“Literary Hypertext (From a Writer’s Point of View)” presented by Kerman
Symposium:
Session Title:
- Narratives, Interactivity and Metaphors
Presentation Title:
- Literary Hypertext (From a Writer’s Point of View)
Presenter(s):
Venue(s):
Abstract:
Today the word on the page has ramified into (at least) oral performance, book arts, and text on the screen, with or without graphics, animation and sound. Hypertext is partly a bridge between the world of the book and the world of multimedia, but art made entirely of words is not going to go away. So I’m going to concentrate on hypertext and on texts made of words. Most of the issues I will discuss map onto my colleagues’ presentations as well.
I like very much the two questions printed in the program to describe this panel: Can traditional narrative make a successful transition into interactive media? Is a participatory space between author and audience possible without losing the pleasures of closure and individual uniqueness? To ask these questions is to reflect where most readers and most writers are today. But they are two really different questions, and the answer to one doesn’t necessarily determine the answer to the other. think the first question, about traditional narrative, is, at
the surface level, the wrong question, and the answer is probably “no” – traditional narrative can’t make a successful transition, and why should it? New media often start their lives as
platforms for performance of old forms (e.g. films of staged plays), but they soon develop genres of their own, which depend on the aesthetic potential of the new medium itself. If electronic literature were nothing but pages on a screen, it would be a failure. But not to worry – it was clear as soon as computers were widely available that interactivity is the most interesting new potential offered by electronic literature. Hence hypertext. Yet the nostalgia for traditional narrative points to a deeper question, a dynamic which may be based in human biology and even physics, rather than based in culture or technology and susceptible to cultural change. It may be that verbal language is inherently linear
