If Oscar Wilde had Twitter: On the Week 5 Landlow reading
Why didn’t we read the Landlow text weeks ago? It’s a dynamite piece of blogger fodder for people new to the game of Hypertext.
I loved Landlow’s discussion of the adaptation of Samuel Pepys 17th Century diaries into a blog entry, enabling his work to be more accessible and relevant to modern audiences. This is a great example of how texts can be adapted via blogging, and reminds me lots of the 2012 web series ‘The Lizzie Bennet Diaries’. I watched this religiously last year because I thought the diaries were a fantastic way for people who studied P & P in Year 10 Lit and kind of hated it to delve back in to an important text. This was certainly the case with me, I read P&P for school and was like ‘jesus Jane stop with your long dissertations on the weather at Pemberly’. I love literature, but I didn’t really get why this was such an important text, particularly to feminism. I thought Lydia was an idiot and Jane (Bennet) was boring as heck. In the end I just watched the BBC Mini Series and then Bridget Jones.
But the web series really made me think. Unfortunately, I realised, in this case I might be one of those silly gen Ys who can’t respect anything that isn’t made relevant to them! The series ingeniously threads together the story of P&P in a modern context. Lizzie does the videos as part of an integrated media Masters she is undertaking alongside Charlotte Liu, her asian bff who ends up becoming a ‘partner’ at Mr Collins’ digital media company ‘Collins & Collins’. Lydia is your average party animal, who like every teen gal makes dumb decisions and goes out with silly guys. The coolest part of it all was that you could follow all the characters online through twitter, facebook and instagram. Who could forget the moment Gigi (Georgiana) Darcy followed Lizzie on twitter, the pics Lizzie put up on instagram of her lunch date with Darcy and the moment Kitty Bennet debuted as a literal Cat.
The series absolutely blew up and birthed the ‘welcome to Sanditon’ (an unpublished Austen manucript) series which I believe is a more intricate social media adventure built around an app the creators built called ‘Domino’ and another series on ‘Emma’ is coming soon.
How exciting is the capacity to combat anachronism in literature by bringing disaffected ex lit students back into the literary fold through social media!
I might try it soon, I’ve already made a short film based on Oscar Wilde’s work called ‘Wilde Thing’, recontextualising his plays in a girls high school. Think Mean Girls vs. The Importance of Being Earnest to The Troggs.
Just imagine, twitter would have been perfect for Oscar whose epigrams would have definitely fit into 140 characters or less.
