Part One: Pasts, Presents, Futures
The Archival Text
The first part of the course will begin with a brief overview of the thought and history that informs hypertext, focusing in particular on how it is modeled on the archive and oral forms of storytelling.
Hyperlinked fiction, unlike the larger network of the web, draws its narrative inspiration from the print-based novel; its structure, however, is derived from that digital archival model, the database, and its design from visual thinking.
As a hybrid form, the archival text is a new genre in a new medium for fiction (since genre is a way of categorizing various literary structures) that allows the reader to leap from one spatio-temporal coordinate to another. It is dynamic, although not necessarily interactive, embodying movement as a part of the reading experience.
In hypertext, the story always lives as much in the gaps -- in the pause between the heartbeat of the links -- as on the screen. Students will explore three texts which talk back to the book and one which addresses orality in literature.