Writing in Vonnegut’s World

If these are the end times for literature, then we must be traveling in circles, for the death of storytelling looks an awful lot like its birth. The novel itself isn’t all that old. Sure, we can find a handful of examples going back thousands of years, but you have to stretch your definition of novel the further back you go. Really, the idea of an immutable and unchangeable text dates only to the printing press. Before that, every scribe tasked with producing a tome thought he was an author. Like movie producers dabbling with plot, it was difficult for the hand-copiers of text not to make a tweak here or there. Books were ever-changing. Stories evolved. And that was the way things were until Gutenberg’s time. Continue reading at 'Slate'

[ Slate | 2014-01-14 00:00:00 UTC ]

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