المناقشات هي تعاطيات مع موضوعات قد تم إفتتاحها من قبل مدير ما في الموقع، وهي موضوعات تتعلق بالقراءة والكتب والمؤلفين والميديا القديمة والحديثة.

[ 23.12.2005 ]

Walter Grond’s call for what is foreign and not on the beaten track induces me to go off on a tangent for a moment. There has been much talk of digital literature on the Internet. Yet there is another electronic medium which should not be forgotten here, one which has established itself as a highly effective storage medium for literature: the CD-ROM or DVD.

Recently, a “major library” was released as the 125th volume in the series “Digitale Bibliothek” (Digital Library). It contains German literature from Luther to Tucholsky. On a single DVD, there’s a phenomenal 600,000 pages, which corresponds approximately to the number of books on 130 meters of shelves. Though the amount says little. The more volatile aspect of this electronic compilation is the selection of books presented on it. Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Stifter: they’re all there, of course. Nevertheless, if one browses through the index of authors, one immediately notices that the literary canon is in the minority compared with the huge number of kitschy novels, adventure stories and obscure popular works from the past. To exemplify my point, here are the first names in the alphabetical index: Abraham von Sancta Clara, Hans Aßmann von Abschatz, Charlotte von Ahlefeld, Konrad Alberti, Willibald Alexis, Peter Altenberg... On this list the latter almost seems like an old acquaintance, even if he too is merely a fringe figure in the world of literary classics.

It is this enormous storage capacity which allows us to republish and so rediscover marginal, forgotten, lost writers. But what primarily becomes evident is the basic fragility of the literary canon.

Artist duo Lutz / Guggisberg plays ironically with this observation. Their imaginary library contains a cornucopia of books which on closer inspection reveal themselves to be pieces of plywood in book jackets. Title, author and blurb look comme il faut and vary the practices of the literature market in such a way as to produce new absurd tales. Books, as they show us, have always been a mixture of real text and virtual imagination – which is why they do well with the new media.