The New York Times asks “Can a blog rise to the level of literature?”
“The question is prompted by the arrival of José Saramago’s latest effort, The Notebook, which collects a series of blog posts that Saramago, the Portuguese Nobelist, wrote from September 2008 to August 2009 at the urging of his wife and friends.”
While we would argue that the answer lies in the quality of the writing, not the way in which that writing is presented, the NYT takes a somewhat different stance.
(via PW)
Update: So, “can a blog rise to the level of literature?” Let us know what you think in the comments section below.
5 responses
I think so! Some of the best writing I’ve ever read is on NightmareBrunette’s blog, which is about her life as an escort. Sure there’s stigma stemming from both her trade and her writing outlet, but each post is carefully crafted, telling its own encapsulated story.
I’ve often found it interesting how it’s the ‘prestigious’ magazines and papers that are always the most narrow-minded.
Art should be judged primarily for its content, not the context. If Saramango first published his Nobel winning novel as installments on his blog, it wouldn’t change the words he wrote. The context would change–viewers would see it on the screen, the reader might have some bias about what s/he can expect from a blog, but the content would still be the same. It’s surprising that Papercuts are so skeptical of new media being that they are a blog, engaged in producing content in a new media form. So, to answer the question, yes, blogging can rise to the level of literature. It’s like you said, Issac, it’s the writing that counts, not where the writing is published.
This seems like an issue because the NYT’s is conflating form with format. Obviously someone could publish whatever they want (or, that fits the length–like pieces of flash fiction, poems, etc.) on a blog and some of it could be literature. I can see Paper Cuts point that what we normally think of as blog writing, quasi-journalistic commentary in quasi-diary form, is almost always too fleeting and tied to fleeting things to make sense in book form. I’m sure there are some bloggers who prove that wrong somewhere though.
PepysDiary.com is all that is needed as a refutation of this; I regret that the people who were posting DIARY OF A NOBODY as a daily blog seem to have run out of steam, because that was marvelous too. Blogging Boswell’s LIFE OF JOHNSON also seems like it might work well. Or Montaigne’s ESSAIS. Or WALDEN.
So, yeah, literature can be bloggy, and blogs can be literary, and it’s all roses. Silly New York Times!
Can literature be written? Are blogs [primarily] a written form? This is a non-question from a tired establishment that still insists on not figuring out what everyone else knows.
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