Hypertext Fiction: The Future of Narrative? (original) (raw)
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Text, Hypertext, and Hyperfiction
SAGE Open, 2014
This article briefly surveys the changing theoretical perspectives on text from structuralism to poststructuralism and how they are subsequently accounted for by hypertext theorists to comprehend the emerging genre called hypertext fiction. Some theoretical issues concerning the reading of this genre also will be discussed. The purpose of this study is to illustrate that the radical promises and challenges of digital novels to readers would prove reading and interpretation of conventional texts are far more participatory. This will be accomplished by tracing the evolution of poststructuralists’ concepts of intertextuality, multivocality, decentering, multilinearity, disorientation, and interactivity to find a way out of constant notions of conventional principles of reading.
In the present age we live in, what might be called ‘the age of hyper reality’ it is obligatory to know the new genre of electronic literature i. e. hypertext fiction. The present research paper provides a detailed consideration of the significance of the hypertext interface in influencing reader satisfaction, since very few papers, if any, integrate analysis of reading, narrative form, and the medium of delivery, which is considered crucially significant in this new story-telling environment. The paper examines and adapts existing models of reading and of interface design, using research methods adapted from literary studies and computer usability studies.
Leonardo, 2013
This article proposes a new approach to literary hypertext, which foregrounds the notion of interrupting rather than that of linking. It also claims that, given the dialectic relationship of literature in print and digital-born literature, it may be useful to reread contemporary hypertext in light of a specific type of literature in print that equally foregrounds aspects of segmentation and discontinuity: serialized literature (i.e. texts published in installment form). Finally, it discusses the shift from spatial form to temporal form in postmodern writing as well as the basic difference between segment and fragment.
Canonizing Hypertext: Explorations and Constructions
2007
With regard to (digital) hypertext as a medially determined literary 'genre', or 'hypertext proper', which forms the focus of this study, let us continue with an investigation of the actual technological concept of hypertext, which, after all, forms the macrostructural foundation of the literary concept. The most widely acknowledged definitions have been suggested by Ted Nelson, whose first public use of the word 'hypertext' dates back to his 1965 lectures at Vassar College, Jakob Nielsen (1990), Paul Delany and George P. Landow (1991) and Jay David Bolter (2001). Essentially, the abstract idea of 'hypertext' is based on the rhizome metaphor (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), characterized by a ramifying, horizontally organized root structure, which is, unlike arborescent structures, decentralized, i.e. there is no core, or 'trunk', and no visible hierarchy. Similarly, Nelson's ubiquitously quoted definition of hypertext classifies it as non-sequential writing-text that branches and allows choices to the reader, best read at an interactive screen. As popularly conceived, this is a series of text chunks connected by links which offer the reader different pathways. (1984: 0/2) 6 Evidently, Nelson's explanation combines issues of production, reception, mediality and textuality. It emphasizes hypertext's compositional nonlinearity, which allows a
The text, the Reader and the Author A Critical Study of some Selected Hypertexts
The importance of the book comes from the fact that hypertexts are used widely nowadays without a clear understanding of their dimensions and impacts. Since the late twentieth century and the invention and circulation of the Internet, computers have been used for many kinds of writing in the literary and academic worlds. One of these kinds is electronic literature that is written in a form that can only be read on a computer. Therefore, electronic literature, especially hypertext, has gained much more popularity than ever. However, the vast popularity of hypertexts has exceedingly aroused controversial matters about its nature and impact on the role of the two main poles involving in the creative process, namely the author and reader.
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.
Hypertext and creative writing
Proceeding of the ACM conference on Hypertext - HYPERTEXT '87, 1987
Among its many uses, hypertext can serve as a medium for a new kind of flexible, interactive fiction. Storyspace TM is a hypertext sys tern we have created for authoring and reading such fiction, Interactive fiction in the computer medium is a continuation of the modern "tradition" of experimental literature in print. However, the computer frees both author and reader from restrictions imposed by the printed medium and therefore allows new experiments in literary structure.
Computers and Composition, 2003
Early work in and about hypertext suggested dramatic potentials for the medium, primarily in the way it challenged notions of authorial control, linearity, and the status quo in general. This history of hypertext tended to portray contradicting archetypes or pure forms that concrete developments never fulfilled. We argue that hypertext has long been a cultural analogy rather than a simple enactment or fulfillment of desires. To assist in creating a more open, constructive vision of hypertext, we gather three differing but connected tropes for hypertext from this history: hypertext as kinship, hypertext as battlefield, and hypertext as rhizome. Although these tropes are only three among many possibilities, we provisionally play them off one another to deconstruct and reconstruct hypertext theory and practice, and to demonstrate potentials for moving beyond archetypes in theorizing and practicing hypertext.