non-linear

"This chapter examines the transformations of literary hypertext as a nonlinear digital writing format and practice since its inception in the late 1980s. We trace its development from the editorially closed and demographically exclusive writerly practices associated with first generation hypertext (also known as the Storyspace School) to the participatory, inclusive, and arguably more democratic affordances of the freely accessible, userfriendly online writing tool Twine. We argue that while this evolution, alongside other participatory forms of social media writing, has brought creative media practices closer than ever to the early poststructuralist-inspired theory of “wreadership” (Landow 1992), the discourses and practices surrounding Twine perpetuate ideological and commercially reinforced binaries between literature and gameplay. In view of the recent proliferation of text-based literary games, however, we argue that media literacies are bound to change and adapt to the cognitive challenges and distinct immersive qualities of literary-ludic hybrid artifacts, and readers/players will develop media-literate strategies of engaging with the clash between hyper- and deep attention" (Hayles 2007)

This paper will outline the material process and theoretical underpinnings whereby I turned a critical practice of reading a philosophical text, in this case Plato’s Phaedrus, into an electronic, interactive, Twine game. The game, called “Plato’s Phaedrus: a Memory Pharmacy,” is a rhizomatic dialogical game whereby players engage in a procedure of enacting verbal dialectics upon an interactive text that is interspliced with both Platonic passages and transcriptions of contemporary interlocutor's dialectical analysis upon the Phaedrus. The game is played on Twine, an open-source tool for non-linear storytelling. Players choose a character, either Socrates or Phaedrus, and begin by reading aloud scripted lines of the Platonic text. As the dialogue continues, it becomes unclear if the text has departed from the original Platonic dialogue as the content mixes in anachronisms and the style vears upon the colloquial. Soon conversation choices are introduced as players can choose which line to speak aloud, and thereby steer the dialogue in different conversational directions. The game itself guides players down conversation pathways that discuss the philosophical foundations of writing and textuality, literature and electronic literature, and ends by forcing players to make a choice asked of Socrates in the text – to choose between writing on a soul (a virtual, non-inscribed, potentially eternal form of writing) vs writing on an inscriptive platform (a potentially decaying yet sensible material) The procedure I following to construct this game are as follows: 1) Find passages in the text where it implicitly asks a reader to act alongside or outside of the activity of reading. 2) Expand upon these passages via textual alteration or configuring certain external (spatial or behavior) factors around the reading of the text such that the text more radically directs a reader. 3) Repeat and mould these acts of expansion into a coherent set of rules or structures, thereby creating a game. Note: At any point in this process, find a suitable electronic medium for your textual expansion or game. I believe this procedure is important as it outlines a method of textual analysis that doesn’t only focus on semantic content but also on place, time, duration, voice, style, repetition, and modes of generating response. By sharing this procedure with others I am hopeful that others can create their own interactive platforms that attend to the demands of other text and multiply the variety of pedagogies of textual encounters and reading methodologies that a given text can proliferate. In addition this paper will share certain theoretical underpinnings of this process related to textual interactivity. The choice of textual passage for this project was quite deliberate as Plato’s Phaedrus is one of the foundational texts in the Western tradition which takes up the question of writing’s status as dead and inert. The questioning of aliveness within the written medium will be explored not only via the project itself, but through various key thinkers such as Derrida (the concept of Pharmakon as explored in text Plato’s Pharmacy), Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy, and Anne Carson’s Eros.

The current Indian government’s dream of a ‘Digital India’ does not include digital culture or the digital humanities. The country now has its digital library of digitised analog works (mainly printed texts) but it does not have a significant electronic literature. It does have a growing videogames industry that is becoming keener on sophisticated means of non-linear storytelling and also deeper investment in digital storytelling through platforms such as wevideo etc. mainly for the purposes of raising social awareness. Recent videogames such as the indie RPG, Unrest as well as adaptations of Bollywood films such as Ghajini attempt non-linear storytelling. Digital stories, such as ‘We are Angry’, a story about the recent brutalities against women in India, are becoming a popular medium of spreading awareness.

Together with this, the popularity of using the web as a medium for publishing poetry is on the rise. Some of this poetry, often not acceptable to print journals, tends to go viral on the web and on social media. Indeed, songs such as ‘Kolaveri di’ (sung in Tanglish, a mix of Tamil and English) and ‘Hok Kolorob’ became overnight hits on Youtube and other social media sites. While the former gained cult status in the country, the latter inspired a political movement against a corrupt education system. Another example is the digital recording and dissemination of the late-poet Vidrohi who lived by himself in a university campus in Delhi and composed poems in the oral tradition.

Non-linear traditions of storytelling and poetry have existed in India since ancient times and in a variety of forms ranging from the stories in the Katha traditions to the Urdu dastangoi plays. Strangely, though, despite its recent digital commitment, the government has not considered digital counterparts of such nonlinear literature worthy of its attention. Electronic literature, as it is understood in Europe and the U.S.A, does not have a presence in Indian literary and cultural traditions yet. The few Digital Humanities programmes that have developed in the country might be engaging with electronic literature in their curriculum. If so, the beginnings of e-lit are already evident in older cultural traditions and the process of remediation is certainly This article aims to explore the (non)beginnings of electronic literature in India and to think through larger implications of electronic literature in the digital culture and Humanities teaching at large.

Nonlinear writing refers to (a) a writerly activity and (b) a specific type of written document. The first meaning relates to the strategy of composing a text in a nonsequential way by adding, removing, and modifying passages in various places of manuscript rather than producing it in one piece, from beginning to end. The second meaning refers to documents that are not structured in a sequential way, with a clear beginning, middle, and end. Rather, their macrostructure follows an associative logic, which assembles its composite elements (paragraphs, text chunks, or lexis) into a loosely ordered network. These networks offer readers multiple choices of traversing a document, which can facilitate specific types of reading strategies, such as keyword searches or jumping between main text and footnotes, and complicate others, such as reading for closure or completeness. (Source: Author's introduction)

An essay written as a hypertext about hypertext structure.