Literary criticism being shaped by Google
Do you ever spend time online while reading a book (not at the exact time you’re reading, of course) so you can gain a broadened understanding of the text? If so, how do you go about it? Chances are, you start with a simple Google search and go from there.
If you are doing this, then whether you realize it or not, you are helping to shape the future of literary criticism. A recent article in the Guardian Unlimited brings this issue to light with one particular novel called Spook Country by William Gibson. Now, I have not read the novel (but very intrigued and will add it to my reading list), so some of the article confuses me when it goes into various plot points about the book.
But it doesn’t need to be that hard to understand. A quote from the author himself actually makes this idea of literary criticism being shaped by Google very clear:
"One of the things I discovered while I was writing Pattern Recognition [Gibson's previous novel] is that I now think that any contemporary novel today has a kind of Google novel aura around it, where somebody’s going to google everything in the text … there’s this nebulous extended text. Everything is hyperlinked now."
So on a real basic level, the idea is simply that because of the power of the internet, and especially the search powers of Google, the text of a novel can be taken to an entirely different level of understanding because of this "hyperlinked" quality that any text has right now.
Back when I was a freshman in college, in one of my very first literature courses, I had a professor who was interested in this very idea. In fact, he had us design our own web pages based on a text we read in class (don’t worry, we weren’t being graded on our web design skills). Within that web page, aside from having basic information and a few quotes from the text, we also had to provide links that would, in a sense, illuminate the text even further.
For example, I chose the poem The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe. Yes, it’s a fairly straightforward poem. But I added links that lead the reader to more information about the raven, as a bird in the wild (habitat, feeding and mating habits etc). Then I also linked to sites that talked about they mythology around the raven. So as you can probably imagine, after reading all that extra information, the poem started to take on an entirely different shape.
In fact, one aspect of e-books that appeals to me is the ability to make hyperlinks within the text itself. Unless you’re reading on another electronic device that doesn’t have internet access, then you’re in trouble. But those hyperlinks can and do add another dimension to the texts.
Yeah, I know, when we start talking literary criticism the conversation can turn really confusing really fast. Just understand that criticism is a way of reading the text and understanding it. Pretty simple, huh? Things only get really confusing when we start getting into the nuts and bolts of the various schools of thought in criticism. Deconstruction, anyone?
Read the article from the Guardian and see what you think. And if anyone out there has read the book being discussed in the article, please leave a comment and give us your thoughts!
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