" in an appreciative way, rather than rivalrously. It's the same way that I think scholarly historians should relate to "amateur" or everyday historical knowledge.
Side note but there is a pretty good novel that does Groundhog Day at a larger scale (if not everybody being in on it)--Ken Grimwood's Replay, which I really enjoyed.
I think you're definitely on to something about why sprawling franchise universes and "clomping foot" world-building have their pleasures for readers and viewers. When world-building as a conscious strategy for writing works, I think it's because it enables the writer or creator to tell a story where lived-in detail is present and *different* from the world we inhabit. Where it fails is when a world-builder feels obliged to info-dump all the details they've imagined or sketched out or where the world-builder's imagination of the lived-in details either doesn't make sense or is just a dull copy-paste of another world (or our world with names that have funny apostrophes and so on).
But in some ways it's even better when world-building happens as an emergent accident of a lot of stories being told within the same setting, and there I think the second pleasure of it is that it lets any dedicated reader achieve the feeling of critical mastery--essentially emergent world-building that grows from a set of incidentally connected stories converts a reader into an expert. When you read all the Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys stories, you start to intuitively understand how they were written (and even spot where there were slight variations in the corporate style). You start to see the patterns and intentions in the writing and marketing. You start to think about the unspoken stories of minor characters, and appreciate the difference between an adventure where the protagonists really did something clever and where they merely went through the motions. You start to understand a larger fictive universe that included a bunch of other series--Tom Swift or the Three Investigators or Famous Five--and all their cousins and descendants and ancestors. It's a function of coherent predicate--the stories all coming from the same place, with a similar style--but also that the stories all connect and intermesh, both deliberately and serendipitously.
And I think that experience of being expert is enticing, exciting, interesting. To me this is a better way towards Felski's "limits of critique"--not that we have to "love literature", but that academic literary critics can relate to "emergent expertise" in an appreciative way, rather than rivalrously. It's the same way that I think scholarly historians should relate to "amateur" or everyday historical knowledge.
There is a reason why Iceland has produce a wealth of sagas.