afternoon, a story

Tags: 
Description (in English): 

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
Electronic Literature Without a Map Markku Eskelinen 2008
Electronic Literature: A Matter of Bits 2016
Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary N. Katherine Hayles 2010
Elektronisk litteratur i Norden Hans Kristian Rustad 2008
Ex libris: medierealistik litteratur, Paris, Los Angeles & cyberspace Søren Bro Pold 2004
Ex-foliations: Reading Machines and the Upgrade Path Terry Harpold 2009
Fiction and Interaction: How Clicking a Mouse Can Make You Part of a Fictional World Jill Walker Rettberg 2003
First Half-Century of Electronic Literature at Brown Robert Coover, Robert Arellano 2019
Formalisation d’un modèle fonctionnel de communication à l’aide des technologies numériques appliqué à la création poétique Philippe Bootz 2001
From Revisi(tati)on to Retro-Intentionalization Astrid Ensslin 2010
From Storyspace to Browsers: Translating afternoon, a story into Polish and XML Mariusz Pisarski 2012
From Text to Hypertext: Decentering the Subject in Fiction, Film, the Visual Arts, and Electronic Media Silvio Gaggi 1997
From Theorizing to Analyzing Digital Fiction Alice Bell, Astrid Ensslin, Hans Kristian Rustad 2014
Fuzzy Coherence: Making Sense of Continuity in Hypertext Narratives Jukka Tyrkkö 2011
Gaps, Maps and Perception: What Hypertext Readers (Don't) Do J. Yellowlees Douglas 1992
Genre Trouble: Narrativism and the Art of Simulation Espen Aarseth 2004
Hyperfiction as a Medium for Drifting Times: A Close Reading of the German Hyperfiction Zeit für die Bombe Alexandra Saemmer 2014
Hyperfiction – ein neues Genre? Beat Suter, Michael Böhler 1999
Hyperfiktion und interaktive Narration Beat Suter 2000
Hyperizons: A study of interactive reading and readership in hyperfiction theory and practice, with an outlook to hyperfictions' future inspired by the reading of Sophie's World and The Pandora Directive Lisbeth Klastrup 1997
Screen shots: 
The permanent URL of this page: 
Record posted by: 
Jill Walker Rettberg