Literature and the Internet

I have been attempting to clear out the backlog of un-listened to podcasts. Last week, I decided to work through On Being, which I love 50% of the time. Krista Tippet had interviewed Maria Popova, the woman behind Brain Pickings, which is a blog that I need to read more often because it challenges my thinking whenever I do read it. There are so many ideas worth discussing that Popova brings up, but the one that really blew my mind was around literature.

MS. TIPPETT: I mean, I wonder — someplace you said, “Literature is the original Internet.” And I wonder if that image of your grandfather is precisely what you're describing.

MS. POPOVA: Oh, yeah. Yeah, definitely. And I mean, in this — I guess, seeing these books of his added a different layer of understanding to this thing which I've been saying for a while. And originally, I meant it in the sense of — you know, you look at a book and then, in it, every footnote and allusion and reference is essentially a hyperlink to another work. Except it only works backwards. It only goes back in time, you know? And marginalia or this sort of — it goes back and forth because it is the present mind conversing with a past mind. So it's a different kind of hypertext, I guess.

I have struggled at times to explain why allusions expand a text. In one way, they are ideas building on previous ideas from, what Popova calls, the common record. Perhaps one of the greatest difficulty that inexperienced readers have is that they don't have enough experience with the common record to see how the ideas are building. The corollary is that students also have difficulty building their own ideas within their writing.

This idea of allusion as hyperlink and literature as the internet is one that has been intriguing me all week. In fact I was so excited to share it with co-worker. She also pointed out that "allusions were what you HAD to do as author -- it was about how you established your credibility to even write your work." Oh my! (Did I mention that my coworkers are amazingly smart?). Allusion then becomes a part of rhetoric, which is forcing me to reconsider some what I know about ethos.

The podcast is definitely worth an hour of listening. Another intriguing part:

POPOVA: I think a lot about this relationship between cynicism and hope. And critical thinking without hope is cynicism. But hope without critical thinking is naïveté. And I try to live in this place between the two to try to build a life there because finding fault and feeling hopeless about improving our situation produces resignation of which cynicism is a symptom and against which it is the sort of futile self-protection mechanism. But on the other hand, believing blindly that everything will work out just fine also produces a kind of resignation because we have no motive to apply ourselves toward making things better. And I think in order to survive, both as individuals and as a civilization, but especially in order to thrive, we need to bridge critical thinking with hope.

Yes. This is giving me food for thought because I've been reading Peter Elbow's work on Believing and Questioning and I'm in the middle of pondering an article around doubt for a Writing Project piece.