Week 6 – Readings

This week we are once again met by George Landow’s ideas on hypertext and Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Glabalization.

He opens this chapter by reminding us that the digital world and image, even on the World Wide Web, does not inevitably produce hypertextual narrative.

Even in its early stages hypertext has been used in many forms. Landow seperates these arrangements in terms of number of axes, including those formed by degrees or ratios of (1) reader choice, intervention, and empowerment, (2) inclusion of extra-linguistic texts such as images, motion and sound, (3) complexity of network structure, and (4) degrees of multiplicity and variation in literary elements, such as plot, characterization, setting etc.

I really like the idea of reader intervention in hypertext fiction as explained through Tom McHarg’s The Late-Nite Maneuvers of the Ultramundane. His text does not rely on linearity, causality and probable characterization, the staples of traditional print narrative. He is able to make this piece work by taking advantage of the linking capacity of hypertext. Readers choose the way the narrative will unfold from a number of plot turns depending on the pathways they follow. Flashback: This concept reminded me of the Goosebumps chapter books my classmates and I read in primary school in which the page you skipped to determined the direction of the story.

By its very nature, hypertext challenges narrative structure and literary form by calling into question ideas of plot and story. To quote Aristotle, “a well constructed Plot, therefore, cannot either begin or end at any point one likes.” Specifically, according to Landow, hypertext challenges fixed sentence, definite beginning and ending, a story’s “certain definite magnitude”, and the conception of unity or wholeness.