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1. Hypertext Fiction in the Twilight Zone

   The first hypertext fictions were written in the early eighties, and the first commercially distributed hypertext fiction was Michael Joyce's Afternoon. A Story. It was published by Eastgate Systems in 1987 - slightly over a decade ago. I would like to take a look at hypertext fiction, its history and present, and try to make some predictions of its future.

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 13.01.2011 - 00:00

2. Semantisation, Exploration, Self-reflection and Absorption: Our Modes of Reading Hypertext Fiction

   "How do we read hypertext fiction? The question has been widely explored (Moulthrop 1991; Kaplan and Moulthrop 1991; Snyder 1997; Miall and Dobson 2001; Ryan 2001; Gardner 2003; Gunder 2004; Landow 2006; Mangen 2006; Page 2006) and there seems to be a consensus regarding the reader’s experience of hypertext fiction. Many critics actually claim that reading hypertext fiction generates frustration and insecurity. These and other studies describe how their readers react on and respond to hypertext fiction, but, as I see it, they partly fail in that they put to much weight on the reader’s responds and hardly no weight on the fact that hypertext fiction just like print fiction encourage or prefigure different responses and different modes of reading. The consequence is that these studies suffers from limitations witch lessens their valuable contribution to our knowledge about reading hypertext fiction. One reason for this might be that hypertext theory lack established concepts for describing response structures that encourage different modes of reading.

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 27.01.2011 - 15:13

3. Electronic Literature Without a Map

   The paper discusses several problems that seem to define and determine the field of electronic literature in theory and practice and suggests several strategies to remedy the situation in the spirit that is both analytical and polemical.

   Electronic literature has been around at least for 50 years and many of its typical ergodic ingredients share a cultural (pre)history that reaches back to classical antiquity and beyond (I Ching). Still, the cultural, economical, educational and even literary status and visibility of electronic literature is low and obscure at best despite occasional canonisations of hypertext fiction and poetry (the works of Michael Joyce and Jim Rosenberg), literary groups such as the OuLiPo that from very early on extended their orientation beyond print literature, and the efforts of an international or semi-international organisation (ELO) to promote and preserve electronic literature - not to mention multiple and more or less influential and comprehensive theories of electronic and ergodic literature.

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 27.01.2011 - 16:03

4. The Possible Worlds of Hypertext Fiction

   Publisher's blurb: Written in hypertext and read from a computer, hypertext novels exist as a collection of textual fragments, which must be pieced together by the reader.The Possible Worlds of Hypertext Fiction offers a new critical theory tailored specifically for this burgeoning genre, providing a much needed body of criticism in a key area of new media fiction.

   Table of Contents: The Universe of Hypertext Fiction
   Hypertext Fiction and the Importance of Worlds
   Contradictions, World Views and the Nature of Truth in Michael Joyce's (1987) afternoon--a story
   Going, Going, Gone: the Slippery Worlds of Stuart Moulthrop's (1995) Victory Garden
   Is there a Mary/Shelley in this World? Parody and Counterparts in Shelley Jackson's (1997) Patchwork Girl
   The Colourful Worlds of Richard Holeton's (2001) Figurski at Findhorn on Acid
   Bibliography
   Index

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 01.02.2011 - 11:43

5. For Thee: A Response to Alice Bell

   In an essay that responds to Alice Bell's book The Possible Worlds of Hypertext Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Stuart Moulthrop uses the lessons of hypertext as both an analogy and an explanation for why hypertext and its criticism will stay in a "niche" - and why, despite Bell's concern, that's not such a bad thing. As the response of an author to his critic, addressed to "thee," "implicitly dragging her into the niche with me," this review also dramatizes the very productivity of such specialized, nodal encounters.

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 03.02.2011 - 11:01

6. Interview with Michael Joyce

   Archivist Gabriela Redwine interviewed author Michael Joyce during his visit to the Ransom Center in April 2009. Excerpts from the interview are available as audio files and transcripts. Joyce talks about the reader community around early hypertexts, before they were even published and were just being passed from person to person on floppy disks, about connections between his work and Modernist authors (Stein, Joyce), about lowercase letters not being an obvious requirement to early computer programmers, about e-lit authors having to be their own critics and about the sensation of writing the first line of afternoon and knowing that this was different from conventional literature.

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 14.02.2011 - 11:43

7. 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

8. Canonizing Hypertext: Explorations and Constructions

   from the publisher: Description This innovative monograph focuses on a contemporary form of computer-based literature called 'literary hypertext', a digital, interactive, communicative form of new media writing. Canonizing Hypertext combines theoretical and hermeneutic investigations with empirical research into the motivational and pedagogic possibilities of this form of literature. It focuses on key questions for literary scholars and teachers: How can literature be taught in such a way as to make it relevant for an increasingly hypermedia-oriented readership? How can the rapidly evolving new media be integrated into curricula that still seek to transmit ‘traditional’ literary competence? How can the notion of literary competence be broadened to take into account these current trends? This study, which argues for hypertext’s integration in the literary canon, offers a critical overview of developments in hypertext theory, an exemplary hypertext canon and an evaluation of possible classroom applications.
   Table of Contents
   Introduction
   1. Hypertextual Ontologies
   2. Hypertext and the Question of Canonicity

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 22.02.2011 - 16:34

9. Ex-foliations: Reading Machines and the Upgrade Path

   In Ex-foliations, Terry Harpold investigates paradoxes of reading’s backward glances in the theory and literature of the digital field. In original analyses of Vannevar Bush’s Memex and Ted Nelson’s Xanadu, and in innovative readings of early hypertext fictions by Michael Joyce and Shelley Jackson, Harpold asserts that we should return to these landmarks of new media scholarship with newly focused attention on questions of media obsolescence, changing user interface designs, and the mutability of reading. In these reading machines, Harpold proposes, we may detect traits of an unreadable surface—the real limit of the machines’ operations and of the reader’s memories—on which text and image are projected in the late age of print. (Source: Publisher's website.)

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 24.02.2011 - 09:48

10. Intermediation: The Pursuit of a Vision

    Twenty-first century literature is computational, from electronic works to print books created as digital files and printed by digital presses. To create an appropriate theoretical framework, the concept of intermediation is proposed, in which recursive feedback loops join human and digital cognizers to create emergent complexity. To illustrate, Michael Joyce's afternoon is compared and contrasted with his later Web work, Twelve Blue. Whereas afternoon has an aesthetic and interface that recall print practices, Twelve Blue takes its inspiration from the fluid exchanges of the Web. Twelve Blue instantiates intermediation by creating coherence not through linear sequences but by recursively cycling between associated images. Intermediation is further explored through Maria Mencia's digital art work and Judd Morrissey's The Jew's Daughter and its successor piece, The Error Engine, by Morrissey, Lori Talley, and Lutz Hamel.

    (Source: Project MUSE abstract)

    Eric Dean Rasmussen - 11.03.2011 - 10:27

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