I find particularly interesting the claim that the literary novel ha[s] quit center stage of our culture and [is] in the process, via university creat

I find particularly interesting the claim that the literary novel ha[s] quit center stage of our culture and [is] in the process, via university creative writing programs, of becoming a conservatory form, like the easel painting or the symphony. Drawing on Bakhtin, ­­we can see BDDM (bi-directional digital media) as having precisely the qualities previously celebrated in the novel: Among genres long since completed and in part already dead, the novel is the only developing genre. It is the only genre that was born and nourished in a new era of world history and therefore it is deeply akin to that era, whereas the other major genres entered that era as already fixed forms, as an inheritance, and only now are they adapting themselves-some better, some worse-to the new conditions of their existence. Compared with them, the novel appears to be a creature from an alien species. It gets on poorly with other genres. It fights for its own hegemony in literature; wherever it triumphs, the other older genres go into decline. ... The novel parodies other genres (precisely in their role as genres); it exposes the conven­tionality of their forms and their language; it squeezes out some genres and incorporates others into its own peculiar structure, re­-formulating and re-accentuating them... Those genres that stubbornly preserve their old canonic nature begin to appear stylized... Parodic stylizations of canonized genres and styles occupy an essential place in the novel... What are the salient features of this novelization of other genres suggested by us above? They become more free and flexible, their language renews itself by incorporating extraliterary heteroglos­sia and the "novelistic" layers of literary language, they become dialogized, permeated with laughter, irony, humor, elements of self-parody and finally-this is the most important thing- the novel inserts into these other genres an indeterminacy, a certain semantic openendedness, a living contact with unfinished, still­ evolving contemporary reality (the openended present). I don't know, I'm excited about computational media and the new kinds of reading and being we're developing. I wish we could make space for this in school without having to wait another 50 years.