hypertext theory

Featured interview with David Kolb, a professor of philosophy and author of hypertext novels.

Featured interview with George P. Landow, a professor of English and Art History at Brown University and a well-known pioneer in the study of hypertextual literature.

This book introduces and defines the new field of digital literature, answering to the question of the introduction of hypertext if it has suposed a reconfiguration of the literary paradigm in all its areas: theoretical, creative and educational. The theory, ideology and politics of hypertext are examined from a view of a theory of the hypertextual links, which proposes an original typology that is used as a tool for the analysis of literary digital texts (Source: Aurea Library) (Translated by Maya Zalbidea Paniagua).

This article proposes a theoretical framework intended to facilitate descriptions and discussions of texts of works in different media. The main theoretical traditions which have inspired this endeavor are, on the one hand, textual criticism (with scholars such as Fredson Bowers, D. C. Greetham, Jerome J. McGann, D. F. McKenzie, Peter L. Shillingsburg, and G. Thomas Tanselle), and, on the other hand, hypertext theory (represented by theorists like Espen Aarseth, Jay David Bolter, Jane Yellowlees Douglas, Michael Joyce, George P. Landow, and Janet H. Murray). The study aims to combine and develop the perspectives of such theoretical traditions in order to suggest a more consistent and extensive set of concepts for the analysis of how narratives are stored and disseminated. The study examines the structural aspects of texts and works, and deals with storage, presentation and reproduction of works. Moreover, the structure of works and texts, as well as the navigation related to these structures, are discussed. The study also includes an in-depth discussion on links and linking, and a new terminology is suggested for the subject. The most important concepts discussed are work, text, version, variant, storage medium, storage sign, presentation medium, presentation sign, storage capacity, life expectancy, direct text access, indirect text access, copy, edition, impression, issue, monosequential, multisequential, content space and axial structure. Furthermore, the concepts of network structure and lateral structure as well as hypertext, ergodicity, link and linking are examined.

How electronic-writing technologies will affect authorship remains an
important issue in hypertext theory. Theorists agree that the author’s function
has changed and will continue to change as writing migrates from the page to
the screen, but they disagree on the specifics of how print-based and
hypertext-based authorship differ and whether this digital migration constitutes a radical break from the age of print. Early hypertext
advocates, writing in the early 1990s, claimed that naviagational features, such
as hypertextual links, transfer a large degree of textual control from writers
to readers, thus blurring the distinction between the role of the author and
that of the reader. More recently, theorists began to dispute the idea that the
hypertextual reading experience was necessarily more creatively empowering than
reading a printed book. Exploring the arguments of influential hypertext
theorists, this paper traces developments in hypertext theory in the United
States during the 1990s. It describes how poststructuralism has informed
hypertext theories of authorship, identifies problematic or undertheorized
claims made about hypertext, and points towards new avenues of theoretical
inquiry that hypertext scholars are beginning to explore. It endorses the
recent medial turn in hypertext theory and argues that literary scholars must
revise existing theories of authorship to better articulate how hypertexts are
produced and function within online networks where the written word coexists
with streaming multimodal content. 

(Source: author's abstract.)

In Ex-foliations, Terry Harpold investigates paradoxes of reading’s backward glances in the theory and literature of the digital field. In original analyses of Vannevar Bush’s Memex and Ted Nelson’s Xanadu, and in innovative readings of early hypertext fictions by Michael Joyce and Shelley Jackson, Harpold asserts that we should return to these landmarks of new media scholarship with newly focused attention on questions of media obsolescence, changing user interface designs, and the mutability of reading. In these reading machines, Harpold proposes, we may detect traits of an unreadable surface—the real limit of the machines’ operations and of the reader’s memories—on which text and image are projected in the late age of print. (Source: Publisher's website.)