Shifting notions of the literary

According to Terry Eagleton in his book Literary Theory, “literature cannot in fact be ‘objectively’ defined. It leaves the definition of literature up to how somebody decides to read, not the nature of what is written.” This does not mean that literature is anything that people carelessly label as such, but rather that these characterizations are rooted in a particular culture’s deep-seated beliefs, meaning that literature itself varies according to a culture, its history, social ideologies and value judgments. If Eagleton’s theory is applied to the blog, a blog can absolutely qualify as literature due to the reader’s appreciation of it as such, as Escandell demonstrates. For this week’s class we have read the fourth chapter, “Literatura y simbiosis: El blog como marco de creación literaria” in Daniel Escandell’s book titled Escrituras para el siglo XXI: literatura y blogosfera. In this chapter, Escandell illustrates the potentiality of the blog as a valid literary medium that has to this day not been freed from elitist classifications and frequent associations with the genre of the diary, which is traditionally not considered as having literary value. Specifically, Escandell focuses his study on blog-novels (blogonovelas), the principal genre of of blog-fiction.

The primary characteristic of blog-novels is the innovative conception of the protagonist and narrator through the use of the avatar. This avatar is a virtual entity that functions as not only the writer of the work, but also the protagonist who must interact with readers while maintaining this “mask” in order to convince them of his existence in the real world, which does not actually exist. Thus, the avatar becomes the defining marker that distinguishes it from other types of blog fictions. Moreover, another significant marker of the blog-novel is its objective, which intends to get readers to finish chapters and return to the blog for the following chapter since it is published as it is created. Consequently, another fundamental characteristic of the blog-novel is its use of a “natural” or chronological temporality. Last, the relationship established with the reader is also essential to the blog-novel. Though the reader does not have the capacity to alter the work, she does have the ability to question and interact with the avatar, in this way making this exchange crucial to the work. These distinguishing features of the blog-novel generate interesting implications when the blog, a non-literary platform, is re-purposed for literary uses. First, the avatar presents a modification of the concept of an original author, given that there can exist a great distance between the real “I” and the author “I,” meaning that the real “I” has to create a separate entity from which to write, the avatar narrator. Also, since the role of the reader is central to the blog-novel, it could be stated that readers act as co-authors, making the creation of literature into a more democratic space. Last, the blog-novel’s inflexibility with its temporality, insisting on the present time, requires the author to include current events and popular topics in order to display the most natural and convincing story for the purposes of deceiving the reader. Furthermore, due to the possibility of immediate publication, writing time also becomes more immediate and faster than ever before. These implications are clearly broadening the horizons of what is considered literary due to uniqueness of the medium of blogs which simultaneously put on display our culture's shifting attitudes and beliefs of what constitutes literature.