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Hyperworks: On Digital Literature and Computer Games
This study investigates the effects of digitization on literature and literary culture with focus on works of literary fiction and other kinds of works inspired by such works. The concept of "hyperworks" refers to works intended to be navigated multisequentially, i.e. the users create their own paths through the work by making choices. The three articles that make up the dissertation include analyses of individual works as well as discussions of theoretical models and concepts. The study combines perspectives from several theoretical traditions: narratology, hypertext theory, ludology (i.e. game studies), sociology of literature, textual criticism, media theory, and new media studies. This study investigates the effects of digitization on literature and literary culture with focus on works of literary fiction and other kinds of works inspired by such works. The concept of “hyperworks” refers to works intended to be navigated multisequentially, i.e. the users create their own paths through the work by making choices. The three articles that make up the dissertation include analyses of individual works as well as discussions of theoretical models and concepts.
Jill Walker Rettberg - 14.02.2011 - 14:38
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Computing Language and Poetry
[Insert author's abstract here.]
Montfort introduced a new critical term, stanzory, which refers to "a unit of lines in a poem that is also a narrative with some sort of point."
Presented at the 2012 MLA Convention as part of the "730. New Media Narratives and Old Prose Fiction" panel, arranged by the Division on Prose Fiction. Other panelists included Dene Grigar and Joseph Tabbi. The moderator, filling in for Amy Elias, was Heather M. Houser.
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 17.01.2012 - 15:45
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Fuzzy Coherence: Making Sense of Continuity in Hypertext Narratives
Hypertexts are digital texts characterized by interactive hyperlinking and a fragmented textual organization. Increasingly prominent since the early 1990s, hypertexts have become a common text type both on the Internet and in a variety of other digital contexts. Although studied widely in disciplines like hypertext theory and media studies, formal linguistic approaches to hypertext continue to be relatively rare.
Patricia Tomaszek - 25.03.2012 - 13:25
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Ontological Boundaries and Methodological Leaps: The Importance of Possible Worlds Theory for Hypertext Fiction (and Beyond)
This essay sets out an ontologically centered approach to Storyspace hypertext fiction by applying Ryan’s (1991) model of Possible Worlds Theory to two canonical texts [...] Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl (1995) and Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden (1991). The analyses show how the Possible Worlds Theory method allows the study of hypertext fiction to move away from the chronological focus of traditional narrative theory to address the ontological mechanics of hypertext narratives. The chapter closes by suggesting ways in which Possible Worlds Theory might also be used as an analytical tool for other forms of digital literature.
(Source: author's abstract.)
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 08.04.2012 - 09:17
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Curveship: An Interactive Fiction System for Narrative Variation
A report on the interactive-fiction system Curveship, which was designed to provide users a means of generating narrative variation.
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 08.04.2012 - 09:25
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Footnotes in Fiction: A Rhetorical Approach
This study explores the use of footnotes in fictional narratives. Footnotes and endnotes fall under the category of what Gérard Genette has labeled paratexts, or the elements that sit above or external to the text of the story. In some narratives, however, notes and other paratexts are incorporated into the story as part of the internal narrative frame. I call this particular type of paratext an artificial paratext. Much like traditional paratexts, artificial paratexts are often seen as ancillary to the text. However, artificial paratexts can play a significant role in the narrative dynamic by extending the boundaries of the narrative frame, introducing new heuristic models for interpretation, and offering alternative narrative threads for the reader to unravel. In addition, artificial paratexts provide a useful lens through which to explore current theories of narrative progression, character development, voice, and reliability. In the first chapter, I develop a typology of paratexts, showing that paratexts have been used to deliver factual information, interpretive or analytical glosses, and discursive narratives in their own right.
Patricia Tomaszek - 16.11.2012 - 15:43
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Travels in Cybertextuality. The Challenge of Ergodic Literature and Ludology to Literary Theory
The dissertation’s main point of departure is the clash between explicit and implicit presuppositions, conceptualisations and generalisations in print-oriented literary theoretical paradigms and a plenitude of empirically verifiable anomalies and counter-examples to them found in digital and ergodic works of literature. The behaviour of these counter-examples is explained by cybertext theory that addresses the often neglected issue of the variety of literary media. Both the empirical counter-examples and the empirically verifiable differences in the behaviour of literary media allow us to expand and modify literary theories to suit not just one traditionally privileged media position but all of them. Therefore, in the first half of the dissertation, literary theory and narratology are viewed and modified from the perspective of slightly revised cybertext theory. In this process theories of ergodic and non-ergodic literature are integrated more closely and several so far non-theorized ways of manipulating narrative time, regulating narrative information, and generating narrative instances are located and theorized.
Scott Rettberg - 13.12.2012 - 21:45
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I, Chatbot: The Gender and Race Performativity of Conversational Agents
Amidst the various forms of electronic literature stands a class of interactive programs that simulates human conversation. A chatbot, or chatterbot, is a program with which users can “speak,” typically by exchanging text through an instant-messaging style interface. Chatbots have been therapists, Web site hosts, language instructors, and even performers in interactive narratives. Over the past ten years, they have proliferated across the Internet, despite being based on a technology that predates the Web by thirty years. In my readings, these chatbots are synedochic of the process by which networked identities form on the Internet within the power dynamics of hegemonic masculinity. Chatbots, in this light, model the collaborative performance humans enact on electronically-mediated networks.
Scott Rettberg - 14.12.2012 - 01:12
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Theorizing Digital Narrative: Beginnings, Endings, and Authorship
[Published under author's previous name, Jennifer Smith] Since its development, critics of electronic literature have touted all that is "new" about the field, commenting on how these works make revolutionary use of non-linear structure, hyperlinks, and user interaction. Scholars of digital narrative have most often focused their critiques within the paradigms of either the text-centric structuralist model of narrativity or post-structuralist models that implicate the text as fundamentally fluid and dependent upon its reader for meaning. But neither of these approaches can account completely for the unique modes in which digital narratives prompt readerly progression, yet still exist as independent creative artifacts marked by purposive design. I argue that, in both practice and theory, we must approach digital-born narratives as belonging to a third, hybrid paradigm. In contrast to standard critical approaches, I interrogate the presumed "newness" of digital narratives to reveal many aspects of these works that hearken to print predecessors and thus confirm classical narratological theories of structure and authorship.
Jennifer Roudabush - 13.01.2013 - 23:40
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Cybertext Narratology
"Cybertext Narratology" combines Espen Aarseth's textonomy and typology of cybertexts to three advanced models of narrativity: narratology (Gerard Genette, Seymour Chatman, Gerald Prince), postmodernist fiction (Brian McHale), and the combinatorial and procedural writing(s) of OuLiPo (Marcel Benabou, Jacques Roubaud).
The basic and most important distinctions, categories and concepts derived from these approaches are systematically examined, expanded and rewritten in order to map out and include narrative possibilities and practices inherent to and emerged with literary cybertexts and digital textuality in general. The matters of tense, mood and voice are closely studied as well as those of trans- textuality, audibility, reliability and narrative situation.
Scott Rettberg - 19.01.2013 - 13:19
