An excerpt from _Postmodern American Fiction_ (1998):
"For many observers... the advent of electronic textual forms represents a potentially historic transformation of literature, one where the reader's self-guided tour through a series of linked and interrelated 'lexias' (or blocks of text) departs sharply from the model of a single, linear narrative compelled by the printed page. Michael Joyce's _afternoon, a story_ (1990) has been celebrated both for the gracefulness of its prose and for its realization of the possibilities of hypertext narrative. Using the inter-connected and random properties of the hypertext reading experience to simulate the tangles of memory, _afternoon_ explores the consciousness of a writer named Peter, who is drawn into premonitions of loss and tragedy that - depending upon the paths through the text the reader chooses - lead toward different and often ambiguous outcomes."
If you're interested in hypertext narratives, check out
http://www.wwnorton.com/pmaf/welcome.htm
These examples may be (and probably are) dated, coming out of the early 1990s. Can anyone point us to more recent development in electronic literature?
J
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1 comment:
This is one example of a structured non-linear narrative. It isn't really hypertext, but it is designed to be read in 180 fragments of arbitrary (dis)order.
Hal Duncan's Vellum is a non-linear text novel. If you put each bit onto a different webpage and then indexed them by wordpress or something, you'd have a hypertext novel.
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