hypertext

The novel is digital, it was digital, and it will be digital. Most authors have written on word processors and most publishers have made books with some form of desktop publishing software since the early 1990s. The first novels for digital display were written and published in the late 1980s. From a literary perspective, the question is whether such digital-born literature translates into palpable changes in the novel form, why, and how.

Previoustheories of the meeting of digital technology and literature have all too often presented a predetermined fate for this pairing—an essentialist vision of literature, technology, or both. I begin by showing this process at work in the creation of Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story (1987), the most well-known hypertext fiction. Joyce’s work is often understood as evidence that hypertext and digital technologies were inherently suited to experimental practice. I show, instead, that hypertext technology was initially reader and user friendly, and that the experimentalism of afternoon should be credited to Joyce’s literary goals. Print books also became digitally born in the 1990s, with all major American publishers shifting to digital typesetting (or desktop publishing). This largely unnoticed shift shows a technology developing according to the particular state of the publishing industry during this period, and the fading influence of high postmodern literary style. I show how three authors—Mark Z. Danielewski, Jennifer Egan, and Junot Díaz—turn digital technology toward more narrative means during this period, augmenting textual meaning with an enhanced typographical paratext. Last, I look at a digital book within a book, the Primer from Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer (1995), to show how this digital book remediates the social and contextual aspects of the early British novel. The Primer shows how clearly digital fiction has been defined as highly experimental, and how this constricts how we think about digital fiction and what it can be. Digitizing the novel has not meant something stable or predefined, but is a moving target, shifting to account for context, public, and literary moment.

This thesis looks at a sample of twelve stories of electronic literature written in Spanish and focuses on the different narrative techniques that these works implement. The techniques range from simple hyperlinks to highly complex functions as in videogames. These works draw from the traditions of print literature as well as from the digital culture that has shaped this era: hypertext, algorithms, text reordering, text fragmentation, multimedia creations, and almost anything else the computer is capable of. As each work discussed here is unique, a different theoretical approach is used for each.

Bernstein's revisioning of Storyspace in its 3rd version functions as a bridge between the previous hypertexts that Eastgate Systems, Inc. published and experimental interactive works readers encounter today on storytelling platforms like Twine or as apps on their phones. The result is that Those Trojan Girls remains constant in his approach to publishing “serious hypertext” embraced in the 1990s while at the same time contemporizes its aesthetic and functionality for readers today.

In his essay, “The American Hypertext Novel, and Whatever Became of It?,” Scott Rettberg discusses the impact of hypertext fiction before the mainstreaming of the World Wide Web, arguing that the "link and node hypertext" approach represented by early stand alone software like Storyspace was “eclipsed . . . by a range of other digital narrative forms” (Rettberg, “The American Hypertext Novel”). His essay goes on to reference important examples of hypertext fiction––Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story (featured in Chapter 1 of this book) as well as Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl and Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden. Of these, both Joyce’s and Jackson’s novels are still accessible to the reading public; Moulthrop’s is not. As a digital preservationist of interactive media whose mission it is to maintain public access to our literary and cultural heritage, the question this essay asks is, “Has the lack of accessibility to Moulthrop’s novel affected research about it?”

M. D. Coverley’s Califia is an interactive, hypertext novel that experiments with multi-vocal storytelling. The first of two major novels by the artist, it was produced in 2000 on the Toolbook 2.0 platform and published by Eastgate Systems, Inc. for the Windows operating system on CD-ROM. It tells the story of three people whose lives, intertwined by various family connections and location, search for the fabled Treasure of Califia. A major theme driving the narrative is The American Dream, or rather the stuff such dreams the three main characters––Augusta Summerville, Kaye Beveridge, and Cal (Calvino) Lugo–think it should be made of rather than what it really ends up to be.

This essay is a study of six of the 13 editions of Michael Joyce's afternoon, a story that shows a significant number of structural changes relating to work’s hyperlinking strategy and choices over paths to follow that affect the reader’s experience. 

This essay introduces Rebooting Electronic Literature Volume 3 that documents born-digital literary works published on floppy disks, CD-ROMs, and other media formats held among the 300 in Dene Grigar's personal collection in the Electronic Literature Lab at Washington State University Vancouver.

This essay compares two novel forms that are separated by more than 250 years: Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews, published in 1742, and Philippa Burne's hypertext fiction "24 Hours with Someone You Know," copyrighted in 1996. Using narratological, pragmatic, and cognitive tools and theories, the confrontation of the two distant texts aims to highlight that while "the ethics of the telling" is congruent with the "ethics of the told" in both stories (), the texts differ in the pragmatic positioning of their audiences and the freedom that they seem to grant readers, thereby emphasizing the evolution of the author-reader relationship across centuries and media. The article shows to what extent digital fiction can be said to invite the active participation of the reader via the computer mouse/cursor. Meanwhile it exposes a paradox: although Joseph Andrews is a highly author-controlled narrative, guiding the reader's ethical interpretation of what is told, it seems to leave more "space" for the actual reader, while Burne's participatory framework, conveyed through a second-person pronoun that blurs the line between implied and actual audience, requires some "forced participation" () via the "virtual performatives" that hyperlinks represent. Finally, the specificity of "you" digital fiction as opposed to its print counterpart is theorized in two contrasted models of audience.

Rebooting Electronic Literature, Volume 2 is an open-source, multimedia book that documents seven pre-web works of electronic literature held in the Electronic Literature Lab's (ELL) library at WSUV. Written and produced by the 2019 ELL Team—Dene Grigar, Nicholas Schiller, Holly Slocum, Mariah Gwin, Kathleen Zoller, Moneca Roath, and Andrew Nevue—the book features Traversals of Kathyrn Cramer's "In Small & Large Pieces," Deena Larsen's Samplers, Richard Holeton's Figurski at Findhorn on Acid, Tim McLaughlin's Notes Toward Absolute Zero, and Stephanie Strickland's True North. Released December 2019.

Source: Dene Grige's website nouspace.net