Cybertexts, Hypertexts and Interactive Fiction: Why Shan’t the Prodigal Children Overthrow Their Forefathers (original) (raw)

Paratextual Interferences: Patterns and Reconfigurations for Literary Narrative in the Digital Age.

Amsterdam International Electronic Journal for Cultural Narratology (AJCN), 2016

To acknowledge that the beginning of the twenty-first century has witnessed the rise of literary narratives that make extensive use of visual or graphic elements such as photographs, typographical experimentations, unusual page layouts, drawings, illustrations, etc., is not a novelty per se. Neither is it, in recent years, to explore digital narratives and their affordances. Rather, these explorations have received much attention in narrative theory and in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. Since the digital turn, new studies have approached both subjects. However, while most of these studies are either inquiries into new digital devices and digital narratives (e.g., digital narratology) or focus on experimentations with the materiality of the book (e.g., multimodal narrative), this article will consider the two issues as part of the same phenomenon. On the one hand, literary experimentations with the materiality of the book have been especially flourishing since the emergence of new digital technologies. On the other hand, contemporary fictional writers, who are becoming more and more aware of the affordances offered by digital media, have started exploiting the properties of these new technologies to supplement their print narratives. These new but recurrent practices are thus both historically grounded in the socio-cultural context of the twenty-first century and consistent with a knowledge-sharing mode embedded in web 2.0 technologies. As I will show, the correlation between (a) the materiality of the book and (b) the digital supplementary material to be found on writers’ personal websites and blogs and in social media finds its origins in Gérard Genette’s concept of paratext and, in particular, in his subdivision into (a) peritext, i.e. the paratextual elements situated in proximity of the text, and (b) epitext, i.e. the paratextual elements “not materially appended to the text within the same volume, but circulating [...] in a virtually limitless physical and social space” (Genette [1987] 1997: 344). In the first section of this article, I highlight how the concept of paratext, despite some lacks and ambivalences, is still able to offer a valuable perspective on contemporary practices. I will introduce recent investigations on issues of media, mode, and materiality in order to contextualize my study in a wider cultural and theoretical discourse. The second section analyzes how paratextual elements are employed in a contemporary novel, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad (2010). This analysis sheds new light on the way visual and digital elements may be used in a literary narrative. Drawing on this paradigmatic case, the third section puts forth my proposal of “paratext 2.0.” Formed by the categories of material peritext and digital epitext, the conceptualization of paratexts 2.0 allows for the identification of several functions. Far from containing a definitive reconfiguration of paratext for literary narrative in the digital age, this article provides new a vocabulary and, more significantly, new insights to answer some of the urgent questions twenty-first century literary practices are posing to narrative theory.

Hypertext Fiction: The Future of Narrative?

The relationship between technology and literature extends far back in history, and includes such innovations as the invention of writing which allowed stories to be committed to paper rather than being retold by bards and troubadours, and the inventions of movable type and the printing press, which allowed texts of all kinds to be disseminated throughout the world. The development of the computer, especially the recent growth of the home computer, has given birth to a new relationship between technology and literature, a medium known as hypertext.

The Shaping of Hypertextual Narrative

2012

nonetheless expressive, and enjoyable to read." Garcia also underlines how, at the moment, there is (on the Internet and elsewhere) an excess of text (in hypertextual form). "We have now many tools at our disposal, many possibilities, many things that allow the realization of works that just a few years ago we could only dream about. But the risk we run is to fall into the Baroque, the over-elaborate, that is, the desire to pile up gimmicks, and to amaze with special effects. In this way, we often forget the conciseness of a well-written story, which, after all, in hypertexts as well as in regular texts, is always the best thing we should try to create. However, to live together with all this is the unavoidable condition for the transformation of semi-trash literature into a form of art..." These fragments of opinions, sometimes hasty and lapidary, bring out some important aspects of the problem I would like to consider: reading hypertexts, and narrative hypertexts in particular, is difficult; often there is no pleasure while reading, there is no understanding of what has been read. Narrative hypertexts are anonymous, cold, impersonal, chaotic, inconclusive. In short: narrative hypertexts are ugly. I cannot avoid sharing, at least in part, these ideas on hypertextual narrative. Thus, unable to get rid of the feelings of uneasiness and irritation I feel when facing a narrative hypertext, I would like here to try to substantiate my reactions. I will, therefore, try to analyze and in part support the reasons of those-and I suspect are manywho, while accepting with enthusiasm the new technologies, are forced to admit, maybe in a low voice, the difficult digestion of the texts that have been produced with those new technologies.

The New Technologies and the Novel: Re-coding Narrative in Book Form

Recherches Sémiotiques / Semiotic Inquiry

The focus of this paper is on the novel in book form and on the influence and impact of the new media and their technologies, both as hardware and software, including the Internet and varied web content — web pages, online magazines, blogs, chat rooms, forums, social networks and media — as well as mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets and therefore text messaging (SMS) and instant messenger services. Three main questions guide this paper. Have the Internet, the new media and digital devices altered the way authors conceive, design and weave together their narratives in books? How is the interaction or mutual relation between various old and new media (art, cartoons, cinema, and TV included) achieved within the codex book? Do authors expunge or expose the phenomenon of media merging and interaction? By analysing works by five writers - British, Canadian and American - Matt Beaumont and Jeanette Winterson, Douglas Coupland, Mark Z. Danielewski and Jennifer Egan - this paper looks at the codex form as one medium among others, and as a diagrammatic, phenomenal and performative space (see Drucker 2007) rather than a representative/figurative space, and as an ur-coding practice now existing among newer ones.

The “Narrative Turn” in Literature. Observations on Digital Works

2020

The transformation of literary models was born out of a process initiated by the avant-garde and is still present nowadays in the form of the post avant-garde, understood as the cre­ation of many new manifestations of literary expressions, including digital literature. The aim of the article is to analyse the forms, changes and structures of digital literature in comparison to the procedures of so-called “traditional literature”. The methodology is based on comparative literature. The topic is viewed from the perspective of Ibero-American literature exemplified with proto-hypertexts, hypertexts and literary hypermedia from Latin America. As a summary, we can say that digital literature is not going to change literature, but it is going to introduce new literary aesthetics which, in turn, will provide literature with new, different, and experimental narrative structures.

Appraisal of Reader ’ s Role in Revolutionary Potential of Hypertext Fiction

2013

One of the outstanding effects of development in technology is on literature; times when novels were read just through printed books have passed. By introducing electronic literature readers can experience a virtual reality and additional aesthetic pleasure in compare to printed texts. This paper puts forward that electronic literature and specifically hypertext fiction encourages readers to see writing in a radical sense as connecting one text to another and form a new composite. The cybernetic environment endows readers different roles to engage in a story and incorporate their identities toward fictional characters. Literary creativity needs to converge with computer and through by this way readers encounter various layers of meaning and can interpret a story without the author’s interference. However, the problem is that with this structure, it is impossible for the readers to respond in a realistic normal way as they did in print technology because, the electronic authors creat...

Dual effects in digital texts: connectivity in hypertext fiction and the splitting of stories

Storytelling involves the recounting and shaping of events by portraying in words, images, and sounds, for the most part, what happens in our world or in imagined worlds. Approaching storytelling across media as a cognitive construct, activated by various types of signs and displayed through different supports, implies taking into account three fundamental levels of narrative. First, semantics or content, which concerns the meaning of signs; second, syntax, which relates to the structure and the way these signs interact; and third, pragmatics or narrative seen as performance. Now, the question is what happens to these domains when storytelling migrates to digital media?

Title: Digital Narratives: Exploring Literature in the Age of Technology

Manpreet Kaur, 2024

This research paper delves into the transformative intersection of literature and technology, focusing on the emergence of digital narratives. In an age dominated by technological advancements, literature has undergone a paradigm shift, moving beyond traditional forms to embrace digital storytelling. The paper aims to analyze the impact of technology on narrative structures, reader engagement, and the overall landscape of literary expression. Through a comprehensive examination of digital narratives, the study seeks to uncover how technology has redefined storytelling and the implications of this evolution on the future of literature.

Interactive digital environment: A symbiosis of hypertext fiction and reader

European Online Journal of Natural and Social Sciences, 2013

In 1965, when Theodore Nelson and Douglas Engelbart developed Vannevar Bush's idea of an efficient information retrieval device called Memex and coined the term "hypertext," least did they realize that the revolutionary system would result in radical changes to human thoughts from the production of texts and its form to the reading experience of these electronic texts in the digital platform. The purpose of this paper is to account for multiplicity of readings in interactive narrative structure of hypertext fiction and its comparison to that of linear printed text. Additionally, this study involves changing role of a reader which is reinforced in an interactive environment while navigating narrative structures of hypertext fictions.