Canonising digital literature in India

Abstract

As rightly pointed out by Adam Hammond, literature has travelled through four different ages based on major medium shifts, in the course of its existence, namely the Oral Age, the Chirographic or Manuscript Age, the Print Age and the Digital Age. The shift from Gutenberg Press to Project Gutenberg has taken almost five hundred years. During every shift from one age to the other, there has been literary tensions, questioning the quality and canon of literature. However, at some point or the other, the literature in that particular medium of the age has been canonised and qualified. It is understood and proved that the medium plays a vital role in the dissemination of meaning from the text. The internet and the social media have already changed the way we think and work. Multitasking has become the order of the day. In such a situation, the multimodal born-digital texts have become all the more common. However, in India, reading digital literature and interpreting and analysing it have taken a back stage in India, especially in the academic forums. This study raises a few questions with reference to canonising digital literature, such as When memes are considered literature, with its textual and visual modalities, which are read and enjoyed by people of all strata, why should not the literature departments consider digital literature as part of the syllabus? What are the challenges faced by the readers while reading a digital text and what are the possible ways of addressing the challenges? Can the existing theories of literature be applied for studying digital literature? If not, how does the study of digital text remain different from the print literature? This is an attempt to canonise the digital literature for study in the Indian literature classrooms.