Tuesday, November 06, 2012

Twitter and Literature - Unlikely Bedfellows


The Guardian looks at the growing convergence between literature and Twitter.

From the piece...

But I'm not convinced that Twitter and literature are natural bedfellows. So far, attempts to marry the two – from gimmicky stocking fillers such as Twitterature to chicklit such as The Twitter Diaries, to the inevitable Bloomsday tweetathon, to dustjackets begging us to "join the conversation", to the hashtag #amreading (no you're not, you're online) – have been uniformly annoying.


I tried to follow Jennifer Egan's short story "Black Box", which she live-tweeted via the New Yorker. It was a nice idea, but wholly impractical, especially for someone on British Summer Time. Even Shakespeare would lose its impact read backwards, in 140-character soundbites, between breaking news and apercus from @PiersMorgan.

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