So What is Literature 2.0? | Goa Musings

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29th February 2024

This morning, at 4.45 am, our train chugged into Thivim Railway Station. Prof. Subhash from DMC College, Goa, was there at the station, to receive me warmly.

Then, on our lovely car drive to our hotel, I learnt a lot of local specifics about North & South Goa, about Konkani’s five alphabets [and hence five scripts] - Devanagari, Roman, Kannada, Malayalam and Perso-Arabic scripts that are currently used to write the Konkani language, about the famous tourist attractions, about how, for every two kilometres the language varies when it comes to Goa and how community plus geography determine the dialect variant of a particular region, etc etc!

But that’s meet for another post!

Today, just a few minutes ago, at 9.45 pm, we drove back from our lively dinner time at Jacob’s Creek, where our conversations over literature, culture and society went on and on for hours!

As I got back to my room, the first thing that I had resolved was to write a post on a lovely comment that I had received on our academic blog yesterday.

Well, for avid bloggers out there, this post is meant to motivate you to share your precious thoughts, of all hues - because you may not know how much it is valuable and useful to someone who is desperate to get inspiration from that particular post of yours! 

It was a critical take on Bertrand Russell’s “Education and Discipline”.

Back then, there were hardly any good critical summaries available for this wonderful essay by Bertrand Russell, and hence I took some quality time off to write and post a wholesome and simplified critical summary on this highly philosophical treatise!

And it felt so happy to to see a lot of encouraging comments for that post! Just posting a few here!

Today, I had received another such comment for this post, which said,

Russell’s earlier work, ‘On Education’, is also significant.

Well, this lovely comment, is the spur and the motivation for this post!

In the era of Digital Humanities, to rephrase a typical New Historicist parlance, these comments could also be called anecdotal evidence of the highest order!

This takes us to the concept of Literature 2.0!

In this era where the text assumes an entirely different avatar in the digital platform, it becomes all the more imperative on our part to know more about Literature 2.0!

What exactly is Literature 2.0 then?

Well, Literature 2.0 is basically about websites that host literary works – a poem, prose or play, on their platform, and also abundantly make use of user-generated content for their readers aka end users.

In this respect, Literature 2.0 helps in enhancing user interactivity and collaboration.

And this could also be called a kinda New Historicist reading since, it is also characterised by a ‘parallel reading’ of the text alongside its socio-cultural and socio-historical conditions, which form the co-text to the text, thus enhancing and amplifying the meaning of the text!

The ‘Textuality’ of the historical specifics hence become equally important in the production and the interpretation of the text! In other words, the historical specifics of a work of art, say a text, gets embedded into the text!

This reading and interpreting of the ‘Text’ in the context of the co-text includes both the literary and the non-literary as well, which make it ‘anecdotal!’ [Anecdotal Evidence].

In short, it is these anecdotal materials that prove valuable for the New Historicist to lay bare their truth claim that, meaning production is dependent on this so-called ‘fragmented stuff’ [reader responses of any sort, be it in social media, on You Tube, on blog posts, etc), that facilitate the shaping of an event or a story into ‘formalized facts!’

To sum it up, the anecdote or the Anecdotal Evidence Helps in refashioning the historical reality as it really ought to have been!

Again, that’s simply because of the fact that, anecdotal evidence helps us to take into account the felt experience of the other as well!

So what is the book that the person has mentioned in the comment and why does it assume a lot of significance to enhance the original post?

Well, it’s Russell’s book ‘On Education’, in which Russell says that,

If the basis of all education is knowledge wielded by love then society can be transformed.

How true he proves!

It’s not knowledge alone that the child needs, but knowledge that’s wielded by love, that the child needs, and that can transform society for the better!

The comment, then, is an excellent exemplar to Literature 2.0!