Is there no end to Twittermania?
Chatroom, news feed, celebrity watch, rebel intercom — for such a young technology, Twitter has already generated an improbable array of uses, not to mention a couple of potentially very rich founders.
But now, the microblogging site is about to discover a new incarnation — a tool to aid the digestion of great literature.
Fans of the classics will be delighted or appalled to learn that the New York branch of Penguin books has commissioned a new volume that will put great works through the Twitter mangle. The volume has a working title that will make the nerve ends of purists jangle: Twitterature.
In it, the authors will reduce the jewels of world literature — they mention Dante, Shakespeare, Stendhal and Joyce — into 20 tweets or fewer. That is 20 sentences, each with no more than 140 characters.
The book is the brainchild of two first years at the University of Chicago, who claim to be starting a cultural revolution. One evening, Emmett Rensin and Alex Aciman, both 19, asked themselves what defined the grandest ventures of their generation and best expressed the souls of 21st-century Americans?
They identified high literature as a crucial pillar for any generation, but they also latched on to Twitter, the Web site where users compress all of human experience into 140 characters.
Twitter, they thought, epitomized the short attention span and info-deluge that defined the contemporary age. So what if you put the two together? If great literature and Twitter were combined and Twitterature was born.
“We have embarked on an attempt to bring the two pillars of our generation together, once and for all,” the pair said.
In the blurb for the book the authors give a clue to their incentives for writing it, which are not entirely ethereal. Aciman and Rensin both harbor ambitions to become writers and clearly also hanker after cash. They say they are aiming for a book that has the literary merit to wow the blogosphere, as well as the “pure-money genius to take the market by storm.”
Whether they are right will depend on whether people want the 14,000 lines of Dante’s Divine Comedy trimmed to 20 short sentences. All should become clear in the autumn, when Twitterature is scheduled for publication.
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