Literature and the Internet

A Guide for Students, Teachers, and Scholars

Stephanie Browner, Stephen Pulsford, Richard Sears

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317707653
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

Literature and the Internet: A Guide for Students, Teachers, and Scholars is the only Internet guide written for those who love and study literature. The book begins with a practical introduction for readers who want help finding, navigating, and using literary sites. Later chapters focus on educational issues such as plagiarism, citation, website evaluation, the use of Internet sites in literature courses, as well as the technical, scholarly and professional issues raised by the advent of the Internet. Finally, the book concludes with a chapter on the cultural implications of the Internet for literary studies.
In addition, the book offers an annotated bibliography of Internet sources (with URLs) that introduces readers to hundreds of sites which they can explore on their own.
Readers need not have a B.A. or even a major in English, and no special training in computer technology and software is necessary. The book explains both the basics of the Internet and sophisticated scholarly issues in simple language.
Ultimately, each Internet user must choose his or her own path through the Internet, but with Literature and the Internet in hand, surfing the net for things literary will be more efficient and satisfying and much less confusing and overwhelming.

Chapter 1

The Internet as a Whole

Why?

For people who are primarily interested in literature, reading books about the Internet may seem pointless. Many guides to cyberspace list jargon and instructions about how to perform operations most readers would never want to perform. A few purport to serve only the interests of the dim-witted. One Internet text, Using the Internet: The Most Complete Reference, which is extra long but otherwise typical in many respects, has well over a thousand pages of definitions and functions, but nothing in the entire work suggests why anyone should wish to use the web in the first place or details what resources are actually available via Internet. Reading books about the Internet is generally not encouraging for those more interested in an academic discipline than in computers.

A quick look at the Internet itself scarcely motivates scholarly exploration, since its immediate appearance evokes billboards, television, and video games. This impression is not a false one: The Internet displays tons of material that is commercial, colorful, entertaining, and interactive, as well as occasionally loud and intrusive.

In addition, even a short journey through the World Wide Web indicates that the Internet is incredibly vast and daunting. The net is so large that many recent accounts simply explain why its size cannot be accurately established, and some critics have claimed that looking for information on the Internet is like trying to drink from a firehose. Why should a serious-minded scholar or reader waste precious time exploring a frustrating, overloaded virtual universe of advertising, hype, doubtful amusement, and trivia?

The answers are so simple that they may seem uncompelling:

1. The Internet is an enormous, in some ways unique, academic resource. In many important respects, the Internet is a new kind of library, an electronic library of libraries, with text, pages, books, collections of books, and collections of collections.
2. The Internet is immediately accessible, quite easy to search, and easier to use than the typical university library. For some kinds of information, the Internet is much the quickest route; for other kinds, which are on the increase, the Internet is the only source available.

Text

The material of the Internet is mostly text, divided into pages. In fact, the page (as in home page, for example) is the basic unit of Internet sites, which are produced with software closely related to or identical with word processors. Ordinarily, a whole lot of words on pages collected together would clearly appear to us as books. Only the necessity of viewing the assembled words on computer screens prevents our seeing the leaflets, pamphlets, magazines, and books that readers usually read and literary scholars habitually dealt with long before computers existed. For people whose occupations or majors include the study of literature, the Internet is an extension of their ordinary interests into a new realm, but text on the Internet is still text, even though it is not between cardboard covers.

There are differences between books and Internet pages, of course, but not necessarily the ones we have been led to expect. For example, some writers have stated that Internet text is delivered in the form of sound bites, little television commercial–sized portions, but although such units may be found, one is just as likely to turn up enormous files: All Shakespeare’s plays are on the Internet, and none of them is geared toward the hypothetical short attention span of computer users; all The Iliad, all The Odyssey, all The Divine Comedy appear on the Internet also. Since much of the text on the Internet is derived from the textual forms in the “real” world, much of it is simply the size of its inspiration.

The four primary differences between text on the Internet and text in actual books are that Internet texts are searchable, connected, collectible, and reproducible. The first two capacities permit the reader to study and relate to texts in new, solely electronic modes, whereas the last two primarily give the reader new powers of manipulating and possessing texts in print.

1. Internet text is searchable, not simply because it appears on the Internet but also because it appears in relationship to the word functions of computers. All word processors have search capacities; all web browsers have search capacities; and absolutely all the texts one may discover at Internet sites can be searched, sometimes in multiple ways. Word-by-word textual analysis, which used to depend on concordances laboriously compiled for only a very few works (the Bible and Shakespeare), is now possible for an enormous range of literary works and is available to anyone, academic scholar or not. Techniques for style identification via computer (using not just big, important words, but the, and, but, and so on) have been developed by linguists and are being used now; the identifying differences between the styles of (say) John Steinbeck and Jane Austen can be numerically defined and demonstrated. Whether or not Shakespeare wrote a particular work is a different kind of question than it used to be since the subtlest discriminations of usage can be compiled and scrutinized. In addition, the Internet, of course, makes thousands of texts available for such scientific study.

2. Internet text routinely connects to other texts, and any Internet site has the potential to connect to any other site. The World Wide Web is called a web because it is interconnected to itself at point after point. From any site on the Internet, a link can be made that enables the user to move directly and immediately to any other site, a physical impossibility for even the most agile of real-world spiders. This “any point to any point” feature depends completely on the use of hypertext on the Internet, so the connections (or links, as they are called) are the basic differentiation of text on the Internet from text anywhere else. Other text forms may be searchable, collectible, and reproducible in some way, but they are not linked. Because of the linking, virtually all Internet sites appear in a matrix of other sites. Whether or not coherence is perceivable on a local level (why is that particular site attached to this one?), the total impression is of a vast coinherence of knowledge. Never has literature seemed so “related” to all the other concerns of the human race.

3. Internet text is collectible in a very immediate way, since most sites allow files to be downloaded and used like any other computer files. Usually, downloading a file is possible in two different modes: as a text file or as a source file. A text file eliminates the images from a site and provides only the words, which can then be manipulated as in any other word-processing file. If a person wants to insert annotations into a complete text of Hamlet, for example, it is possible to do so; in fact, once it becomes a text file, any work of literature can be altered in any way. A source file stores all the information of the original site in hypertext markup language (HTML) so that it can be opened and used on the user’s computer; in this format, it looks exactly as it did on the Internet, and although it can also be changed, the process is rather difficult and thus not very likely.

4. Internet text can be reproduced electronically (copied and recopied, cut and pasted here, there, and everywhere) or it can be printed as hard copy. Most files can be printed directly from the Internet browser (Netscape or Microsoft Explorer, for example), and, of course, any text that can be downloaded as the user’s own file can be printed in the ordinary way. Thus, a student who needs to read Chapter 1 of Pride and Prejudice can easily print a copy of her own from an e-text version. Actually purchasing certain kinds of textbooks may very well become obsolete.

The changes that the Internet may bring about in our use of literature have not yet developed clearly, but it seems reasonable to predict that the four differentiae mentioned above contribute to several new emphases in literary studies: the possibility of more scientific approaches to texts, a new sense of interrelatedness between texts and texts and between texts and the world; a new capacity for flexibility and change within the text itself, and the reader’s altered style of text “ownership.”

Internet Library (Primary Texts)

Conceiving of the Internet as a vast library is enticing for literary scholars; it makes a brave new world seem accessible and manageable on old, familiar terms. It must be acknowledged, however, that the Internet is composed of a whole new breed of text collection, in many crucial respects unlike any other library on earth.

To characterize the primary texts, actual literary works, represented on the net, one must draw analogies to bookstores as well as libraries. A reader at the Internet, so to speak, can readily find works that would otherwise appear in specialized archives, graduate school libraries, rare book collections, antiquarian bookstores, airport terminal stalls, discount chains, adult bookstores, sidewalk newsstands, small-town public libraries, and floor-to-ceiling used bookstores, to name a few. All these sources of books appear on the same level, and all are acessible through the same means: the most democratic, variegated, surprising lot of books ever assembled in one—let us say—realm.

Among the works on the Internet that would ordinarily be published some other way, however, one seldom encounters the current books that are appearing in mainstream bookstores right now. Copyright restrictions prevent Internet publication of recent titles. Biographical information about the most current writers, advertisements for their titles, and the most up-to-date reviews are all easy to find, but not the books that Barnes and Noble stocks by the thousands. For that reason, the Internet “library” collection has a strange twist: It has large and obvious gaps, it cannot cover the literary ground as even a moderately well-stocked library can, and it cannot equal the contemporary appeal of a good bookstore.

The library of the Internet, however, contains sources that are almost inaccessible through any other collection. Among these are hypertext publications of archival rarities such as slave narratives or eighteenth-century fiction by little-known female writers. Texts that would be prohibitive as reprint editions appear on the Internet—more and more frequently—at low cost compared with traditional publishing methods. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of texts that would once have been very difficult to access are now at the scholar’s fingertips.

Still other Internet resources are really not available anywhere else, including journals published only in electronic editions and fiction and poetry composed in hypertext in the first place. In addition to those works, which are structurally tied into the Internet, a host of writings appear in cyperspace simply because it is an available place for publication. Letters, diaries, commentaries, reflections, sexual confessions, diatribes, poetry, essays, short stories, and novels from the pens of people whose works less than a decade ago would never have been published are now occupying shelf space on the net, and only on the net. Walt Whitman’s egalitarian crowds, some uttering barbaric yawps, have found their niche.

Research Library

Because the vast majority of literary works published since the 1920s cannot be displayed on the Internet, secondary texts relating to literary works and authors far outnumber primary ones on the net. Every sort of encyclopedic reference appears on the web. Some sites feature literally thousands of entries of a biographical or historical slant, and it is safe to say that every past author we have ever heard of is discussed somewhere on the Internet. Many electronic encyclopedias contain only materials readily available in any ordinary reference collection, but they all have the advantage of links to facilitate their cross references. All other things being equal, an Internet encyclopedia is a bit more efficient to use than the same set in print and between covers.

Some biographical (and autobiographical) and journalistic information on the Internet is more current than the data in any library, simply because Internet sites may be updated weekly or even daily. The most famous newspapers in the world—and TV news channels, weather channels, shopping channels, arts channels, and film channels—have Internet versions of their stories and schedules, provided every day and frequently available before any other form of report. The Internet is an invaluable pop culture treasure trove, and since book publishers strive to keep up with all the other media, the most contemporary, up-to-date literary news is on the Internet.

Of more interest (perhaps) to the academic user is that the Internet has become the repository for home pages of the most respected intellectual institutions in the world, including, of course, virtually all the major colleges and universities; all the major libraries and archives, including, in the United States alone, the Library of Congress, the National Archives, all the state historical societies, the National Geographic Society, the Smithsonian; and virtually all the major art museums, opera houses, and theaters. These home pages contain valuable links to other sources chosen by the (generally) well-informed staffs of these major institutions. In short, the Internet is an unparalleled cultural treasure trove, too.

Unlikeness to Libraries

The Internet offers literary texts and primary and secondary resources arranged in pages like the books that websites have copied so quickly. Although it would seem that the experience of reading literature on the Internet would be much the same as any previous way of reading, it is not.

The Internet as a library, for example, exhibits some very peculiar features. It is a huge collection of textual sites, but site after site offers nothing beyond what is already available on hundreds of other sites; these duplicates may even be linked to each other, so that the unwary reader may be invited to move from clone to clone to clone on a trail set up by the clone makers. Very frequently, in fact, materials are connected and totally redundant (whereas when reading a book, turning the page to find the same page would not be permissible!). It begins to seem as if there are a thousand versions of the same thing. Just visit any list of a thousand Shakespeare sites for ready examples. Please note that AltaVista reports 503,430 Shakespeare sites on the Internet!

Of course, it is sometimes convenient to have many different routes to the same place, but it can also be confusing and time consuming. Often, the Internet is like being in a big city where all the streets look alike and you are trying to locate only one of them.

In actual libraries, such a configuration is rare, since publishers generally avoid simple duplications of previously published works and collection builders consciously avoid collecting all the same books again. At present, there is no sense on the Internet of gaps being filled or missing areas of information being supplied; there is no sense whatever of a total vision of the realm of knowledge. Perhaps such a vision is now out of the question.

Out of Date Already

A major difference between the virtual library of the web and the “real” world of libraries is that the Internet is (more) frequently redundant; another major difference is that the Internet is frequently outdated. In fact, the Internet tends to begin with the outdated! The web certainly looks au courant with bright, attractive colors, an ultracontemporary context, and immediate accessibility, but appearances can be deceiving.

In literature home pages, the Internet occasionally seems outmoded, both in theory and in content. At a time when postmodernism minimizes categories and hierarchies, the web reinstates and emphasizes them. The easiest way to present information on the Internet—by now, the traditional way—is in nested hierarchies; everything has a category that fits under another category and so on. The subject tree format is everywhere on the web. Postmodern assumptions about equality of texts and blurring of boundaries within genres and between periods have no place in the formal arrangements of web pages.

The commonest designation for a website is simply an author’s name. By default, the Internet perpetuates a completely auteuristic theory of literarature. So much attention is given to individual authors that larger issues of literary history, criticism, and theo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. The Internet as a Whole
• Chapter 2. Searching the Internet
• Chapter 3. Kinds of Literary Websites
• Chapter 4. Literary Guide to the Internet: A Bibliography
• Chapter 5. Literary Guide to the Internet: A Bibliography (Continued)
• Chapter 6. Evaluation of Sites
• Chapter 7. The Internet and Teaching
• Chapter 8. Literary Texts and Literary Careers in the Electronic Age
• Chapter 9. Literature and the Internet: Theoretical and Political Considerations
• Works Cited
• Index