In Small & Large Pieces

Published in issue 1:3 of the Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext (1994), Kathryn Cramer’s short poetic hypertext fiction, “In Small & Large Pieces” came bundled with Kathy Mac’s “Unnatural Habitats”, first as two 3.5-inch floppy disks for Macintosh and PC, and later on a single CD-ROM requiring 2 MB RAM and a hard disk drive. A “dark fantasy” and “postmodern Through the Looking Glass” (folio back cover), Cramer’s work aligns with numerous remediations of Alice in Wonderland in contemporary history of art, narrative, and digital culture. The titular broken looking glass becomes a metaphor of “obsessive fragmentation” (blurb) throughout the text, and of how readers move between different types of texts, such as poems, hand-written notes, and captioned images “illuminates this moment of shattered self” (ibid).