Paperback reissue.
The bad idea is not known to infect any other species other than humans, among whom it is communicable through language and violence.
but during training they found i have an extraordinary memory i am able to hold entire books in my mind
they tested my accuracy precision and capacity with numbers strength dexterity vision
and my knowledge of astronomy they put me in 20g
in a sensory deprivation tank and into freefall
they starved me suffocated me irradiated me with glasses of metallic-tasting liquid isotopes
but at no point was i asked to read anything more difficult than eye charts
one test never happened
they kept me locked in an empty waiting room all day an honest mistake they said
i think that was the test
the waiting room didn’t even have a magazine
i could have screamed but i wanted this mission
at no point was i asked to write anything
the subject of my poetry never came up.
This article presents the problems and innovative aspects of hypertextual fiction. The hypertextual novel of multiple authors presents the following problem: the notion of the author in postmodern times is dissolved with multiple authorship and copyleft. The time of the discourse is not necessarily lineal, because there is no way to escape from sequentiality in the linguistic sign, but not even in the fragmentary linearity of Rayuela we could approximate to the linearity of the hypertextual story, because it is a polyphonic reality, made of multiple voices. As a consequence, the main characteristic of a novel of these characteristics is polydiachrony.
Este artículo presenta los aspectos innovadores y los problemas de la ficción hipertextual. La novela hipertextual de múltiples autores presenta el siguiente problema: la noción del autor en la época postmoderna se disuelve con la múltiple autoría y el copyleft. El tiempo del discurso no es necesariamente lineal, porque no hay modo de escapar de la secuencialidad en el signo lingüístico, ni siquiera en la linealidad fragmentaria de Rayuela podríamos aproximarnos a la linearidad de un relato hipertextual, poque se trata de una realidad polifónica, de múltiples voces. Como consecuencia, la principal característica de una novela de estas características es la polidiacronía.
"Cybertext Narratology" combines Espen Aarseth's textonomy and typology of cybertexts to three advanced models of narrativity: narratology (Gerard Genette, Seymour Chatman, Gerald Prince), postmodernist fiction (Brian McHale), and the combinatorial and procedural writing(s) of OuLiPo (Marcel Benabou, Jacques Roubaud).
The basic and most important distinctions, categories and concepts derived from these approaches are systematically examined, expanded and rewritten in order to map out and include narrative possibilities and practices inherent to and emerged with literary cybertexts and digital textuality in general. The matters of tense, mood and voice are closely studied as well as those of trans- textuality, audibility, reliability and narrative situation.
Beyond constant scriptons and intransient time it's easy to apply an oulipian perspective to cybertext and divide it into objects and operations. This means first of all that there's an important distinction to be made between static and dynamic narrators. The former are the traditional ones known to print narratology. The latter, on the other hand, can f. ex. turn more covert or overt, move between hetero- and homodiegetic positions and narrative levels, trade places with each other, split or unite, and extend or reduce their territories inside the cybertext. The given, chosen and caused parameters of these operations can change from one generation of the text to the next. For this reason only we should distinguish between scriptonic and textonic objects. The former are those encountered by readers and users on the surface of the text, the latter form a kind of archive or storage of them.
The paper also discusses the possibilities of cybertext fiction to embed games, dialog programs and on-line communities as well its chances to utilize some a-life applications. Finally, and in relation to McHale's constructions of postmodernism, the paper tries to define a digital dominant, that is, a new set of both epistemological and ontological problems for authors to play with.
Despite its serious theoretical orientation the paper doesn't lose sight of more practical concerns. Along the way it provides examples of potential literary cybertexts not yet in existence. Such as glider narratives, that is, narratives that use their lexias or nodes the way cells are used in Conway's "Life, living and dying" from one text generation to the next depending on the number of appearances (absences and presences) of certain characters and narrators in neighboring lexias. Or competing dialog programs that affect the developments and outcomes of narratives and the behavioral patterns of their characters and narrators (turning the harassed or collectively discriminated ones more confused and destructive in their actions).
These examples are far from innocent for they show various directions for further work. That's why it's no coincidence that the last section of "Cybertext Narratology" deals with the partial but almost inevitable overlapping of narrative and drama (theories) in MOO -environments. This situation is viewed through non-Aristotelian (Augosto Boal's Invisible Theatre) and non-western (the Natyasastra) models as well as those derived from interactive installation art (David Rokeby) and the forthcoming Bluetooth technologies.
(Source: DAC 1999 Author's abstract)
For several centuries the novel has been associated with a single material form: the bound book, made of paper and printed with ink. But what happens when storytelling diverges from the book? What happens when writers weave stories that extend beyond the printed word? What happens when fiction appears in digital form, generated from a reader’s actions or embedded in a videogame? What happens when a novel has no novelist behind it, but a crowd of authors---or no human at all, just an algorithm?
We will address these questions and many more in this English Honors Seminar dedicated to post-print fiction. We will begin with two “traditional” novels that nonetheless ponder the meaning of narrative, books, and technology, and move quickly into several novels that, depending upon one’s point of view, either represent that last dying gasp of the printed book or herald a renaissance of the form. Alongside these four novels we will explore electronic literature, kinetic poetry, transmedia narratives, and videogames that both challenge and enrich our understanding of storytelling in the 21st century.
Guiding Concerns:
* the materiality of books
* the role, function, and question of authorship
* the narrative and aesthetic potential of procedure and chance
* the impact of technology upon the material and narrative form of fiction.
(Source: Course Guidelines)
Scott Rettberg's Spring 2004 Hypertext course at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. The course was part of an early comprehensive New Media Studies track within the Literature Program. The hypertext course was both a literature and writing course. Students dealt with classic hypertext fictions in the context of literary postmodernism, learned about hypertext theory, and wrote hypertext fiction using both Storyspace and HTML.
