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1. Hi all, and thanks #HCTwitterConf19 for having me and to all who presented before me! I'm Daniella Gáti, a PhD candidate at Brandeis. I work on contemporary American literature and culture. My thread today is entitled “#LitCrit: Literature and Critique in the Age of Twitter.”
2 #HCTwitterConf19 Obs 1: culture is much more textual today than ever before. Hanging out with friends, business interactions and dating lives all take place primarily in text! That is: we read more than ever before. LitCrit hasn't really tried to account for this phenomenon.
3 #HCTwitterConf19 Obs 2: But the form of reading has changed dramatically. Social media posts, clickbaits, dating apps (+TwitterConf!) make reading much more fragmented/SEGmented into little bits/chunks/snippets. LitCrit has no terms for these texts and this new way of reading.
4 #HCTwitterConf19 LitCrit lags behind: it has not yet described this new reading culture or the ways that that culture impacts the creation of new lit. Electronic lit is still a minor field of lit study, and the impact of digital reading on novels is basically unstudied so far.
5 #HCTwitterConf19 (I attempt the latter in my dissertation--just ask!) But further, LitCrit is itself stuck in a mode of writing that is increasingly out of step with culture. Scholars like Jessica Pressman have called for new platforms of exchange among critics.
6 #HCTwitterConf19 Think of the work of Kinohi Nishikawa, who has suggested that we need to think of ways in which scholarship can make use of these brief modes of communication. post45.research.yale.edu/2019/01/rt-end… Trump must not dominate Twitter.
7 #HCTwitterConf19 That kind of work IS being done: Black Twitter has done much to educate about and challenge institutional racism. But LitCrit has been unable to theorize Black Twitter (cf. insightful work by soc and anthro), NOR do this kind of public humanities work.
8 #HCTwitterConf19 So I'd call for two things: i) a framework for describing the new patterns of reading and literary writing in the age of Twitter and bit-sized media; ii) new approaches toward pop modes of LitCrit engagement with the world. A kind of public humanities.
9 #HCTwitterConf19 For i), I'm working on trying to understand the affordances of the bit-sized text: its structure, the linkages it provides, its pleasures but also the resistances it provokes. I'm relying on the concept of the vignette, orig. a small vine ornament...
10 #HCTwitterConf19 ... in medieval manuscripts, to think through how new reading is segmented, interlinked, and visual. This concept allows me to theorize some forms in which novels can adapt to, but not fully adopt, the forms of their digital environment.
11 #HCTwitterConf19 I mentioned resistance: for many people, a book is still something that you should be able to curl up with: a cup of tea, a cat in your lap, or the shade of a tree under which you sit in a park are essential parts of the project of reading.
12 #HCTwitterConf19 Think of Jane Eyre sitting in the window with her book.... So what I'm finding is that contemporary novels are very aware of these attachments at the same time that they attempt to restructure their own plots to live and thrive in the Twitter world.
13 #HCTwitterConf19 A novel like Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad is structured around vignettes, short descriptive moments, that break up plot. Plot is not discarded entirely: we remain attached to it. But vignettes orient us in the world. It's not a coincidence...
14 #HCTwitterConf19...that Egan also wrote a story in tweets, Black Box. We need to take these linkages seriously as scholars of TEXT. As for ii), something like #HCTwitterConf19, or simply the HC itself, are essential for LitCrit going forward. Thankfully, many of you here...
15 at #HCTwitterConf19 have spoken about this in more depth and more meaningfully than I could. We need those perspectives for a more publicly engaged LitCrit; for my part I hope to have contributed a bit to a better understanding of lit and reading today.
16 #HCTwitterConf19 Thank you for following my tweets, and please ask any questions you might have, or make comments! Thanks *micdrop*
Thanks @caitduffy49 and @annetiquate for organizing!!
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