Once Upon a Text
Once upon a time there was a little girl that all who lived in the village adored. Since she wore a red riding cloak all the time, she was called by the name of Red. One day her mother told her to take a basket of items to her sick grandmother. All she had to do was follow the path and not wander off. As you may very well know, she ran into the wolf on her journey there and told him her destination. The wolf raced onward to the grandmother’s house, gobbled her up, and waited for Red to arrive. And in the end she became dinner for the wolf. Depending on the version of the tale you read, Red and her grandmother live because the huntsman saves them or they die in the belly of the wolf. The End. Oh wait, there is more, isn’t there? There is so much more to the tale of Little Red Riding Hood than that because there are many other versions and insights to the tale in the world, such as the one on the site RedRidingHood. Some would not consider this site a legitimate form of text, but through the feminist meaning and many references towards a few of the written versions of the fairy tale (by Charles Perrault and the Grimm Brothers), this site is an appropriate literary text.
Now I know what you are thinking, “What is an appropriate literary text?” A literary text does not require words or a tangible printed book to hold in your hands and read. A literary text can possess many forms when depicting a story or tale. The site RedRidingHood is the perfect example. RedRidingHood depicts a feminist perspective on the classic tale with many different, yet relevant elements from the original. For example, Red does not wear the traditional girly dress and red silk cape with the attached hood. She wears a red sleeveless shirt accompanied by black pants. This is clearly a feminist touch on the tale. There are also many more elements to the site that are quite different than the tale, for instance Red’s dreams. The dreams reflect the author’s ideas that the wolf already existed in Red’s life, that he was “pre-existing as a picture in her diary, as a dealer at the ‘flesh market,’ an angel which does not stop to rescue her” (Leishman). Basically, none of this previously existed in the original tales written by Charles Perrault and the Grimm Brothers. But remember, that is almost the point of this site; to display a different perspective but maintain the connection to the written works.
Almost certainly, Sven Birkerts would disagree that this site is at all a text with or without the connections to the original tale. “I would have to say good-bye to a certain way of looking at the world because that way is bound up with a set of assumptions about history and distance, and difficulty and solitude and the slow work of self-making—all of which go against the premises of instantaneousness, interactivity, sensory stimulation and ease” (Birkerts 213). Birkerts simply does not view the technological world with much fancy and he most certainly would argue that this is not a text at all.
Birkerts would have good reasoning to argue that this is not a text too. For one, there are only a few times in the progression of the site that there are actual printed words to be read (or selected). “How can this be a text if there are basically no words for reading?” he would ask. Well, it is not necessary for words to be present to obtain a full experience in the literary sense from this site. In his novel, he talks of how when reading printed works, the reader enters the novel and the world it has contained inside it. Is that not the same with this site? Can we not become consumed by the world created inside the site? Birkerts describes the “miracle” of reading taking place due to one thing, one “shared medium, language” (Birkerts 82). “We bring the words…into ourselves. We engulf them in our consciousness and then allow ourselves to be affected by them” (Birkerts 82). So language is the connection he finds when reading. If this connection exists through language, then this proves the site RedRidingHood possesses literary merit as a text. Language is perceived in many different ways, such as sign language (a visual language) and written languages. The site contains a language that is comprehensible through just simple observation. So, an experience like Birkerts’ reading experience can happen when observing this site. You can experience a “miracle” similar to reading and allow yourself to be affected.
Once again, once upon a time there was a little girl named Red. She had many written tales, oral stories, and electronic sites created about her. The arguments against some of the electronic sites, like RedRidingHood, about not being legitimate forms of text appear foolish given the amount of credibility they possess in correlation to many of the original written works of Little Red Riding Hood.
