hypertext literature

Judy Malloy is a pioneer in the field of electronic literature. As she writes in this interview, she wrote the first hyperfiction in 1986 called “Uncle Rogers” a series of works of hypernarratives for Eastgate Systems, the first hypertext publishing house founded in 1982 in Watertown, Massachusetts (USA). The interview is a resume of her work as an author and visiting lecturer at Princeton University that still goes on as her latest publication in 2016 can prove.

Jessica Pressman is associated professor at San Diego State University (USA) and a member of the Board of Direction of the Electronic Literature Organization. This interview is focused on her work in the academic field, her essays and her books as well as the project of the Electronic Literature Organization.

The digital age has had a profound impact on literary culture, with new technologies opening up opportunities for new forms of literary art from hyperfiction to multi-media poetry and narrative-driven games. Bringing together leading scholars and artists from across the world, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature is the first authoritative reference handbook to the field.Crossing disciplinary boundaries, this book explores the foundational theories of the field, contemporary artistic practices, debates and controversies surrounding such key concepts as canonicity, world systems, narrative and the digital humanities, and historical developments and new media contexts of contemporary electronic literature. Including guides to major publications in the field, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature is an essential resource for scholars of contemporary culture in the digital era.

(Source: Publisher's description)

Fabrizio Venerandi is author of two novels published in form of hypertextual ebooks and also co-founder of the publishing house Quintadicopertina. In this interview he talks about the book series Polistorie (Polystories) and about the basic ideas that inspired this project. Recalling the experience he made with the groundbreaking work on the first MUD in Italy in 1990, Venerandi describes the relations between literature and video games. Starting from a comparison between print literature tradition and new media, at last, he faces the problems of creation and preservation of digital works.

In this interview, Carlo Cinato, author of the hypertext novel L’uomo senza cappello e la donna con le scarpe grigie (The man without a hat and the woman with grey shoes) and curator of the blog Parolata, explains how he started getting interested in electronic literature and how he conceived his novel. Through the study of hypertextual and non sequencial books in printed form he discovered a new way of writing which was adaptable to the technical possibilities of the web and the ebooks. According to Cinato there are analogies between literary works of the print tradition and the digital tradition, but in particular the latter are characterised by the possibility of making a leap inside the text. The hypertextual structure alters the role of the reader, the materiality of the text, the way of reading and the way to write for an author. Moreover Cinato sees the writing of the novel as an experiment. It was an occasion to write by using one of the seven hypertext links he has pinpointed. In the end he explains in which way the hypertextual structure changes the way of reading and how it can be installed also in ebooks.

(Source: Interviewer's abstract)