Lit-Liv [LITerature is still aLIVe]

First of all, introduce yourself:

Well, my name is Beniamina, I am 22  years old at the moment, and I come from Italy.

No, I can’t do that. It sounds childish from the very beginning. I must be more serious.

This is not what I mean by “serious”, Beniamina, please…

So, let’s try again.

…no, I can’t do that. I am going back and forth from my thoughts to my words, and viceversa.

The point is that I feel a little bit strange about writing and having the feeling that I am actually going to “publish” what I am doing without the intermediacy of anyone or anything. But that’s it. That’s the Internet era, or revolution, or anarchy, whatever you like to call it.

However, I must admit that I wasn’t really fond of technology until I got to know what it really let us do, how much it has been growing and how much potential it has still to develop. I don’t want to discuss about definition, and what is the web 2.0 compared to the 3.0. I am just looking at what I see going on now, and it’s definetely something of a revolution.

Websites of course, blogs, e mails, obviously social networks, not to mention the magic word “sharing” which has brought generosity back to humankind: everyone is eager to communicate, everyone looks forward to expressing him/herself in a world – that is, the digital world – in which many things have become easier. You just need a PC and a cable – but sometimes even that is superflous – and you find yourself caught in the net. Of course, it can be risky, it can cause addiction, but the more scared we are, the less we will be able to take advantage of it. The perfect couple Internet/computer, being it a laptop or a cell phone, it is entering our lives in many ways, from our workplace to our free time, and I guess they’ll  keep going together like horse and carriage for a long time.

I am an Italian student from Siena, a splendid town in Tuscany. I am studying foreign languages and literatures, mainly English and Russian. Basically I deal with books, print paper, ink, pens, pencils sometimes, rarely even with typewriters, photocopies…but the web has trapped me as well. I guess you are wondering what is this webpage you are reading, then.

Well, welcome in my Lit-Liv website, where I am going to talk about an almost completely new and cutting-edge example of literature, that is Electronic Literature. But how come I’ve ended up here?

Once, almost one year ago now (this is scaring…but anyways) I was sitting my English literature class, and all at once Shakespeare was gone: complexity, web, probability, links…what?? I don’t remember exactly why and those words have entered our door that afternoon, but I know for sure that from then on they’ve never left my mind. If they’ve showed up even in a literature course, I said to myself, then there must be something that connects the two. Maybe it’s because literature is a complex system itself, quoting a famous American scientist and translator (not by chance), Warren Weaver.

Complexity is the baseline on which the Web works: you start from here, than click there, then open a new tab, then a new window…it’s a disorganized complexity, as he would have called it. But it’s not totally random, anywyay: there is a link that makes you want to go from one node to another, you move consciously from here to there. But this is was literature does, I thought: a series of characters is our list of nodes, the relations between them and between them and us, their readers, are the links that form our complex web. On the one hand, this web is absolutely unpredictable and therefore disorganizes, ad its shape depends on how each of us perceives what he/she is reading according to his/her tastes and experiences; on the other, though, the map of connection that we obtain from it has its own internal and weel-formed order…So literature and the Internet, and technology in general, seemed to have something in common. But how is this rendered practically? What happens when the three of them actually meet? Is it just a matter of concept, or it’s a real chance that they can work together?

This was the very beginning of everything, a leap inside the future of literature in an era in which there seems to be no room for whatever is considered old and obsolete, like ink and paper.

But literature can never be obsolete. It grows up with us, it’s a desperately human need, and nobody can say it’s dead only because books aren’t populating our shelves as they used to. It doesn’t mean that people don’t read anymore. People are starting not reading BOOKS anymore, in two ways: first of all, e-books are physically taking their place in our bags and backpacks, but there is not the only way of thinking about literature in the digital era.

What is properly called “Electronic Literature” or “Webletteratura” , according to Mario Gerosa, an Italian critic who has recently wrote a book on that  – but let’s not mess up with definitions for now – is literature that is profoundly connected with the tool in which it has been created. This tool is not anymore the print page, but it’s at first the complex surface of the computer screen, and in the last years this means also utilize the possibilities that the Internet gives.

This is just an introduction to my work, which is part of my final dissertation. I hope you will enjoy reading some more detailed explanations about my project (in English or in Italian), have a look at my blog and leave a comment if you like to, check for reference books and other sources in my webography and bibliography, and appreciate the attempt of writing a history of this new, maybe too new genre, but which still deserves to have its fascinating history written.

That’s all, folks. I hope you like it!

Beniamina