hypertextuality

Literature created in digital media exists in a realm whose borders may be changing, malleable, or nonexistent. In this realm, where anything may happen, traditional theories are insufficient to understand the literary phenomenon in non-print platforms. Electronic literature demands an analysis that matches its nature, which does not necessarily coincide with existing theory, since electronic literature exists to be consumed through technologies which have been available just recently and which, by transforming the ways we read and write, challenge the canon of literary form, and establishing a new paradigm for text creation and reading. According to Roger Chartier, “The electronic text revolution is at once a revolution in the technology of the production and reproduction of texts, a revolution in the medium of writing and a revolution in reading practices.” (“Readers and readings in the Electronic Age”) as a corollary, this revolution implies also a new way of approaching the literary phenomenon from a critical perspective.

This paper proposes that a global analysis is possible to understand electronic literary works and how they function within an ever changing digital materiality. The analysis model sustained by this paper is based in four perspectives: materiality, structure, textuality, and sense. Each of these aspects contains a series of guidelines that will help to describe how is it that each of them is manifested in the work analyzed and will provide a set of ideas to be considered during analysis, thusly helping illuminate other unaccounted aspects.

 These four perspectives rise from a minute examination of the intrinsic relation between post-structuralist ideas and new hypertextuality theories, as well as the study of related phenomena. This analysis also takes into consideration the open work concept as proposed by Umberto Eco, which allows this model to be applied to non-traditional (or multilenear) printed texts whose special characteristics do not warrant traditional literary theory analysis. In other words, this method can be applied to texts regardless of the platform they use. 

The analysis of open works, be it in print or digital platforms, must happen within an unbound framework. This paper's proposal may be used as a starting point to address this kind of work. However, during the application of the theory other new aspects will emerge, since open works are precisely characterized by being prone to constant mutation and by their impossibility to fit in a specific and established genre or theory. Traditional narration methods may describe many aspects related to time, narrator, characters, and other components. Still, as a consequence of the use of ergodic elements, they need to be modified and complemented (Gunder 28) for the study of open literary works. Consideration of electronic text theories allows for this new focus. This paper defines a format/model proposed to analyze open literary works, taking into consideration that it is only a proposal and that it does not disregard the use of other analysis theories, but complements them.

(Source: Author's description from ELO 2018 site)

This article examines an aesthetic experience associated with the digital, which is characterized by the ability of the reader to interact, participate, and manipulate literary works created in this format. First, a map of Chilean digital literature will be presented and then two aspects will be analyzed which allow a description of an aesthetic of the digital: hypertextuality and cultural hacking. As a result of this analysis, and considering that digital literature is that which is created to be read on the screen of an electronic device, two poems will be investigated: A veces cubierto por las aguas by Carlos Cociña and Clickable poem@s by Luis Correa-Díaz.These texts allow us to think about the status of literature and poetry in the digital era, linked with an aesthetic experience which emphasizes intervention and the wish to participate.

Over the last two decades, many recent forms of electronic literature have revealed a strong aptitude for hypertextuality and hypermediality. Meanwhile, we have assisted to the progressive emergence of innovative examples of print fiction that may be defined as «writing machines»,1 because they strive to incorporate the aesthetics and the symbolic forms of the electronic media. These kinds of narrative are often characterised by an "autopoietic" potentiality, since they often tend to include a multiplicity of media sources while preserving the autonomy of their literary function. As Joseph Tabbi observes: «Defining the literary as a self-organizing composition, or poiesis, is not to close off the literary field; instead, by creating new distinctions such a definition can actually facilitate literary interactions with the media environment».2 At the same time, some examples of print and electronic 'writing machines' are also characterized by an «exopoietic function». As the philosopher John Nolt points out (in the disciplinary context of the environmental ethics): «In exopoiesis, an organism functions not for its own benefit, but rather for the benefit of something related to it, to which it is therefore of instrumental value».3 Applying this concept to the literary field, the aim of this article is to analyse the structures and the fruition of four recent novels, in order to understand how the electronic environment promotes a complex relationship between exopoiesis and literariness. William Gibson's novels "Pattern Recognition" (2003) and "Spook Country" (2007) became the core of the projects of some online communities: users begun to build online databases by annotating the various narrative segments, in order to link them to other online searchable resources. These images, videos, and texts are indirectly related to the literary plot, being at the same time independent from it. Similarly, "Flight Paths" (2007) is an electronic «networked novel» that was developed by Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph alongside a related hypermedial database containing images, videos, newspaper articles and other texts, which may be continuously updated by the readers. Finally, the verse novel "Only Revolutions" (2006) was written by Mark Z. Danielewski with the help of a well established group of readers involved in his online forum, in order to discuss the various aspects of the novel and to suggest possible connections to other material. In all these cases, the reading of the literary work seems to be perceived as not sufficient in itself and it requires the support of a parallel electronic environment, such as a database or a forum. Moreover, the authors purposefully prearranged the structural and poetic nature of their works to promote an exopoietic non-autonomy of the literary text, the fragments of the latter being exploited in order to become part of non-literary fluxes of online information. These works are not only «distributed narratives»,4 which spread themselves across different media platforms and authorial voices, but they are also novels whose reading engenders a problematization of many of the most relevant aspects that usually define the literariness of a text, like its «open» nature and the the logic of «possible worlds» that were discussed by Umberto Eco and other scholars in the fields of semiotics and narratology.5 The exopoietic function of literary works in electronic environments may be a proper field of analysis to understand how it is possible to conceive literature as a process that runs along with other information strategies.1 See N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines, Cambridge (MA) - London: The MIT Press, 2002, p. 112. 2 Joseph Tabbi, Cognitive Fictions, Minneapolis - London: University of Minnesota Press, c2002, p. 8. 3 John Nolt, "The Move from Is to Good in Environmental Ethics," in «Philosophy Publications and Other Works» Vol. 31, 2009, pp. 135-154; p. 149. Web. 29-07-2011. . 4 See Jill Walker, “Distributed Narratives. Telling Stories Across Networks,” Presented at AoIR 5.0, Brighton, September 21, 2004 by Dr. Jill Walker, Dept. of Humanistic Informatics, University of Bergen. Web. 12-10-2010. . 5 See: Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, London: Macmillan, 1984, p. 18; The Open Work, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984, pp. 3-24; On Literature, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2005 pp. 14-15; Cesare Segre, Introduction to the Analysis of the Literary Text, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.

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.