Twit-Schatology

What if you had to reduce Hamlet or Dante’s Inferno or the Bible to 140 characters?

Twitter — love it, hate it or just don’t care much?

The micro-blogging megatrend gives users only 140 characters to post a message to anyone following their message feed. This sound-bite approach to “a penny for your thoughts” is a polarizing presence in our culture.

If you subscribe to Ashton Kutcher’s feed, you probably love Twitter. His 4.5 million followers make him the “top twit.”

If you’re an American literature professor, you probably hate Twitter. Or you loathe it. Your revulsion is like 10,000 white hot suns of — oops! Ran out of characters.

Twitter — we love it, hate it or are waiting for it to go away. But new users keep pouring into the service and finding new ways to apply it.

For example: Twitterature.

Nineteen-year-old University of Chicago students Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin have turned the classics from their English classes into a book of Twitter summaries.

Are these guys really too lazy to read the...