Search

The search found 8 results in 0.904 seconds.

Search results

1. Hypertext Revisited: The Issue of Non-Sequentiality in Print and Digital Literature

   In this keynote, Baetens argues that the difference between print and digital literature is shrinking, because print literature has embraced the digital revolution. He proceeds to compare installment narrative to hypertext literature, looking at five aspects, where he finds that hypertext literature fails in relation to installment narrative. 

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 09.12.2011 - 10:14

2. When Digital Literature goes Multimedia: Three German Examples

   In February 2000 Robert Coover noticed the "constant threat of hypermedia: to suck the substance out of a work of lettered art, reduce it to surface spectacle". Coover's message seems to be: When literature goes multimedia, when hypertext turns into hypermedia a shift takes place from serious aesthetics to superficial entertainment. What Coover points out is indeed a problem of hypermedia. If the risk of hyperfiction is to link without meaning, the risk of hypermedia is to employ effects that only flex the technical muscles. Can there be substance behind spectacle? In this paper I discuss three examples of German digital literature which combine the attraction of technical aesthetics with the attraction of deeper meaning.

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 09.10.2012 - 22:12

3. Cinematic Paradigms for Hypertext

   This paper combines film and hypertext theory to try and 'prise open' some hypertextual questions that have been poorly framed. It will use incorporate short film examples. It is also hoped that along the way it might provide a useful way for thinking about how, or why, cinematic theory (of one sort or another) is becoming increasingly relevant in hypertext theory.

   The recent history of hypertext and the image has produced a geneology that seems to have orientated itself around one of three major axes:

   • poststructural literary theories
   • post-ditigal celebrations of hypermedia 'promiscuity'
   • post-digital appropriations of cinema into hypertext

    

   The first category is what could be characterised as 'canonical' hypertext theory, and is represented by the early work of people like Jay David Bolter, Michael Joyce, George Landow and Richard Lanham. This work implicitly locates hypertext within existing literary traditions and relies upon the insights, and appropriation of, various softened forms of poststructural philosophy (Derrida, Deleuze, de Man, Iser, et al).

   Scott Rettberg - 19.01.2013 - 17:33

4. Omission impossible: the ergodics of time

   1. Precautions

   This paper concentrates on temporal aspects of ergodic narratives. In that respect it runs counter to the still strong spatial emphasis in hypertext theory. Sadly, this emphasis often goes hand in hand with complete ignorance of narratology and with favoring the narrative models and ideals of 19th century mainstream fiction as is the case for instance with Janet H Murray´s recent book Hamlet on the Holodeck, the past of narrative in cyberspace. In order to avoid such unimaginative mistakes certain precautions had to be made.

   Scott Rettberg - 19.01.2013 - 17:39

5. New Plots for Hypertext?: Towards a Poetics of the Hypertext Node

   While the significance of hypertext links for the new ways of telling stories has been widely discussed, there has been not many debates about the very elements that are being connected: hypertext nodes. Apart from few exceptions, poetics of the link overshadows poetics of the node. My goal is to re-focus on a single node, or lexia, by introducing the concept of contextual regulation as the major force that shapes hypertext narrative units. Because many lexias must be capable of occurring in different contexts and at different stages of the unfolding story, several compromises have to be made on the level of language, style, plot and discourse. Each node, depending on its position and importance, has a varying level of connectivity and autonomy, which affects the global coherence of text.

   Scott Rettberg - 26.05.2013 - 14:25

6. Tierra de Extracción: How Hypermedia Novels could enhance Literary Assessment

   Howard Gardner's theory of Multiple Intelligences suggests that there are at least eight different types of intelligence. Due to genetic variation and personal experiences, no two people have the same combination of intelligences. These do not only signal the way we interpret and cope with the world around us but the way we react to it. It is no coincidence that Reader Oriented Theories focus on the role of the reader in processing and interpreting text and not solely on textual perception. As readers and students of literature, the act of interpreting is key to understanding; but limited by outdated methodologies of assessment the opportunity to demonstrate what has been learned is practically bound to their linguistic intelligence. With the change of medium, from paper to screen, literature has undergone a kind of art and media hybridization that far from being something new and original recovers and allows the coexistence of multiple means of storytelling that extend the concept of reading, understanding and expression.

   Scott Rettberg - 04.10.2013 - 11:02

7. Beyond Binaries: Continuity and Change in Literary Experimentation in Response to Print and Digital Technologies.

   While many critics have compared the current digital age in communications media with the print revolution that began in the 15th century, these discussions have focused primarily on the differences, as opposed to the similarities between the two moments in history (Bolter, Landow, Hayles). As an author and critic involved in exploring new approaches to digital fiction, I, too, am keenly aware of the distinct differences between the age of print and the current digital age. Nevertheless, I have also been struck by many similar concerns in the specific types of literary experimentation taking place in response to new authoring and publishing technologies today with those undertaken in the past in response to print technology. In this paper, I consider specific instances of experimentation that arose in response to print technology in works of fiction published in the eighteenth century (Richardson, Pope, Sterne) with literary experimentation in response to digital technologies (Moulthrop, Montfort/Strickland, Rodgers).

   Rebecca Lundal - 04.10.2013 - 11:30

8. Unheard Music: Twine and Its Priority

   When he created Twine, Kris Klimas apparently did not think he was building a hypertext platform, rather an intervention into the broader, perhaps distinct tradition of interactive fiction. By 2009 the hypertext moment may have completely passed, leaving Twine within a different dispensation. Reinforcing this impression, some prominent Twine users have disclaimed any links between their work and that of earlier digital writers, notably the Storyspace contingent, decrying their elders’ commercial publishing model and noting that pay barriers have made turn-of-the-century work inaccessible to them. In thinking about how Twine fits into software culture, we thus face a continuity gap. In technical and (perhaps more arguably) aesthetic dimensions, Twine inherits from and extends the hypertextual experiment; yet there are no formal or institutional connections. Twine works may be in some respects a second coming of hypertext fiction (and many other things as well), but without awareness of prior art.

   Amirah Mahomed - 05.09.2018 - 15:38