Good answer but wouldn't that be doing something slightly different from just simulating the internet? Or maybe that's a facile comment cos obviously a book wouldn't actually literally try to be the internet obviously so what I said before had to allow some wiggle room.I reckon you have to do something only a book can do but which taps into what the internet does and is. The advantage a book has, imo, is it forces you to work with it. You can read things online which require a similar commitment but the other media on there are constantly nagging at you in a way that's a few steps removed when you're reading a book.
Good answer but wouldn't that be doing something slightly different from just simulating the internet? Or maybe that's a facile comment cos obviously a book wouldn't actually literally try to be the internet obviously so what I said before had to allow some wiggle room.
it just seems like pure tokenism. there was a real meaning to this thread title. i'm not just trying to get at experiments and mentions of the internet in literature. has the novel played itself out, has it dematerialised into a new form or inexistence, are the limits of experiment reached and what does it leave, iris murdoch's first one under the net is good fun by the way.
I was talking to someone about modern references taking me out of a book the other day. Pynchon's latest was set in 2001 and had references to Pokemon, Metal Gear Solid and Rachel from Friends. It feels like it's not a 'real' book or something.
Perhaps we should outline what 'dematerialisation' means in the context of the novel?
patronising and dad-like. martin amis was referring to e-mails as "e's" in 2003. past it
Gibson's probably the worst for it.
I didn't understand the thread at all, I just took my cues from everyone else... maybe if you had said that comment at the start though...it just seems like pure tokenism. there was a real meaning to this thread title. i'm not just trying to get at experiments and mentions of the internet in literature. has the novel played itself out, has it dematerialised into a new form or inexistence, are the limits of experiment reached and what does it leave, iris murdoch's first one under the net is good fun by the way.
I didn't understand the thread at all, I just took my cues from everyone else... maybe if you had said that comment at the start though...
That's pretty much what Will Self said (repeatedly and at length) while announcing his new book which would change all that. Anyone read it?yeah somewhere in my mind was the death of the novel. has it happened. when. how. what follows or replaces it. does it bear any comparison with the musical dematerialisation referenced elsewhere.
annoyingly there are loads of pesky oddities that go as far back as part 2 of Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy and what have you that anticipate all this and ruin my thread, but there is a certain acceleration in the 1900s and i'd say a bit of a crisis at the moment - innovation has stalled since those heady modern or post-modern fun times and we've gone back 150 years or so to boring realism for the most part in style and subject. i think.
So... isn't that another way of saying 'experimental'?I reckon dematerialisation in this context could simply refer to abstracting the form as far as possible without it becoming poetry or some other medium.