Some
Reference Points for Discussion
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Preliminary Class Business
- Attendance and enrollment
- Course site:
| http://transcriptions.english.ucsb.edu/courses/liu/english165HL/ |
- Students may obtain access stickers for the computer labs
at Instructional Computing in Phelps Hall. Stickers will be
available from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on April 5th-6th in the Phelps
courtyard. Bring proof of class enrollment (e.g., the syllabus
or a Registrar's schedule confirmation)
- How many in the course are Mac users? (Michael Joyce's Afternoon,
A Story has to be ordered by the Bookstore either for the
PC or Mac platforms)
- Problems with buying works or the reader?
- Other questions about the course that have arisen?
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Ed Falco's Self-Portrait
as Child with Father (1999)
Some Formal Issues
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Navigation
Ever onward, or hub-and-spoke? [selfportrait.html]
Does one return and reread previously read lexia?
Does one's pattern of reading the work evolve or change?
What is the effect of chance on the reading experience?
What is the relation between the way the work asks us to
navigate it and what the work has to say about the nature
of memory?
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Closure
How is a sense of closure achieved by the reader?
- closure = completion (hitting all the "lexia"
or reading units)?
- closure = mapping (systematic sense of the whole)?
- closure = ?
Or is closure needed at all?
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Point-of-View
Who is speaking in children.html
or beggar.html
or quiet.html?
Why is this work a "self-portrait" of the child
and not a "portrait" of the father? [child.html]
Is this a good analogy in the terms of the story: We as
readers are to the author as Falco's narrator (the son)
is to his father?
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Relation of Overall Hypertext Form to Sentence
Form
How does the hypertext medium influence the language of
the work, and vice versa? [trouble.html]
[lungs.html]
What is the effect of the language of the navigation links
at the bottom of each page? What is the relation of that
language to the "story" proper?
Falco on fiction and poetry [from interview]:
| "I find hypertext to be closer to poetry. Since
hypertext allows the reader to determine the sequence
of words, traditional notions of narrative are impossible;
as is any conventional sense of closure. Hypertext is
interactive. In a very real sense, readers become writers,
because they determine the structure of the reading
experience: they decide where to start, what sequence
of words to follow, and where to stop. Really, this
is unlike any kind of traditional poetry or fiction,
but it is closer to poetry in that the reader has greater
responsibility for constructing the completed work and
construing its meaning. A story with a beginning, a
middle, and an end, is, on the surface at least, a simpler
thing—and something hypertext can never be." |
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Some Thematic
Issues
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