4 ms·

Literature is dead, right. This guy must have not heard about Twitter sagas, those threads with mystery narrations which develop in real time and get hundreds o

Literature is dead, right. This guy must have not heard about Twitter sagas, those threads with mystery narrations which develop in real time and get hundreds of thousands of retweets. We may not like our nineteen-century three-volume encyclopedic novels nicely packaged in dead-tree bricks anymore, but popular fictional writing is alive and well as it adapts to the possibilities of the new media, where immediacy is a primal element. Literature didn't even become popular as novels in the first place; many popular works were published as serials in newspapers, and before that there were booklets and romances. The article strikes me as a yell of nostalgia for a particular dying format.

coldtea 8y ago
>Literature is dead, right. This guy must have not heard about Twitter sagas, those threads with mystery narrations which develop in real time and get hundreds of thousands of retweets. Or he might have heard of them. That's all the more reason to consider literature dead. Not any form and format that includes text and fiction is literature. The word is usually meant to refer to a particular format and a particular history, not just anything that uses words to tell a story. >The article strikes me as a yell of nostalgia for a particular dying format. And what's bad about this? Not every dying format is bad, and not every new format is better (or even "more fit for the times"). And if some particular format gave thousands of great works that influenced billions, whereas the new one has meager results at the level of young adult fiction (and in an age of reduced cultural impact of fiction anyway), it could very well be a regression (history has those too, it's not all a smooth path to increased greatness or equally good at all times). In the end, it's a subjective value-judgment. But that's exactly what's attempted here.
- BjoernKW 8y ago
  > The word is usually meant to refer to a particular format and a particular history, not just anything that uses words to tell a story. The latter definition probably is the best one can come up with without resorting to notions like "stuff that I like". Other than that, literature often means a body of works that have been canonized because somebody thought they have artistic or intellectual value, in other words: What does and what doesn't constitute literature is highly subjective. What argues against Twitter sagas as literature though is their inherent transience. Literature usually is thought of as something that has literary value not just for the current generation but for future generations, too.
  - TuringTest 8y ago
    > What argues against Twitter sagas as literature though is their inherent transience. Just like poems, then?
    - BjoernKW 8y ago
      Poems aren't transient. Oral tradition is.
      - TuringTest 8y ago
        But Twitter isn't "oral tradition" by any definition of the word. I dare you to find any property that can be said of written poems with respect to those being transcendent, which can't also be said of Twitter threads (other than "they've existed since the beginning of writing").
        BjoernKW 8y ago
        The two don't really compare. Poetry is a form of literature. I can use Twitter as a medium for writing and publishing poetry. A poem written on Twitter and deleted the next day is no more permanent or long-lasting than a poem that's solely available in the oral tradition, perhaps much less so. Why are epics such as Beowulf or the Epic of Gilgamesh considered literature while others aren't? It's because someone at some point recorded them in a more permanent manner so future generations could read them in their unadulterated form (as much as that can be said of stories that probably had been changed and embellished multiple times already before someone wrote them down). A thread on Twitter however can be deleted, added to, remixed, retweeted and forked at any time, which certainly are very interesting properties for creating art but I'm not sure if that art should be called literature or rather something else entirely. Anyway, as originally stated what does and doesn't constitute literature isn't very precisely defined. So, this probably is hairsplitting anyway.
        TuringTest 8y ago
        You can burn the Library of Alexandria, and you can make copies of tweets. There's nothing inherent to the art form in the way that copies are stored. My point is that there is a form of literature that is native to Twitter (or public IM in general), which takes advantage of the specifics of the medium (in particular, unfolding the story at piecemeal bits in real time, and reacting to users comments to tweak the next elements of the story). The end result may be transcribed to more persistent written storage, but it's not the whole experience (just like reading The Three Musketeers as a book is slightly different to what people waiting for the next chapter in the newspaper would have experienced).
michaelmrose 8y ago
As well defend modern multimedia by citing the Teletubbies or modern music by citing Justin Beiber.
B1FF_PSUVM 8y ago
> our nineteen-century three-volume encyclopedic novels Many of which were originally serials published in newspapers ... see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feuilleton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feuilleton - Herman Hesse, for one, griped about the "age of the feuilleton". Gore Vidal, who for a while earned his living writing for TV and movies, used to argue that the post-1960 emphasis on film directors was misplaced, and that writers actually were the essential factor. But he also remarked that pretty soon speaking of a famous writer would be like speaking of a famous ceramicist. Curiously, some of the recente movie/TV series are putting directors back in the hired-hand category that Vidal said was their place, and emphasizing producers-writers, e.g. Game of Thrones. (People like tales, like continued tales with familiar characters, like having some sort of tag to identify what they're picking - an author name is best, and sometimes it is fake, as in "house names" used by publishers as a brand for stories actually produced by a stable of multiple writers. Which is not new either ...)
nearmuse 8y ago
Or phenomena like the SCP wiki/"dossiers", I had fun reading some of those. Now Remedy are making a videogame that looks like it was inspired by those.

coldtea 8y ago

>Literature is dead, right. This guy must have not heard about Twitter sagas, those threads with mystery narrations which develop in real time and get hundreds of thousands of retweets. Or he might have heard of them. That's all the more reason to consider literature dead. Not any form and format that includes text and fiction is literature. The word is usually meant to refer to a particular format and a particular history, not just anything that uses words to tell a story. >The article strikes me as a yell of nostalgia for a particular dying format. And what's bad about this? Not every dying format is bad, and not every new format is better (or even "more fit for the times"). And if some particular format gave thousands of great works that influenced billions, whereas the new one has meager results at the level of young adult fiction (and in an age of reduced cultural impact of fiction anyway), it could very well be a regression (history has those too, it's not all a smooth path to increased greatness or equally good at all times). In the end, it's a subjective value-judgment. But that's exactly what's attempted here.

BjoernKW 8y ago
> The word is usually meant to refer to a particular format and a particular history, not just anything that uses words to tell a story. The latter definition probably is the best one can come up with without resorting to notions like "stuff that I like". Other than that, literature often means a body of works that have been canonized because somebody thought they have artistic or intellectual value, in other words: What does and what doesn't constitute literature is highly subjective. What argues against Twitter sagas as literature though is their inherent transience. Literature usually is thought of as something that has literary value not just for the current generation but for future generations, too.
- TuringTest 8y ago
  > What argues against Twitter sagas as literature though is their inherent transience. Just like poems, then?
  - BjoernKW 8y ago
    Poems aren't transient. Oral tradition is.
    - TuringTest 8y ago
      But Twitter isn't "oral tradition" by any definition of the word. I dare you to find any property that can be said of written poems with respect to those being transcendent, which can't also be said of Twitter threads (other than "they've existed since the beginning of writing").
      - BjoernKW 8y ago
        The two don't really compare. Poetry is a form of literature. I can use Twitter as a medium for writing and publishing poetry. A poem written on Twitter and deleted the next day is no more permanent or long-lasting than a poem that's solely available in the oral tradition, perhaps much less so. Why are epics such as Beowulf or the Epic of Gilgamesh considered literature while others aren't? It's because someone at some point recorded them in a more permanent manner so future generations could read them in their unadulterated form (as much as that can be said of stories that probably had been changed and embellished multiple times already before someone wrote them down). A thread on Twitter however can be deleted, added to, remixed, retweeted and forked at any time, which certainly are very interesting properties for creating art but I'm not sure if that art should be called literature or rather something else entirely. Anyway, as originally stated what does and doesn't constitute literature isn't very precisely defined. So, this probably is hairsplitting anyway.
        TuringTest 8y ago
        You can burn the Library of Alexandria, and you can make copies of tweets. There's nothing inherent to the art form in the way that copies are stored. My point is that there is a form of literature that is native to Twitter (or public IM in general), which takes advantage of the specifics of the medium (in particular, unfolding the story at piecemeal bits in real time, and reacting to users comments to tweak the next elements of the story). The end result may be transcribed to more persistent written storage, but it's not the whole experience (just like reading The Three Musketeers as a book is slightly different to what people waiting for the next chapter in the newspaper would have experienced).

michaelmrose 8y ago

As well defend modern multimedia by citing the Teletubbies or modern music by citing Justin Beiber.

B1FF_PSUVM 8y ago

> our nineteen-century three-volume encyclopedic novels Many of which were originally serials published in newspapers ... see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feuilleton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feuilleton - Herman Hesse, for one, griped about the "age of the feuilleton". Gore Vidal, who for a while earned his living writing for TV and movies, used to argue that the post-1960 emphasis on film directors was misplaced, and that writers actually were the essential factor. But he also remarked that pretty soon speaking of a famous writer would be like speaking of a famous ceramicist. Curiously, some of the recente movie/TV series are putting directors back in the hired-hand category that Vidal said was their place, and emphasizing producers-writers, e.g. Game of Thrones. (People like tales, like continued tales with familiar characters, like having some sort of tag to identify what they're picking - an author name is best, and sometimes it is fake, as in "house names" used by publishers as a brand for stories actually produced by a stable of multiple writers. Which is not new either ...)

nearmuse 8y ago

Or phenomena like the SCP wiki/"dossiers", I had fun reading some of those. Now Remedy are making a videogame that looks like it was inspired by those.