Almost as if it hadn’t spread its tentacles far enough, Twitter has moved into classic literature to make Keats, Kerouac, Kafka, and the likes of, available in 140 characters.
Using no more than the site’s maximum tweet limit, two students have taken 20 tweets to re-tell each of the 60 classics featured in their own debut title Twitterature.
Wanting to help readers ‘not down wiv’ the stories’ contemporary parlance, the duo has given each character a 21st avatar – Macbeth is ‘BigMac’, Juliet a ‘hot babe.’
Continuing their upgrade of Shakespeare, or downgrade as some will insist, the pair claim to have “liberated poor Hamlet and made him a happening youngster.”
However, the students hinted that the plotlines remain intact, as each great work has simply been “distilled through the voice of Twitter to its purest, pithiest essence.”
And proving that they are aware that their lecturers at Chicago University might be reading, the two debut authors described their title, in its blurb, as a “good pastiche.”
“Twitterature skewers the original work with pin-point accuracy,” they wrote, “-mocking its grandiosity, exposing absurd coincidences of plotting, parodying its subject's ticks, slips and oddities.”
Most initial reviewers say the laugh out loud factor is assured, but the more serious critics appear divided: The Guardian hailed it as a “tool to aid the digestion of great literature,” though the Wall Street Journal regretted it could hear Shakespeare “rolling over in his grave.” Twitterature is out today.
Nov 6, 2009
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