Complex textual structure of the Real

Even the most conservatively narrative history is filled with complex textual structure, discursion, and linkage. T

This fact does not depend on postmodern analysis or literary theoretic argument, nor does is derive from a novel philosophical or methodological stance; the structures we have discussed all appear, for example, in Thucydides' opening chapters. We need not fear that hypertext will slash apart or cherished narrative simplicity, for this narrative simplicity never existed.

Letting go our irrational fears of electronic writing and leaving aside nostalgia for an imaginary literary past, we can explore afresh the opportunities hypertext offers. Linearity was never an option for historical writing; hypertextuality can make complex structure concrete, clear and responsive to both the author and reader.

It is a shame that too much of the popular perspective on hypertext does not yet recognize this, and that hypertext punditry so often caters to fear and nostalgia.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts-Enter Jean-Philippe Pastor


Bookmark this on Delicious

Where is the lexia in the hypertext ?

The author's current work in progress carries the concept of simultaneity still further in the idea of a nested simultaneity.

In some cases this work carries the simultaneity inside the sentence. Hypertext is carried into the fine structure of language. Where is "the lexia" now? Is there really a concept of lexia when we are inside the sentence?

A hypertext may be thought of as a kind of virtual diagram, with software for navigating the diagram. If the diagram is small enough it may be presented in a single graphical space, without the aid of software. The author's Diagram Poems are examples of such works. These present an explicitly relational syntax notation, still used in Intergrams and Diffractions through. The structural atoms in the Diagram Poems are small clusters of words; the relational (i.e. hypertext-on-paper) structure is the sentence structure. What shall we say is "the lexia" here? In the Diagram Poems, the diagram notation carries syntax itself. Executed on a larger scale, this concept leads to the use of hypertext to carry the very infrastructure of language. Such works would have hypertext infrawhere: a structural underneath so fine and so pervasive, a lexia so completely fragmented, that the concept of lexia ceases to have any meaning: a completely dematerialized lexia, as in [Mou92b] after all.

In [Mou92b] Stuart Moulthrop asks: "Why does the hypertext research community publish its work in print?" At the risk of seeming glib, the answer is obvious: because hypertext is not our native tongue. Many will surely balk at the idea that this needn't be so, that there can exist a natural language in which hypertext carries the very structure of syntax itself: hypertext not as a medium of organizing thoughts, but as a medium of thought. Perhaps in the end this will turn out to be unachievable, but as a focus for poetic experimentation it provides this author with a sustaining vision.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts-Enter Jean-Philippe Pastor

Bookmark this on Delicious