Is Twitter a Literary Form?

Recent Institute visitor Teju Cole discusses the limits and possibilities of Twitter as a literary form in the "6th floor blog" of the New York Times:

"When the merits of Twitter are debated, one sentiment invariably is at the top of the con column: 140 characters are seldom enough to express the full weight of an idea. Or at least an idea that’s worth expressing."

"People have found ways around this: conjoined tweets, live-tweeting, etc. … The novelist Teju Cole expanded on this theme on Wednesday, when he posted an entire short story via tweet. Yes, that has been done before. But Cole’s project was different, because the individual tweets were posted not by him, but by his followers, and then @TejuCole retweeted them in chronological order to form a sort of quilted story."

More in the New York Times:  http://6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/09/teju-cole-puts-story-telling-to-the-twitter-test/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

More about Teju Cole's visit in February 2012: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/cole_teju12.html

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Teju Cole visits W. G. Sebald's grave in the New Yorker

Nigerian author Teju Cole, who visited us last February, tells of his pilgrimmage to W. G. Sebald's grave in the most recent issue of the New Yorker.

"Finally, coming around the chancel, I saw S.’s gravestone: a slab of dark marble, a slender marker shaded by a large green bush. There he is, I thought. The teacher I never knew, the friend I met only posthumously. Some water had trickled down the face of the slab, making the “S” of his name temporarily invisible, as well as the second “4” in 1944 and the “1” in 2001. The erasures put him into a peculiar timelessness. Along the top of the gravestone was a row of smooth small stones in different shades of brown and gray. There was a little space on the left. I picked up a stone from the ground and added it to the row. Then I knelt down."   More.
More about Teju Cole here.

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Breaking Down Timbuktu

Nigerian author and art critic Teju Cole, who visited the Institute in February 2012, writes about the motivations of iconoclasts in history, and the destruction by Sunni extremists of Timbuktu's medieval Sufi Muslim shrines that have been decleared UNESCO World Heritage sites.

From the webzine, The New Inquiry:

"Iconoclasm is nominally about theology. Images which represent the wrong ideas must be expunged. But why be so furious about ideas? And, so, how are we to understand the ongoing destruction of Sufi shrines in the north of Mali? Ansar Dine, the rebel group that now controls Timbuktu, believes itself to be doing the will of God. The United Nations doesn’t matter, Ansar Dine has said, UNESCO is irrelevant, only God’s law matters. The locals are helpless, and horrified. Short of witnessing grievous bodily harm, few things are as astonishing as seeing the casual, physical destruction of what one holds sacred."

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