afternoon, a story

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Afternoon was first shown to the public as a demonstration of the hypertext authoring system Storyspace, announced in 1987 at the first Association for Computing Machinery Hypertext conference in a paper by Michael Joyce and Jay David Bolter.[1] In 1990, it was published on diskette and distributed in the same form by Eastgate Systems.

The hypertext fiction tells the story of Peter, a recently divorced man who one morning witnessed a deadly car crash where he believes his ex-wife and son were involved. He cannot stop blaming himself as he walked away from the accident without helping the injured people. A recurring sentence throughout the story "I want to say I may have seen my son die this morning" where [I want to say] is one of many lexias built into a loop which causes the reader to revisit the same lexia throughout the story. The hypertext centers around the car accident, but also reveals the multifarious ways of the characters' mutual promiscuity.

Critical writing that references this work:

Title Author Year
A Ciberliteratura: Criação Literária e Computador Pedro Barbosa 1996
A New Media Reading Strategy Cheryl E. Ball 2005
A Short History of Electronic Literature and Communities in the Nordic Countries Hans Kristian Rustad 2012
An Emerging Canon? A Preliminary Analysis of All References to Creative Works in Critical Writing Documented in the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base Scott Rettberg 2013
An interview with Maria Engberg David Thomas Prater, Maria Engberg 2011
Analyzing Digital Fiction 2014
Archiving Digital Narrative: Some Issues Tom Abba
Arte Digital: Pixel, Algoritmo, Código, Programação e Dados Álvaro Seiça 2011
Autorschaft und digitale Literatur: Geschichte, Medienpraxis und Theoriebildung Heiko Zimmermann 2015
Blogging Jill Walker Rettberg 2014
Blogging Jill Walker Rettberg 2014
Born Digital: Writing Poetry in the Age of New Media Maria Engberg 2007
Canonizing Hypertext: Explorations and Constructions Astrid Ensslin 2007
Card Shark and Thespis: Exotic Tools for Hypertext Narrative Mark Bernstein 2001
Collective Memory and the Development of a Field: Building the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base Scott Rettberg 2012
Command Lines: Aesthetics and Technique in Interactive Fiction and New Media Jeremy Douglass 2007
Conclusion: Whither American Fiction? Jessica Pressman 2012
Conclusions Terry Harpold 1994
Contextualizing the King of Space Dene Grigar 2018
Creating Screen-Based Multiple State Environments: Investigating Systems of Confutation Donna Leishman 2004
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Jill Walker Rettberg