About literary webs

Literary Web is my YouTube channel. It is the literature of the web, and the web of literature, of literary history.

Each video is meant to be a glimpse into one moment in the vast web of literature. Looking back, Frankenstein appears clearly as a node with many connections. It is a Romantic or a Gothic novel. It is a starting point in the history of science-fiction. It is a key text in the history of writing about bodies. It has been widely adapted into film and many other forms of media.

One may encounter Frankenstein within any of these lineages, but the nature of the work and its place in literary history is that you can also move from there to start pursuing any other thread. Eventually, you can keep moving like this, reading across texts, to end up studying any work of literature. A vast web.

This is a mode of reading, a mode of exploring. It can also suggest the possible directions of the future of this web – the web of literature, and the world-wide one.

Part of the purpose of this site is to allow me to draw out the larger, more complicated connective threads between the glimpses offered in the videos. You can see a discussion of my first few videos here.

The value of this model of the literary web is that you can start anywhere you want and pursue a topic in as much or as little depth as you want. As your interests guide you, those contexts are there and you can move in various directions. You are never restricted to the one text, but can can read across texts in order to get a proper understanding.

On a practical level, this means that posts will frequently cross-link, and new links will regularly appear in old posts as new content is posted and connections are made.