Modern lit online

Bold experiments with the written word by shamantic authors have created new virtual universes that have become the toast of 20th century literature. Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett, Antonin Artaud, Gabriel Garcia Marquez: they have blurred truth, presented alternate possibilities, and created infinite passages of reality. Just like them, "html" authors today write their own worlds and digital labyrinths with numbers, codes and tags. Indeed, modern literature and the Internet are gardens of infinite forking paths.

TheModernWord.com explores the labyrinth of modern literature with snappy design, deranging graphics and a spiraling galaxy of links and entrances to other worlds. One can easily lose himself in ModernWord’s Borges section alone as he delves into his life and times as well as his games with time and infinity. But the others are worth checking out, too. The lives, works and words of Samuel Beckett, Umberto Eco, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, James Joyce and Thomas Pynchon are also featured in great detail.

ModernWord was started in 1995 by the "Quail" (Allen Ruch) and was first called "The Libyrinth," a portmanteau word coined to represent two common themes that ran through much of modern literature — the Library and the Labyrinth. Ruch is the site’s editorial director and messenger of the site’s gods – the Literary Advisory Board – who work closely with him to ensure a quality slate of authors to be featured on the site. Though Jack Kerouac may be considered modern, only those authors who meet Ruch and the Board’s "libyrinthian" standards are chosen:

• The author’s body of work must have a use of language that calls upon the reader to break through the barriers of normal syntax and linguistics, acting as an invitation to probe the text and explore the space beyond the words themselves.

• The body of work must have a tendency to allow consensual reality to relax or even dissolve; this may range from occasional hallucinatory prose, magical realism to outright fantasy.

• The body of work must have a density of style that is multi-layered with allusions to both the body of work itself and the vast and eternal library of work beyond its pages – an awareness of the eternal human dialogue, so to speak.

James Joyce was the first author to be featured on ModernWord, followed by Borges, Marquez, Eco and Pynchon. Future considerations include William Faulkner, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf.

The site is large which makes it a great source of information for students working on assignments, term papers and book reviews for their literature class. In the Borges section, for example, a great deal of online papers, articles and essays on the author’s work are featured or linked to the site. There are also a great deal of add-ons: a section that explores music inspired by Borges (or Marquez); a gallery of images, photographs and surreal postcards; and a comprehensive catalogue of books written by the featured authors that can be ordered online through Amazon.com.

It is not hard to navigate through the library and labyrinth of TheModernWord.com though. The site is neatly divided into four major sections. The "Rotunda" is the site’s front page and it holds links to the site as well as a set of external links, summaries of new additions, a search engine, a daily literary quote or trivia, and registration for ModernWord’s online newsletter, Spiral-Bound.

The "Libyrinth" is the main body of the site which can be accessed by clicking the "Author" button on the top of every page. It holds the major author sites and the "Sriptorium," an index of single-page sites on the featured authors. The "Gallery" showcases artworks based on literary themes. Its premier collection is the "Ulysses Suite," a series of 18 oil paintings and 18 etchings inspired by the novel Ulysses. The "Omphalos" is the core of the site, containing a load of information about ModernWord and The Quail.