Some
Reference Points for Discussion
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Preliminary Class Business
- Project workshop next Thursday. Students should be prepared
to break into teams.
- "scribe" login for locked files on class site
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Barthes, Borges, and Bush
George Landow, Hypertext 2.0, p. 56:
"In contrast to adapting texts whose printed versions
already divide into sections analogous to lexias, one may,
in the manner of Barthes's treatment of Sarrasine in S/Z,
impose one's own divisions upon a work. Obvious examples of
possible projects of this sort include hypertext versions
of either "Sarrasine" alone or of it and Barthes's
S/Z. Stuart Moulthrop's version of Forking
Paths: An Interaction after Jorge Luis Borges (1987)
adapts Borges's potential for variation. . . ." |
Stuart Moulthrop, from one of his home pages:
"Dear Colleague:
Thanks for
inquiring about the hypertext called "forking paths,"
which you may have read about in works by George Landow, J.
Yellowlees Douglas, and others. You may have asked for access
to this project. With regret, I will not honor any such request.
The "forking
paths" hypertext contains much of the text of Jorge Luis
Borges' short story, "The Garden of Forking Paths."
I don't believe it should be published or otherwise circulated
without permission of the copyright holders. Since the hypertext
was a limited experiment that long since served its purpose,
I have not sought permission. I no longer use or circulate
this text.
Please consider
as a possible substitute for "forking paths" my
hypertext fiction Victory
Garden, which is available from Eastgate Systems. Victory
Garden is an original work based partly on the structure of
'The Garden of Forking Paths.' " |
| George Landow, Hypertext 2.0, p. 7:
"Writers on hypertext trace the concept to a pioneering
article by Vannevar Bush in a 1945 issue of Atlantic
Monthly that called for mechanically linked information-retrieval
machines to help scholars and decision makers faced with
what was already becoming an explosion of information."
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Ted Nelson, Literary Machines 90.1, pp. 1/39-1/54:
[Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think" reprinted
in its entirety]
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A Rough Timeline of the Origin of Hypertext Literature
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Some Interwoven Threads in Bush and Borges
| Bush: The Memex:
–a desktop computer (section
6)
–a hypertext system (section
7)
Borges:
–Ireneo Funes (a "desktop computer") (pp.
63, 65, 66)
–The Garden of Forking Paths (a hypertext) (pp. 21,
26, 26, 28, 27, 28)
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The War
- European Theater
- German offensive in the West begins with blitzkreig
through Netherlands and Belgium into France, May 10
1940
- VE Day: May 8, 1945
- Japanese Theater
- Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941
- Hiroshima, August 6, 1945
- Nagasaki, August 9, 1945
- Japan surrenders, Sept. 2, 1945
Bush, who was Director of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research
during WW II, publishes his "As We May Think" in
The Atlantic Monthly in July 1945. Borges, in Argentinia,
publishes his "Garden of the Forking Paths" in a
collection of his stories of that title in 1941. |
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References
- J. Yellowlees Douglas, The End of Books–Or
Books without End?: Reading Interactive Narratives (Ann
Arbor, MI: U. Michigan Press, 2000)
- Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History
of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard
(New York: Vintage, 1965) [orig. pub. in French in 1961 as Histoire
de la Folie)
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology
of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973) [orig. pub.
in French in 1966 as Les Mots et les choses]
- Ned May, Verbal
Fractal Based on Borges' "The Garden of Forking Paths"
(1997)
- Stuart Moulthrop, "A
Subjective Chronology of Literary Hypertext"
- Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon (New York: Avon,
1999)
Supplementary
links for this class on Study Materials page
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1970 