'Literary' texts no more?

[Sheila]

Project reduces classic works to text messages

LONDON, England (AP) -- "Romeo, Romeo -- wher4 Rt thou Romeo?"

It could be the future of Shakespeare.

Dot mobile, a British mobile phone service aimed at students, says it plans to condense classic works of literature into SMS text messages. The company claims the service will be a valuable resource for studying for exams.

Academic purists will be horrified. Hamlet's famous query, "To be or not to be, that is the question," becomes "2b? Nt2b? ???"

John Milton's epic poem "Paradise Lost" begins "devl kikd outa hevn coz jelus of jesus&strts war." ("The devil is kicked out of heaven because he is jealous of Jesus and starts a war.")

Some may dismiss the summaries as cheat notes for the attention-deficit generation, but John Sutherland, a University College London English professor who consulted on the project, said they could act as a useful memory aid.

"The educational opportunities it offers are immense," said Sutherland, who chaired the judging panel for this year's Booker Prize for fiction.

Sutherland said the compressed nature of text messages allowed them to "fillet out the important elements in a plot."

"Take for example the ending to Jane Eyre -- 'MadwyfSetsFyr2Haus.' (Mad wife sets fire to house.) Was ever a climax better compressed?"

But political commentator and author Oliver Kamm said the terse texts were "more than a travesty."

"What you lose with text messaging in literature is what makes literature what it is -- the imagery, the irony, the nuance," he told British Broadcasting Corp. radio.

"What I fear will happen with text versions of Shakespeare is that students will be encouraged not to read the books but to settle for something else, and people don't need excuses not to read books. They don't read enough as it is."

Books planned for the service include Charles ````ens' "Bleak House," whose tale of the interminable legal suit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce is reduced to a few snappy lines, and Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice," which describes hunky Mr. Darcy as "fit&loadd" (handsome and wealthy).

Dot mobile said it planned to launch the service in January, with Shakespeare's complete works available by April. The texts will be free to subscribers to the company's phone service.

source

[Douglas]

huuh, thats odd... hehe pretty cool though

[Owlie42]

Personally, I think that's sick. I hate trying to read everything phonetically online. And you can't to that to Shakespeare. It's morally wrong. (I've been looking forward to Hamlet since September, okay?)

[adrielle]

^ Oh, absolutely! What sacrilege!
next they'll be adding 'like' to every other line of his works :P

Originally Posted by Owlie42

Personally, I think that's sick. I hate trying to read everything phonetically online. And you can't to that to Shakespeare. It's morally wrong. (I've been looking forward to Hamlet since September, okay?)

I agree. I'm a book lover, and you just can't do that to the classics. Keep the shortened lingo online and that's it. It's like every one in school talking in the chat language. "JK!" and "TTYL!" Please people. It gets annoying after a while. The only reason you should really use it is to make it easier to talk in chat rooms and when instant messaging people.

[Owlie42]

Originally Posted by adrielle

^ Oh, absolutely! What sacrilege!
next they'll be adding 'like' to every other line of his works :P

"Friends, Romans, and, like, countrymen, like, lend me your ears.
I come to ,like, bury Caesar, not to, like, praise him.
The evil that men do lives, like, you know, after them;
The good is oft, like, interrèd with their bones.
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath, like, told you Caesar was ambitious.
If it were so, it was ,like, a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar ,like, you know, answered it."

*shudders*

*Gasp!* Owlie, you mustn't even kid so! Ha ha. I could never imagine it. Terrible. It doesn't flow like Shakespeare should.

[Mr. Initial Man]

I should send this guy a letter written in the most obscure L33T I cam manage, and let him what it's like to have to WORK to read something.