In our recent class discussions we've been focusing a lot on what constitutes literature, or authorship, or even reading, so needless to say, as I poked around the Wiki novel A Million Penguins yesterday, these questions repeatedly came up in my thoughts.
I found A Million Penguins to be fairly interesting, not just for the questions it raises about the nature of online social networking today, but also for the way it has in some ways manipulated what I have to come to define as literature. To my understanding, the Wiki novel was composed entirely of numerous different creative writing submissions, all compounded together to form a single cohesive "novel." In setting this project in motion, the creators of the Wiki novel sought to examine whether it is possible to create a solitary fictional voice from a collection of different writers, and in doing so, also examined what it literature, what is an author, and what is reading.
Truthfully, I didn't find the results of the Wiki novel to be that groundbreaking. While the premise of a combined novel is interesting, the end result of the work felt disjointed, and I didn't feel compelled to continue reading. These impressions made me consider what it is, then, to be an author, and whether or not a unified work must come from one author. In the case of A Million Penguins, it seems to be that in response to the question of whether a work must have a single author to be cohesive, the answer is a resounding yes.
When it comes to determining whether the Wiki novel can be considered a work of literature, my response isn't so emphatic. In the beginning, there seemed to be a storyline of sorts, which grew more and more convoluted with each passing chapter. Ultimately, there didn't seem to be a point to it all. It felt like 21 short stories with all the same character names, not one cohesive piece of literature. This led me to wonder if there needs to be a point to the work for something to be considered literature insofar as the author (or authors) must have a vision of where the work will lead and what they are trying to communicate for it to be literature. If I just put a bunch of random chapters together from several different pieces of literature, would the resulting work be a piece of literature? I don't know that I have the answer, but I believe that these questions have given way to even more intriguing dilemmas in determining what is literature.
Finally, I thought about what reading is in relation to the Wiki novel. Truthfully, I find it incredibly difficult to read any piece of literature online, and I grow impatient and begin to scroll through the work faster than I'm reading it. This brought up the tangibility of the printed word, in that it's harder for me to skip several chapters in a book that I'm reading than it is to skim down several chapters in a make believe Wiki novel. As the presence of literature on the internet grows, I believe it will lead to interesting questions on whether they nature of reading will change as well. Will we still dedicate the same time and attention to something that is displayed in front of us on a glowing computer monitor? In the case of A Million Penguins, I confess that my time and attention could have spent reading something more worthwhile.
Nonetheless, I did find A Million Penguins to be interesting, if only for the fact that it raises complicated questions about the nature of literature, authors, and reading in an increasingly media savvy world.
3 comments:
I found your question about whether internet writing will change the nature of reading really interesting because I do the same thing you do. The internet and computers are just linked with such immediate access to knowledge that I never feel like slowing down to enjoy an article from a computer screen. It's much better from a book. I was also wondering if people would feel more compelled to read A Million Penguins if someone were to publish it as a book.
Your reading of a wiki novel is quite dated. I doubt you read postmodern theory and some representitive works. Take a print novel, such as Kathy Acker's Blood and Guts in High School and William Burroughs's Naked Lunch, and tell me how you would apply your notions of unity and coherence to them.
SLIRK - The Smart Little Rich Kid wiki novel.
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