Three classic hypertexts and a reader

As Markku Eskelinen put it , we could say that the three classic hypertexts, Michael Joyce’s Afternoon, Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden, and Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl all did what they could to make the reader more receptive to the marvels of their labyrinths:

by using hidden and conditional links to highlight and parallel the defences and self-denials of the protagonist in Afternoon, his general unwillingness to know; evoking and concretising the familiar literary tradition of forking paths of Borges, Coover and Pynchon in Victory Garden; and foregrounding Frankensteinian bodily metaphors to ease the postmodernist butchery work of connecting parts and wholes in Patchwork Girl.

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Unexpected thoughts

To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.

Oscar Wilde

To write regular verses destroys an infinite number of fine possibilities, but at the same time
it suggests a multitude of distant and totally unexpected thoughts.

Paul Valery

The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition.

W. H. Auden

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métabole
hypertexte

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Personal homepages for hypertextual thought

In our program we have Web surfing . Do you have some Websites that you could suggest as interesting to visit during Web surfing and can you also tell us something about the Website on which you work with your students and where material of your students is located.

David Kolb - If we’re thinking about hypertext, the two Websites that come to my mind are actually personal homepages. One is the personal homepage of Stuart Moulthrop who teaches at the University of Baltimore and the other is the homepage of Michael Joyce at Vassar College. Both of those are interesting because they connect to essays or texts written by those people, who are both fine theorists and writers, but also because they have many links from those pages to other hypertext-related Websites.

I think those would be good starting points. As to what I’ve done with my students, I’ve created on the Web a little thing called the Bates Hypertext Archive, which is simply a place to put some student works and a bit of my own which seemed to me to be worth putting on the Web. Most of the material there has been transferred from the program Storyspace, which allows you to construct more complex linkage than is easy to do on the Web. As a result, there is some awkwardness in the Web production of the pages, but by and large it is OK. What you’d find there are three or four "fictions" or short stories written by students and also a link to a site of students in a philosophy of art class - quite a large class. I asked the students to go out onto the Web and find sites related to art - paintings, sculpture, architecture - and write reviews of those sites.

So I have several hundred reviews, typically a paragraph or so, written by these students, purely their own opinion, about these various sites, and there is a link to the site with each review. Some of the reviews are very fine, some of them are not. Some of them are quite insightful. But it was an attempt to allow the students to have a voice and to have a fairly simple way of constructing something, because we were able to post the reviews without too much difficulty and it did not require the students themselves to compose a Web page. That is an example of another thing you could do. Given that you’ll probably have some students who know something about Web construction, one of the best ways to involve students is to have a common project - it allows them to learn from one another. Have them create a Website or a portion of a Website that relates to the material of the class or to some project that the students are working on. You could even let them define it to some extent. One of the things that is on the Website, for instance, is something some students did last spring. They had to break into groups of three or four and decide on a Web project and create it. One group did a project on the worst things they could find on the Web. Another one did a guide to college, things the administration doesn’t want you to know, and so forth.

So you are getting people to create. It doesn’t have to be enormous but they learn a tremendous amount and they learn from one another.

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PHONEREADER Library - - Jean-Philippe Pastor

It is clear that link source plays a fundamental role to the context of any particular pattern.

For example Joyce's cycle could as easily describe the experience of using the Internet Movie Database, as Afternoon: a story, yet clearly in each case the effect of the cycle is radically different. Similarly a tangle could describe Simpson's Memex project, parts of Amerika's Grammatron, or Miles' 1996 Hyperweb, yet each are fundamentally different hypertexts.

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Linked materials ans intertextuality

(...) Books offer an obvious example of explicit hypertextuality in nonelectronic form.

(...) Take Joyce's Ulysses for an example. If one looks, say, at the Nausicaa section, in which Bloom watches Gerty McDowell on the beach, one notes that Joyce's text here alludes or refers (the terms we usually employ) to many other texts or phenomena that one can treat as texts, including the Nausicaa section of the Odyssey, the advertisements and articles in the women's magazines that suffuse and inform Gerty's thoughts, facts about contemporary Dublin and the Catholic Church, and material that relates to other passages within the novel. Again, a hypertext presentation of the novel links this section not only to the kinds of materials mentioned but also to other works in Joyce's career, critical commentary, and textual variants. Hypertext here permits one to make explicit, though not necessarily intrusive, the linked materials that an educated reader perceives surrounding it. (Landow)

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See the journal French Metablog with today different posts