Friday 4 November 2011

E-Reading Between The Lines

Production of the first issue of C21 Literature is well underway with carefully chosen readers currently reporting back on our commissioned articles. In coming months these brilliant pieces will be drawn together with creative writings, comments and reviews to form an exciting new journal due for release in Summer 2012. In celebration of the approach date of our launch, C21 Literature will be hosting a drinks reception during the First Fictions Festival on Sunday 22nd January 2012 at 8pm in the Fulton Building of the University of Sussex. As part of this event the editorial team will be giving a talk on the journal, detailing the call for papers for Issue Two and giving advice on how to submit. Please come along and say hello. Details of how to register for the event can be found here: http://www.myriadeditions.com/first-fictions-home

As part of our engagement with contemporary writings, C21 Literature felt it was important to launch our journal in both print and e-formats. E-readers and e-books enjoy an increasing influence over the ways we consume literature in the twenty first century. Recently, the panel of the Booker Prize were offered e-readers to help them transport and digest the long list. Dubbed by some critics the ‘E-Booker’ Prize as a result, this decision highlighted the number of publishers who are moving towards dual release in both print and e-formats. Reader can now choose between a Sony Reader, a Kindle, a new Kindle Fire (showing text and images), Ipads, a kobo e-reader...the list is endless. A recent advert for one of these new devices claims that the e-reader comes with free access to around one hundred thousand books whose copyrights have expired. We all know classics can be found cheaply and that Amazon marketplace is a great source of low-cost seconds, but can anything ever compete with free? E-books offer multi-media content, hyperlinks to other e-resources, cut and paste facilities, regularly updated content and interactivity which printed books are simply unable to match. In a world where popular texts such as newspapers, blogs, Twitter feeds and Facebook updates are read online, e-books speak to a generation for whom instant access and ease of use are key factors in contemporary cultural encounters. Women, often considered the gender most reluctant to take up new forms of technology, constitute the highest percentage of e-book owners and are fuelling a surge in online book clubs. A recent report even highlighted that the anonymous cover of the e-book is enabling readers to indulge in less literary titles, with romance and erotic fiction seeing a significant increase in download sales.

If the printed book is ‘old skool’, the e-book is simply too cool for school. With changeable covers and slim travel-friendly sizes, the e-reader is the supermodel of the publishing world. For many, this weight issue is key. In my own days as a student, I dreamt of a lighter alternative to the (literally) weighty tome that is the Norton Anthology of English Literature. As both an academic aid and domestic door stop of choice, the Norton Anthology was unceremoniously dragged from one lecture to the next until curvature of the spine kicked in. Today, students simply snap open their laptops, MacBooks, Smartphones and e-readers to hunt down paragraphs and search for key words from the exact same text, but in e-book form. With no traditional allegiance to print, this younger generation are making the change to e books far more easily than their elders, many of whom already possess print copies of their favourite books and are reluctant to purchase them again. With the much maligned decline of the high street book seller and the dominance of Amazon, the shift to electronic formats - which can be produced and distributed rapidly - is creating a growing market worthy of serious attention. Amid talk of a Spotify for books and book apps overtaking games apps in download charts, publishers have begun investing in advertising for e-books and building exclusive content to motivate readers to take up this new format. The e-book of Nick Cave’s The Death of Bunny Monroe recently captured press attention for its exclusive social networking links, enhancements including audio of author readings and lyrics that sit alongside the traditional text. Changing the way we engage with as well as consume fiction, the e reader and e-books are altering our cultural landscape, creating multi-layered dialogic literary experiences.

Light, fast, clear and easy to navigate, the e-reader is in many ways the ideal companion of the twenty-first century book lover. But at what cost to the printed word? In their infancy, the e-reader and e-book have experienced some teething problems. Authors like Stephen King, whose new texts have been leaked as e-books prior to publication, have proved the strength of demand for the format but have also highlighted its pitfalls. Piracy is the one dark cloud on the e-horizon and many publishers are currently working on plans to avoid their own e-books falling victim to file sharing websites like PirateBay. Issues relating to royalties, copyright and ownership continue to loom large over the development of this technology. And for many, the e-book is simply another gadget to add to our already over-filled bags. Jammed alongside our laptop, smartphone and IPod, the need to integrate rather than propagate technology is cited as a major factor by those who choose to stay with the printed form. Readers can also find it hard to accept price levelling across print and e-formats. Given the choice, would you pay the same price for a hardback, paperback or e-book? Should e-books be cheaper, since the printing cost of production and distribution is so much smaller? And should readers be given the choice of both printed and electronic formats – or is the book set to become the vinyl of the twenty-first century? Whether we turn to technology to disguise our secret Mills and Boon habit or to display our technological cool, these new forms have already changed the ways in which we consume and experience literature. In dialogue with the printed book, the e-book has been instrumental in generating debate, new writings and innovative content and has enriched our literary experience in the twenty-first century. At present the two co-exist, but how long until the e coup?

Dr Katy Shaw

Monday 19 September 2011

Exposing A Dark World

Hello and welcome to the first C21 Literature: Journal of 21st Century Writings Blog. As Editor, it has fallen to me to take the first steps into the blogosphere but my co-editor and members of the editorial board will be hot on my heels in the coming months. Together, we’ll be offering a behind the scenes look at the design, production and promotion of C21 Literature as well as our reflections on current literary developments. We have been inundated with submissions for our first issue and as a result the commissioning process has been a long but thoroughly enjoyable one. We would like to thank everyone for an excellent range of abstracts and creative pieces. After some intense and interesting discussions, commissions have been chosen and matched with readers who will be casting a critical eye over the full-length pieces. In the coming months we will be editing book reviews and an exclusive piece of creative writing by a rising star of contemporary literature.
C21 Literature will launch in two stages during 2012. Our first launch will be an informal affair at the First Fictions festival with the University of Sussex and Myriad Editions in January. The second launch will be held at the University of Lincoln in July as part of the second bi-annual What Happens Next? Twenty-First Century Literature conference. Full details and information about tickets and times for both events will be featured in forthcoming C21 Literature blogs.
At the time of writing in September 2011, the twenty-first century world has temporarily turned its attention away from the olympic fascination of 2012 and back to the start of the new millennium and the influential events of 2001. With the recent tenth anniversary of 9/11, questions regarding the role of literature in understanding contemporary events have arisen again. In the immediate days and weeks after 9/11, a widespread panic grew about the purpose of literature – and the author - in a new world of danger and uncertainty. Martin Amis famously claimed that ‘after a couple of hours at their desks, on September 12 2001, all the writers on earth were reluctantly considering a change of occupation’. While it is probably fairer to say ‘some’ not ‘all’ writers experienced this doubt, the role of the writer and particularly of fiction was the subject of much debate in the post-9/11 world. Writers were asking whether they had indeed found themselves living in ‘the age of horrorism’ Amis knee-jerkingly predicted or whether they had instead been thrust into a new international game of heroes and villains.
The ten years following the attacks have produced a range of fictional responses to 9/11. Some have forced us to reconsider not only the terrible events of that day but the weeks, months and years before it, to use a tragedy as a way of accessing a wider comprehension of other peoples, beliefs and ways of understanding the world. Others have chosen to focus on a sense of nostalgia for a time before the towers, a utopian vision of the past that we must fight to reclaim.
As Eisenberg wrote in the short story ‘Twilight of the Superheroes’, ‘The planes struck, tearing through the curtain of that blue September morning, exposing the dark world that lay right behind it’. Shaken from a state of perceived innocence, the events of 9/11 compelled - rather than forced - writers to reconsider the function of their work. While Amis speculated that ‘a feeling of gangrenous futility had effected the whole corpus’ of literary output, Ian McEwan felt it ‘wearisome’ to consider inventing fiction when so much remained to be learned about current events. His desire to use post-9/11 literature to educate, to use fiction as an informing force, has proved influential in literary responses produced in the face of a new and unknown world of danger.
Focusing on literature – and especially the novel – the first decade of the twenty-first century has seen authors attempt to understand both the events of 9/11 and the altered landscapes left in its wake. But the coming generation will have to look much further back, not only to understand the events of 9/11 but how they came about, why they reached such a demonstrative pinnacle of terror and the effect of their reverberations on the post 9/11 world. For twenty-first century readers, this new generation of literature has the potential to offer a valuable and focalising source of understanding for our present and future. In exposing a dark world, the events of 9/11 changed not only the course of international history, but the path of literature in the twenty-first century. C21 Literature aims to create a critical, discursive space for the promotion and exploration of these writings as well as new creative work.
Watch this space.

Dr Katy Shaw