hypertext theory

Publisher's blurb: Written in hypertext and read from a computer, hypertext novels exist as a collection of textual fragments, which must be pieced together by the reader.The Possible Worlds of Hypertext Fiction offers a new critical theory tailored specifically for this burgeoning genre, providing a much needed body of criticism in a key area of new media fiction.

Table of Contents: The Universe of Hypertext Fiction
Hypertext Fiction and the Importance of Worlds
Contradictions, World Views and the Nature of Truth in Michael Joyce's (1987) afternoon--a story
Going, Going, Gone: the Slippery Worlds of Stuart Moulthrop's (1995) Victory Garden
Is there a Mary/Shelley in this World? Parody and Counterparts in Shelley Jackson's (1997) Patchwork Girl
The Colourful Worlds of Richard Holeton's (2001) Figurski at Findhorn on Acid
Bibliography
Index

Despite postmodern and deconstructivist studies in the field, interxtuality is still often viewed as a process of textual closure: in that vision a text refers to an older text, and once we have found the source, the intertextual interpretation is completed.

Riffatterre, for example, seems to suggest this in his article ‘Intertextuality vs Hypertextuality’ (1994). Riffaterre stated here that intertextuality and hypertextuality should be distinguished, since the former is finite, while the latter is infinite. He defines hypertextuality as ‘the use of the computer to transcend the linearity of the written text by building an endless series of imagined connections, from verbal associations to possible worlds, extending the glosses or the marginalia from the footnotes of yesteryear to metatexts’ (Riffaterre 1994: 780) Intertextuality, on the other hand, ‘depends on a system of difficulties to be reckoned with, of limitations in our freedom of choice, of exclusions, since it is by renouncing incompatible associations within the text that we come to identify in the intertext their compatible counterparts’ (ibid: 781).

I would like to demonstrate how this vision of intertextuality does not apply in electronic literature. Instead of ‘limitations’ and ‘incompatible associations’ some cases of e-poetry that will be showed and interpreted should emphasise how intertextuality in these texts is rather the explosion of meanings and of possibilities than a way of ‘exclusion’. Three of these ‘new’ functions of intertexuality in digital poetry shall be proposed and discussed in my presentation.

I will not pursue the issue of a hypertextual competence (or a multimodal hypertextual competence) here. Rather I would like to take a closer look at literary hypertext and electronic literature itself, and the fact that electronic literature, just like print literature, prefigures different modes of reading. I will insist on the necessity of examining what mode of reading and what kind of responses are prefigured in hypertexts when we make conclusions about hypertext reading. I want to approach the topic by putting weight on how Megan Heyward’s Of day, of night (2002) prefigures the reader's response. The aim of this article is to explore some of the preconditions for reading Of day, of night, and to identify three modes of reading in this hypertext fiction. In addition to these three modes I will argue for a fourth mode of reading hypertext fiction. This mode can be identified in several literary hypertexts, but is less relevant for describing the preconditions for reading Heyward's text. Consequently I will make use of other work to exemplify this mode. Four modes of reading are identified and described. These are semantization, exploration, self-reflection and absorption. These modes arise as the reader interacts with textual elements and utilises contextual features. Through the article the modes of reading will be discussed in relation to similar established concepts, such as the four approaches to playing MUDs identified by Richard Bartle (1996), and different attitudes of reading print literature represented in Wolfgang Iser's theory on "die Appellstruktur der Texte" (Iser 1974, 1978), or what he later in his text game theory calls "text game structures" (Iser 1989; 1993).