1. Instructor's Introduction
2. Student Opener: Jennifer Jones
3. A hypertext of materials that may be useful for class discussion

• Supplementary Resources for Class
• Other Works Mentioned in Class ( = especially recommended)
  • Some Theoretical Precursors
    • Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984)
    • Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974)
    • Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1987) [see esp. "rhizomes" and "maps"]
    • Fredric Jameson
      1. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1991) [see esp. "cognitive mapping"]
      2. The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press; London: British Film Institute, 1992) [see esp. "conspiracy"]
    • Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1966) [see esp. "bricolage"; but also see Lévi-Strauss's characteristic visual diagrams and schemas of "savage" classification systems]
  • Hypertext Theory
    • Scott Stebelman, "Hypertext and Hypermedia: A Select Bibliography"
    • VoS Resources on Hypertext Research and Theory (edited with help from Jennifer Jones)
  • Hypertext Literature
    • Eastgate Systems, Inc. (motto: "Serious Hypertext")

Excerpt from the presentation:

Interactivity: A Thought Experiment Allegories of Reading Freedom

        In English studies, we are enchanted and moved and inspired by language, by a structure like metaphor, for instance, which, unlike simile, does not want to admit figuration. With no ‘like' or ‘as' to signal its artifice, it works at relations of equivalence even as those relations are forged through abstract relations defined by difference. ‘Interactivity,' one of hypertext fiction's most powerful mythical offerings according to theoretical and critical discourses of hypertext fiction, is a metaphor which tries to approximate the relationship between reader and text, reader and writer, reader and computer, approaching always the sense of reader as writer, as computer. Raine Koskimaa illustrates the degree to which hypertext fiction is defined by the concept of ‘interactivity' even as he attempts to temper the actual degree to which it has delivered (rather than imagined delivering) a ‘new' degree of interactivity by using the term "interactive fiction" as a synonym for "hypertext fiction" throughout his article "Visual Structuring of Hypertext Fiction Narratives" (1997). Further, Koskimaa articulates the new, special degree of interactivity that hypertext fiction offers (as opposed to the interactivity offered by ‘traditional' linguistic-based texts) when he claims that "the future of interactive fiction is dominantly visual (and probably, based on virtual reality devices)." In other words, hypertext fiction delivers an interactivity that is defined by its visuality, which is to say, its externality. In this context, hypertext fiction is new because it transcends linguistic figuration, the realm of metaphor, and emerges as a literal manifestation of what we understand ‘interactivity' to mean. With Katie's presentation in mind from last week, in which we thought carefully about what it might mean and how it might look to ‘realize information,' this talk today is chiefly concerned with what is at stake and what it might mean to ‘realize metaphor.'

        Both Raine Koskimaa and Matt Kirchenbaum have proclaimed that we need to turn our attentions away from ‘vaporware' and toward what in this context can be understood as ‘realityware,' (soft/hardware in actual existence). I would argue, however, that this call to practical critique and away from what at least Kirchenbaum designates as the realm of science fiction and cyberpunk, alluding to the metaphorically-‘wared' world of Neuromancer, is a troubling dichotomy. Consider, for instance, the difficulty of defining Virtual Reality, a term which technically speaking undergirds all of the technologies falling under the rubric of the digital. There is no way to separate what we imagine this term to be, from what technicians and luminaries hope it could be, from what theorists like Zizek are afraid it might be, from what we hear it seems like in its overt manifestations at Disneyworld or in a VR studio. I would argue that critiques of hypertext fiction are inextricably bound up with vaporware images of what it might be or should be or could be or would be. With this in mind, I would point to the understanding of the shortcomings of hypertext interactivity proposed by the authors we have read for today's class. These critiques of existing structures are conditioned by phantom prophetic structures even in an essay like Koskimaa's, in which the goal is explicitly that of practical consideration. We need, I would argue, to trace our links, our allegorical imaginations, and this work is mapped out across a critical terrain whose non/fiction borders are irrelevant. The question of interactivity becomes a question of how we understand hypertext fiction as a structure, how we understand it to structure how we read, and how we understand both the practice and the desires at work in that process of reading the structure.

Question or challenge posed during the presentation:

What allegories do hypertext fictions serve us?
Is this, too, an allegory of emancipation?

What would a realized interactive hypertext look like?
Would we want such a thing?

Does interactivity, pushed to its logical extreme, cancel out the equation of alterity altogether and replace it with an other which is the copy of the self?

1. George P. Landow, Hypertext 2.0 (1997)
2. Raine Koskimaa, "Visual Structuring of Hyperfiction Narratives" (1997)
3. Steven Johnson, Interface Culture (1997)
4. John Tolva, "The Heresy of Hypertext: Fear and Anxiety in the Late Age of Print"
5. Stuart Moulthrop, The Shadow of an Informand: An Experiment in Hypertext Rhetoric
6. M.D. Coverley (Marjorie Luesbrink), Fibonacci's Daughter

Some Questions (With Links to Relevant Passages in the Readings)

How did you make your way around Fibonacci's Daughter? Did you try to proceed systematically, and if so how?

[Koskimaa G; Johnson 116; Moulthrop map; Coverley A]

Did you prefer to browse "randomly"?

[Koskimaa E; Tolva D; Coverley B, F]

Are you more, or differently, disoriented when reading hypertext as compared with an "ambiguous, paradoxical, or ironic" poem?

[Landow 116; Johnson 112, 119, 131-32, 135]

Which is the better frame of comparison in which to think about hypertext: lyric poem (the implicit New Critical paradigm) or narrative?

[Koskimaa B; Johnson 112 ]

Is the alternative understanding of hypertext as a "space" or "environment" helpful? Is spatial experience a postindustrial habit? How does it relate to the experiences of orality, writing, or print?

[Landow 124; Koskimaa G; Tolva D]

Which of the following terms, or combination of terms, best describes the kind of experience that hypertextual browsing offers: oral, textual, visual, spatial, narrative, interactive? Could there be a "rhetoric" of hypertext that integrates these dimensions of browsing experience in a single system?

Oral [Landow 123-24; Tolva B]
Textual [Landow 123-24; Tolva C]
Visual [Koskimaa I; Tolva D]
Spatial [Landow 124; Koskimaa G; Tolva A, D]
Narrative [Koskimaa B]
Interactive [Koskimaa A, K]
Systematicity [Landow 123]

Must hypertext "map" over reality?

[Landow 124-25, Koskimaa F; Coverley D, E, F] [Fibonacci Numbers and Nature]

What is the closest analog to a "link" in the textual world? In the oral?

[Landow 123-24; Johnson 110-11, 111, 112, 130]

How does gender figure in Fibonacci's Daughter?

[Coverley C; Luesbrink, The Progressive Dinner Party]

First, the concept of disorientation relates closely to the tendency to use spatial, geographical, and travel metaphors to describe the way users experience hypertext. . . . According to The American Heritage Dictionary, to disorient is "to cause to lose one's sense of direction or location, as by removing from a familiar environment," and Webster's Collegiate Dictionary offers three definitions of disorient: (1) "to cause to lose one's bearings: displace from normal position or relationship"; (2) "to cause to lose the sense of time, place, or identity"; and (3) "to confuse." (p. 116)

Readers of literature in fact often describe the experience here presented as disorientation as pleasurable, even exciting, and some forms of literature, particularly those that emphasize either allegory or stylistic and narrative experimentation, rely on disorienting the reader as a primary effect. (p. 117)

. . . what new forms of organization, rhetoric, and structure must we develop to communicate effectively in electronic space? In other words, if hypertext demands a new rhetoric and a new stylistics, off what do they consist, and how, if at all, do they relate to issues such as system speed and the like? (p. 123)

Whether or not it is true that the digital word produces a secondary or new kind of orality, many of the devices required by hypertext appear in oral speech, just as they do in its written versions or dialects. Many of these devices . . . announce a change of direction and often also provide some indication of what that new direction will be. For example, words and phrases like "in contrast," "nevertheless," and "on the other hand" give advance notice to listeners and readers that something, say an instance or assertion, is coming that is contrary to what has come before. "For example" announces a category shift as the discourse switches. . . . Causal or temporal terms, such as "because" or "after," similarly ready listeners for changes of intellectual direction. . . . Since hypertext and hypermedia are chiefly defined by the link, a writing device that offers potential changes of direction, the rhetoric and stylistics of this new information technology general involve such change—potential or actual change of place, relation, or direction. (pp. 123-24)

In both print and oral communication, they are means of preparing us for breaks in a linear stream of language. One must take care in using this term linear, since, as we have already seen when looking at hypertext narrative, all experiences of listening or reading in whatever medium are in an important sense linear, unidirectional. . . . It is the text that is multisequential not a particular reading path through it. (p. 124)

First, what must one do to orient readers and help them read efficiently and with pleasure? Second, how can one help readers retrace the steps in their reading path? Third, how can one inform those reading a document where the links in that document lead? Finally, how can one assist readers who have just entered a new document to feel at home there?
         Drawing upon the analogy of travel, we can say that the first problem concerns orientation information, necessary for finding one's place within a body of interlinked texts. The second concerns navigation information, necessary for making one's way through the materials. The third concerns exit or departure information and the fourth arrival or entrance information. In each case, creators of hypermedia materials must decide what readers need to know at either end of a hypermedia link in order to make use of what they find there. The general issue here is one of interpretation. More specifically, to enable visitors to this new kind of text to read it pleasurably, comfortably, and efficiently, how much interpretation must the designer-author attach to the system as a whole, to link pathways, and to documents at the end of links? (p. 124)

Unfortunately, no analogy maps reality with complete accuracy. Navigation, the art of controlling the course of a plane or ship, presupposes a spatial world, but one does not experience hypertext entirely as such. (pp. 124-25)

Hypermedia as a medium conveys the strong impression that its links signify coherent, purposeful, and above all useful relationships, from which it follows that the very existence of links conditions the reader to expect purposeful, important relationships between linked materials. (p. 125)

2. Raine Koskimaa, "Visual Structuring of Hyperfiction Narratives" (1997) (instructor's initial interrogations or comments in RED)

[A] First, a dismissal of hyperficton mythology. One of the main myths created by the confusion of hypertext with hyperficton is the exaggeration of the reader's interactivity. 'Interactivity' is usually interpreted as the possibility—which almost automatically turns to a responsibility—to take the 'role of the author,' for the reader to create his/her own story. Hypertext theoreticians make a distinction between the 'interactive' and 'proactive' reader, but in practice this distinction seems to be forgotten; existing hyperfictions largely maintain the distinct role of the author as the ultimate creator of the Text. The reader has to some extent the possibility of 'interacting' with the (making of the) story, but not of taking the role of a 'proactive author.' (Section I)

[B] It is also essential to highlight the nature of hyperfiction stories as narratives. (Section I)

[C] First, we must take a more specific look at the concept of 'interactive narration'. Narrative fiction in general can be described with a three-level model: 1) the Text describes how; 2) the narrator tells what; 3) the characters do/perceive (Tammi 1992). (Section II)

[D] To sum up, the reader's choices have effects on all three levels, story, plot, narration, but the concrete interaction occurs at the level of plot.
        Each lexia has a narrative voice, and actually, each lexia in isolation functions according to the general narratological models. . . . With hyperfiction narratives, the most prominent problem is identifying the narrator or focaliser in each lexia; closely linked to this is the problem of the temporal dimension. There are at least three temporal levels involved when reading fiction: story time, narration time, and reading time. (Section II)

[E] A reader of interactive hyperfiction mainly has control over the order of story events. There are different ways to establish this possibility, but usually the reader's primary decision is whether to follow the 'default' story line or chooses an alternative one. The intentionality of choice is usually heavily restricted, making the choosing seem quite random to the reader. This randomness is denied by the instructions to Victory Garden, which claim that "links are complex and subtle, but never random." From the viewpoint of the hyperfiction author this is obviously true, but for the reader it is not as obvious.  . . . For as long as the reader doesn't know the effects of his/her choices, the interaction seems random. (Section II)

[F] The use of a representational map is, of course, one way of making the interface 'fuse' with the represented fictional world (even though in this case it is quite a symbolic representation—it isn't anything like a geographical map of the places of action). (Section 4)

[G] The map as such, however, alters the nature of this narrative. [Stuart Moulthrop] himself has written extensively about the relation of story and map in interactive fiction, and I will quote him here at some length:

they [the students in a hyperfiction class] had given up hope that the metonymic flow of language in any given node would take them coherently to a conclusion. Instead they were plotting their own readings through a cartographic space, hoping to discover a design which . . . might prove to be buried or scattered in the text. The map, which represents the text as totality or metaphor, was not something to be reached through the devious paths of discursive metonymy, rather it was a primary conceptual framework, providing the essential categories of 'right', 'left', 'up' and 'down' by which these readers oriented themselves. Metaphor here was not identified with finality or revelation, but with the initial incitement to hypertextual reading, the sense of being precipitated into an unexplored space. (Moulthrop 1993, 128) (Section IV)

[H] . . . the reading of Victory Garden turns easily—at least after some time—into a process of spotting 'blank areas' on the map, that is, looking for those parts of the map which are not yet familiar to the reader. This can be seen as a mode of 'reading as plot' instead of the more traditional 'reading for the plot' (as described by Peter Brooks in Reading for the Plot, 1984), but as Moulthrop himself has noted, the ultimate goal still is to 'fill in' the underlying story (Moulthrop 1994, 128). (Section IV)

[I] There is no inherent reason for not using visual devices in hyperfiction narratives, and in fact I am inclined to claim that most interactive fiction IS dominantly visual—the most developed adventure games being nothing but interactive fiction. I am quite willing to state that the future of interactive fiction is dominantly visual (and probably, based on virtual reality devices). The role of writing is, though, quite different in that kind of fiction; in fact it is more convenient to approach it from the theory of film. (Section VI)

[J] . . . the presence or absence of visual means have an impact on the overall aesthetics of the Texts, so that the (virtual) absence of visual effects in Afternoon makes it appear episodic and epistemologically unstable, the use of a representational map in Victory Garden restores the coherence of the Text and makes it possible for the reader to relate to it in the same way as to realistic narratives, and in Patchwork Girl, the use of the conceptual map as an alternative site of signification lends it a postmodernist feel. (Section VI)

[K] I think that to make the reader more interactive, a real bricoleur, requires that the reader be provided with more information about underlying structure. (Section VI)

The link is the first significant new form of punctuation to emerge in centuries, but it is only a hint of things to come. Hypertext, in fact, suggests a whole new grammar of possibilities, a new way of writing and telling stories. But to make that new frontier accessible, we need more than one type of link. (pp. 110-11)

In the terminology of linguistics, the link plays a conjunctive role, binding together disparate ideas in digital prose. . . . [T]the link should usually be understood as a synthetic device, a tool that brings multifarious elements together into some kind of orderly unit. In this respect, the most compelling cultural analogy for the hypertext webs of today's interfaces turns out to be not the splintered universe of channel surfing, but rather the damp, fog-shrouded streets of Victorian London, and the mysterious resemblances of Charles Dickens. (p. 111)

"Links of association" was actually a favorite phrase of Dickens. It plays a major role in the narrative of Great Expectations—arguably his most intricately plotted work, and the most widely read of his "mature" novels. For Dickens, the link usually takes the form of a passing resemblance, half-glimpsed and then forgotten. Throughout his oeuvre, characters stumble across the faces of strangers and perceive some stray likeness, something felt but impossible to place. These moments are scattered through the novels like hauntings, like half-memories, and it's this ethereal quality that brings them very close to the subjective haze of modernism and the stream of consciousness. Consider Pip's ruminations on his mysterious playmate and love interest Estella: "What was it that was borne in upon my mind when she stood still and looked attentively at me? . . . What was it? . . . As my eyes followed her white hand, again the same dim suggestion that I could not possibly grasp, crossed me. My involuntary start occasioned her to lay her hand upon my arm. Instantly the ghost passed once more and was gone. What was it?"
         These partial epiphanies are more than just stylistic ornamentation—they serve as the driving force behind the suspense of Dickens's novels. Resolving the half-resemblance, connecting the links, putting a name to the face—these actions invariably give the novel its sense of an ending. They stand for the restoration of a certain orderliness in the face of tremendous disorder. (This is one way in which they mirror the "synthetic" connections of today's hypertext prose.) The "associative links" of the half-glimpsed resemblance are so central to Dickens because they unite his two major thematic obsessions: orphans and inheritances. (p. 112)

Where Dickens's narrative links stitched together the torn fabric of industrial society, today's hypertext links attempt the same with information. The imaginative crisis that faces us today is the crisis that comes from having too much information at our fingertips, the near impossible task of contemplating a colossal web of interconnected computers. The modern interface is a kind of corrective to this multiplying energy, an attempt to subdue all that teeming complexity, make it cohere. And on the World Wide Web, where this imaginative crisis is most sorely felt, it is the link that finally supplies that sense of coherence, like the families reunited at the close of Bleak House, or Hard Times, or Great Expectations. Today's orphans and itinerants are the isolated packets of data strewn across the infosphere. The question is whether it will take another Dickens to bring them all back home again. (p. 116)

The Memex wouldn't see the world as a librarian does, as an endless series of items to be filed away on the proper shelf. It would see the world the way a poet does: a world teeming with associations, minglings, continuities. And the trails would keep that radiant universe bound together. (p. 119)

As it turns out, the most interesting advances have taken place on the micro level of syntax, rather than the macro level of storytelling. [ . . .] Hypertext links were supposed to be a storytelling device, but their most intriguing use has proved to be more syntactical, closer to the way we use adjectives and adverbs in our written language. The link was going to engender a whole new way of telling stories. It turned out to be an element of style. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the ironydrenched column of Suck. (p. 130)

Certain sentences [in Suck] had a kind of elusive, shimmering quality to them, as if you were seeing them at a great distance. You sensed that a tangible meaning lurked in the mix—if only you had the time to disentangle all the subsidiary clauses, parse out all the throwaway references. [ . . .] Like the passing resemblances of Great Expectations, the links triggered that sense of mystery, the sense of a code half-deciphered. (pp. 131-32)

Suck's great rhetorical sleight of hand was this: whereas every other Web site conceived hypertext as a way of augmenting the reading experience, Suck saw it as an opportunity to withhold information, to keep the reader at bay. (p. 132)

Instead, they [Suck] used links like modifiers, like punctuation—something hardwired into the sentence itself. (p. 133)

When you added it all up,the "meaning" of the sentence [in Suck] was a good deal more complicated than the original formulation. (p. 135)

[A] Rather than confronting the community of happy hypertextualists and media theorists, I propose to answer this question by exploring some fears and anxieties generated by the interaction of the print-based world and its emerging digital counterpart. As I see it, three specific sources of tension require investigation: First, the Platonic heritage of mistrust in the written word--specifically, the fear that unmediated language loses its communicative function, becoming merely a receptacle of information; Second, the elusive ontic status of digital text, the search for the digital word-as-thing—specifically the anxiety generated by its disconcerting lack of physical presence; Third and finally, the blurry distinction between the verbal and non-verbal elements of electronic textuality—specifically, hypertext's technical emulation of simultaneity and spatiality, characteristics usually associated with the visual arts. Common to these three points is the sense that traditional or formal boundaries are deteriorating: between author and work, signified and signifier, visual and verbal, and so on.

[B]         Further on, [Plato in the Phaedrus] remarks, "Your pupils will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part ignorant." This notion of writing's inadequacy as a replacement of or supplement for oral discourse has never vanished from the historical radar screen, becoming a rather large blip since Saussure, but the striking point is the resemblance of Plato's position to modern-day criticism of electronic textuality. Writing and print, Walter Ong tells us, are both ways of technologizing the word, methods of structuring cognition. As such, the king's objections to writing easily apply to electronic text, a very literal technologizing of the word. Hypertext databases, for example George Landow's In Memoriam web, have been attacked for dumping loads of seemingly unsystematized information into an unwary student's lap. "Total information," philosopher Michael Heim writes, "is the illusion of knowledge, and hypertext favors this illusion by letting the user hop around at the speed of thought." In another echo of Plato's argument, Myron Tuman notes his concern that "the ascendancy of hypertext [will] . . . push literacy in the direction of information management."
        The fear is not that text-based computing will keep students from "exercising their memory" but rather that their powers of creative association and assimilation will atrophy as they navigate around an amorphous, virtual "docuverse" via predetermined hypertext pathways. In both ancient and modern cases, though, the central fear is that what is essentially a means of storage will not organize thought but stifle, disperse, or worst of all, control it.

[C] Ong calls this kind of collective environment in the Renaissance "participatory poetics." Indeed, the circulation dynamic of texts published on the Internet resembles the medieval and Renaissance practice of glossing, parodying, or otherwise altering a manuscript before passing it along. Slowly, though, the fixity and ubiquity of print have eradicated such practices, all but banishing the notion of a collaborative, "textually permeable" work. Now, the cult of the author and the printing press are inextricably linked; you can't have one without the other. Digital text, however, requires neither. As a consequence, and much to the chagrin of political critics, no economic model has yet been devised to explain its production and propagation in a capitalist society.

[D] Hypertext, specifically hypermedia, in which visual elements (even full-motion video) are woven into the fabric of the text like a modern-day illuminated manuscript, allows visual manipulation of text blocks (called lexias) and graphical depiction of structural features. In addition to this literal spatialization of the word, hypertext also approaches the condition of visuality in experiential ways. William Dickey, in an essay called "Poem Descending a Staircase," notes how the narrative element of chance in hypertext poetry and fiction emulates the visual arts' "rejection of linear causative organizations." The reader may "enter" a hypertext narrative just about anywhere, much like the viewer approaching a painting or sculpture. In such a hypertext environment, the reading process, like the gazing eye, jumps around associatively, moving not according to the work's formal structure but according to its content. Jay David Bolter refers to electronic writing as "topographic," "both a verbal and a visual description." By this he means "not the writing of a place, but rather a writing with places, spatially realized topics."

An Experiment in Hypertext Rhetoric

Prospecting ("Rhetoricians have mainly tried to integrate hypertext with existing media and forms . . .")

Going Native ("I'm interested in another kind of hypertext, one that denies the priority of print structures. . . .")

Hypertext and Informand ("The informand is not itself an object but rather a socially distributed, virtual text comprising an unspecifiably dense network of propositions and links. . . .")

Statement of Intent ("What I'm mainly trying to do here is mix it up -- i.e. use the hypertextual medium to assemble a wide range of ideas and discourses to be held, if not in suspension, then at least in a kind of dynamic (dis)equilibrium . . . ")

Lexia and Dialectics ("All hypertexts retain some degree of absolute sequence, some minimal dimension or granularity . . .")

Map

Perfunctory Closure | Invitation? | Actual Closure (no "more")

Woe ("Introduction to the Printed Version")

[A] A Choice of Ordering Schemes:

• The Map | The Blackboard | The Contents | The Numbers | Random Quotes
• The Book | The Place | The People | Headline News | Yours Truly
• The Golden Square | [Fibonacci Numbers and Nature]

[Cf., Eastgate Systems, Inc., "Web Squirrel" software]

[B] "Every Choice is a Gamble" [*]

[C] He left my mother behind, pregnant, in a small apartment in New Jersey. She went back home to my grandparents', took the veil of guilt, raised me while she waited tables in a Howard Johnson's Restaurant, and calculated her odds on finding a rich husband (slim-to-none). A perfectly-plotted spiral. [*]

[D] If, indeed, the Fibonacci numbers represent facts of nature, then they form a code we see only in flashes—strange recurrences in the patterns of our lives and in the stories we report. [*]

[E] He insisted that all events are controlled by the numerical sequences--it is only an illusion of fragile humanity that events have causes or consequences that we control. [*]

[F] Our lives are not seashells. There is no such thing as symmetry on the plane of human understanding; there are only accidents that coincide in time. [*]