College professor tells the story of 'Beowulf' in 100 tweets
Elaine Treharne, a professor at Stanford University and medieval scholar, recently compressed 'Beowulf' into 140-character passages for Twitter. Her effort echoes similar projects by other authors like writer Jennifer Egan, who released a short original piece via Twitter in 2012.
Stanford University professor Elaine Treharne delivered the story of 'Beowulf' (text seen above) via Twitter.
Medieval scholar Elaine Treharne, an English professor at Stanford University, recently finished narrating the classic work 鈥溾�� in its entirety in only 100 tweets. Treharne said she relied on multiple translations of the manuscript as well as its original Old English version in order to compress the dense epic poem into an even more compact form.
鈥淔or me, it was a worthwhile exercise, forcing me back to the Old English to try and capture, in the shortest possible length, what I thought were the essential components of the poem,鈥� Treharne wrote on her .
She said the exercise addressed the issue she seeks to explore with her class.
"The underlying theoretical question for this course is 'What is (the) Text?' What constitutes 鈥楤eowulf鈥�?" Treharne wrote. "What is its core and what do we understand by 'Beowulf'? In some senses, this seeks to address, for 鈥楤eowulf,鈥� F. W. Bateson's question, 'If the Mona Lisa is in the Louvre, where then are Hamlet and Lycidas?'"
Treharne's not alone 鈥� other writers have also created literature on Twitter. In 2012, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Jennifer Egan released a short science fiction piece, ",鈥� as a series of tweets on the New Yorker鈥檚 Twitter account. The story was later also published in print.
More recently, novelist , author of 鈥淥pen City,鈥� created a story last month by retweeting others. The author had solicited contributions from his followers in advance for the story, which was titled "Hafiz.鈥�
鈥淚 was fascinated by how clean a retweet can be, how you can make someone else present on your timeline," Cole told the . "This is usually a cause for anxiety (an anxiety people express with the plea 鈥榬etweets are not endorsements鈥�), but I thought it could also be an occasion for grace, for doing something unusual together. 鈥楬afiz鈥� was a small attempt to put a number of people into a collaborative situation, to create a 鈥榳e鈥� out of a story I might simply have published in the conventional way.鈥�
Cole had live-tweeted stories before, most notably his nonfiction project and drone . However, this was the first time he had brought his followers together by combining their tweets to create one large narrative.