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
Cyberspace, Virtuality and the Text Marie-Laure Ryan 1999
Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature Espen Aarseth 1997
Design som medievitenskapelig metode Anders Fagerjord 2012
Digital Literary Arts - Scandinavian E-Texts: Criticism, Theory, and Practice Melissa Lucas 2014
Digital Literature: From Text to Hypertext and Beyond Raine Koskimaa 2000
Digital Literature: Theoretical and Aesthetic Reflections Luciana Gattass 2011
Digital Media Scott Rettberg, Jill Walker Rettberg 2010
Digital Poesi. Æstetisk Analyse og det Mediales Rolle i Kunstværkers Kommunikation Mette-Marie Zacher Sørensen 2013
Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries Loss Pequeño Glazier 2001
Digitizing the Novel, 1987-2010 Bradley Joseph Reina 2016
Discourse Timer: Towards Temporally Dynamic Texts Markku Eskelinen, Raine Koskimaa 2001
Do You Think You're Part of This? Digital Texts and the Second Person Address Jill Walker Rettberg 2000
Don't Believe the Hype: Rereading Michael Joyce's Afternoon and Twelve Blue Anthony Enns 2001
E-Borges: Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden Álvaro Seiça 2012
E-lit context as Records Continuum: the “lost” Michael Joyce’s Afternoon Italian edition and the archival perspective Paola Pizzichini, Mauro Carassai 2010
E-literature Joseph Tabbi 2011
Editing the Interface: Textual Studies and First Generation Digital Objects Matthew G. Kirschenbaum 2002
Electronic Literature Scott Rettberg 2018
Electronic Literature Publishing and Distribution in Europe Markku Eskelinen, Giovanna Di Rosario 2012
Electronic Literature Seen from a Distance: The Beginnings of a Field Jill Walker Rettberg 2012
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Jill Walker Rettberg