> Following on from Greg's comment (23 June 12.34) re: the novel as a
> virtual space......I like to think of the novel as the ideal immersive space.
>
> Lisa Le Feuvre
> -------------------------------------------------------------
And the Mud-MOO et al definition (a text-based virtual reality) could
apply to the novel, or to literature as a whole. However, I am interested
in framing this consideratin with Benedict Anderson's discussions in
__Imagined Communities__, about the role literature played in the creation
of the nation state. The novel--includes not only the form and format
but the institutionalizations that go with it--the invention of the
"author," of vernacular, national languages, the whole social machine.
Anderson focuses on the experience people had when they read novels (when
they behaved in literate ways), which he sums as **meanwhile**. Meanwhile
is an experience of belonging together (an experience of England,
American, Germany, France as definable boundaried places with insides and
outsides). This feelingg of meanwhile was a new experience.
My assumption is that the experience of "letters" online is somewhat
different, even within the writing and reading of narrative, not to
mention the production and consumption of emergent new hyper-forms. The
historical precedent of the interdependence of high literature and then
mass journalism with the technology of printing and the nation state
suggests that shifts in the social machine such as the one we are engaged
with here are part of a large-scale political shift as well with
consequences of boundaries-categories at evey scale of identity (logical,
cognitive, emotinal, social).
I am wondering what the feeling is of the virtuality emerging in the
practices of the internet environment (a restatment and elaboration of
earlier question: what is the virtual mood)...
best
Greg Ulmer