Heterotopias of the Digital Age: Reading Applications and Platforms

Abstract

Today’s literary landscape is greatly influenced by the ‘explosion’ of free reading platforms and applications, often complemented by the so-called self-publishing. These do not always offer carefully edited and/or revised works; all the while encouraging the publication of writings that can hardly constitute aesthetic models or good examples of practicing fiction. Whereas the term literature itself has become, starting with postmodernism, debatable, and perhaps, at times, too inclusive, it is contended here that certain aesthetic guidelines should still be abided by, in order to produce a literary work. While these applications and platforms can be regarded as heterotopic online spaces, helping their ‘inhabitants’ evade reality, they still trigger the discussion on what does or should constitute a literary text in this post-postmodern context. Especially, since these platforms and applications publish and perpetuate questionable content, and thus affect their readers’ taste in the process. The aims of the current article are to discuss the impact of the technological progress on literature and its readers, employing such concepts as: literature, genre, canon, postmodernism, post-postmodernism, heterotopia and intertextuality.