What is Culture Carve?

The mission of Culture Carve is threefold:

1. To deconstruct artistic media with an intimate attention to detail and a particular focus on narrative; every frame will be under scrutiny in film, every word in literature. Understanding the building blocks of storytelling is the first step to becoming a more intelligent and sophisticated consumer of artistic media—you will gain a greater appreciation for what makes a good story good, and you will be able to better articulate what makes a bad story bad. An audience with a keen knowledge of storytelling will cultivate a culture in which higher-quality stories are produced.

2. To reconcile our relationships with various Western canons—film, gaming, literature, philosophy, and television—in an ongoing effort to understand why some works becomes canonical and whether they should remain canonical. This is in service of sifting through the onslaught of artistic media that saturates the modern world: how do we continue to establish canons when lifetimes of potentially-canonical content are generated every day? Culture Carve won't answer that question, but it will respond to it on a continual basis.

3. To promote cultural literacy on all fronts. Artistic media provides a common language with which we relate and respond to one another, whetting our empathetic edge and facilitating the relationships that govern our lives. Culture Carve will encourage readers to be conscious of the stories in which Western culture is steeped and push them to familiarize themselves with those stories—if not because they are interested, then at least because they have an interest in maintaining their cultural fluency.

Who Am I?

My name is Erin Larson; I am the creator of Culture Carve and its only writer. I graduated from Luther College in 2016 with a BA in English and am an aspiring novelist. As someone who is also passionate about culture and artistic media, my goal in maintaining this site is to consume and dissect books, games, movies, and television, breaking them down in an ongoing effort to analyze how and why they work—or don't—from the perspective of a writer. I hope your time at Culture Carve will enrich your understanding of the artistic media you experience every day.

The Culture Carve logo was created by Ian Wold.