= one of the main points of the lecture |
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Some
Reference Points for Discussion
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Preliminary Class Business
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The Aesthetic Impact of Hypertext
- Definition
of "hypertext"
- Early hypertext development and
theory
- Hypertext on the personal computer (standalone hypertext
environments)
- Hypertext on the Internet
- From FTP and Gopher to Tim Berners-Lee's WWW, 1991
- The Mosaic browser from the National Center for
Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), 1993
- Netscape Navigator browser, 1994
- Hypertext Literature
- Some early influential works:
- Michael Joyce, afternoon, a story (Watertown,
MA: Eastgate Systems, 1986) (purchase
from Eastgate)
- Stuart Moulthrop, Victory Garden
- Shelley Jackson, Patchwork Girl (Watertown,
MA: Eastgate Systems, 1996) (Eastgate)
- Mark Amerika, Grammatron
- Migration of hypertext writers to the Web
- Experimentation with Flash and other graphical means of
presenting hypertext online
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Questions Commonly Asked of a Work of Hypertext
Literature (A Handlist)
|
Question |
Type of Question |
| 1 |
How does it work? |
Technology/Rhetoric
(on rhetoric of hypertext, see Espen
Aarseth, pp. 90-92, and Gunnar Liestal, pp. 98 ff.) |
| 2 |
What kind of work is it? Like what other
works?
(cf., Espen Aarseth,
p. 71) |
Genre/Form/Media |
| 3 |
How do we know where to go? How do we know
where we are? Where have we been? |
Navigation/Structure |
| 4 |
Why keep going (from lexia to lexia)? |
Motive |
| 5 |
How do we know we have reached the end? |
Navigation/Structure + Motive |
| 6 |
What do we get out of it (the work as a
whole)? |
Value |
| 7 |
Is it literature? |
?
|
| 8 |
Is it good literature? |
Aesthetic value |
| 9 |
How can we bookmark, quote, or excerpt it?
How can we talk about it? How can we talk about it together?
(return to question #1) |
Critical/Pedagogical |
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= questions commonly posed bythe
theory and criticism of hypertext literature; roughly corresponds
to the domain of traditional poetics and narratology |
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 Califia
and the Ethos of Networking
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Kaye: "hidden links that elude the mind but enlighten
the fancy"
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Kaye: "restore the connections, find the harmony
beneath the fragments of song"
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Augusta: "I am beginning to see the way Kaye links
everything together"
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Calvin: "I am arranging and linking the contributions
of Augusta and Kaye"
-
Kaye: "The message in the embroidery can be recovered
only in the fragments"
Marjorie Luesebrink's hypertext novel Califia is about
California. It is about what California means, what California
itself is "about."
What is California about?
The most contemporary (but also partial) answer that the novel
gives to this question has to do precisely with the age of information
networking. As shown by the work's self-reflexive awareness of
the hypertext medium and of computing in general . . .
for example,
—Calvin's deft computer work 
—Kaye Beveridge's transcendental instinct for "linking"
—and the general "windowed"
hypertextual interface of the work
|
. . . California in Califia is in some
sense "about" Silicon Valley. It is about personal computing
and networking as the latest "gold rush" of the golden
state.
Cf., Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron's critique of "The
Californian Ideology" (1996:
"At the end of the twentieth century, the long predicted
convergence of the media, computing and telecommunications
into hypermedia is finally happening. . . .
At this crucial juncture, a loose alliance of writers, hackers,
capitalists and artists from the West Coast of the USA have
succeeded in defining a heterogeneous orthodoxy for the coming
information age: the Californian Ideology." |
In short, Califia, is an allegory of California as the
epicenter of the age of networked information.
Yet precisely because this is the most contemporary of the answers
the novel gives about what California is "about," it
is also the most superficial. For, in a spirit very much aligned
with that of this course itself, Califia also tells us
that to understand our contemporary gold rush we need to dig under
the surface into deeper historical layers. The "silicon rush"
that all the Seekers and Builders of present-day California are
after was not the first such "rush" upon which the new
world of California was built.
Marjorie Luesebrink, from "Historical
Background of Califia" (2001):
Embedding the modern story in real ground was important; the
search for historical certainty is best done by "mapping"
in a literal as well as a metaphorical sense. As Philip J.
Ethington writes, Los Angeles suffers from "unknowability":
"Influential writers on postmodernity such as Fredric
Jameson have named specific sites within Los Angeles as evidence
of a new condition, in which history itself is effaced by
the 'depthlessness' that characterizes a core condition of
the 'world space of multinational capital'–the ultimate
source of ongoing exploitation and alienation. Recent scholarship
has singled out Los Angeles as either unique among cities,
or especially representative of new conditions of urban life
and globalism." ("Los Angeles and the Problem of
Urban Historical Knowledge.")
Califia, with its careful
mapping of places, excavation of the sediments of forgotten
layers and observation of remembered outcroppings, records
of the topographical and topological features, is a defense
against such erasure. The "depthlessness" that
has been noted by some historians and cultural theorists
is one aspect of Southern California. But the impression
of shallowness is also the result of looking with a traditional
orientation for hierarchies of meaning in a place that is
constantly shifting, creating a new surface. There is something
underneath, but the history of Los Angeles tends to reveal
itself through a multiplicity of approaches. And, as Augusta
observes (The Journey West), "the past is always
with us."
|
Imagine, therefore, that what we see on the
surface
of California in Califia is just the top if a deep set
of geological
layers (animation).
The story of Califia—narrated in different ways by the three
main characters (Augusta, Kaye, Calvin)—is a pilgrimage plot
in which horizontal motion
,
as in any pilgrimage, stands in for a vertical quest. In olden
pilgrimages, the quest was for transcendence on high. In Califia,
the quest is to mine deep below the surface of California for
the real treasure: historical meaning.
What are the layers of meaning through which the characters mine
as they follow their pilgrimage across southern California?
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Layer 1: Califia is about the history
of building of California (LA)
It is appropriate to use the word "pilgrimage" in regard
to the Califia because, put one way the novel is about
the vision-quest, the dream-quest that built California and Los
Angeles—or "Paradise":
- California, according to the novel, arose as an act of imagination
- California was the dream of the Seekers ,
Players ,
and Builders
- California is the land of gold, water, energy, media—and,
most recently—silicon, all empires built half on reality
and half on dream (i.e., the crazy mix of illusion and desire
and addiction that was the Spanish and American grab for land,
the gold rush, the oil rush, the water wars, the newspaper and
Hollywood empires, etc.)
Compare such other works about the building of California as Upton
Sinclair's Oil! (1927), John Steinbeck's The Grapes of
Wrath (1939), and Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974).
Or compare Sergio Leone's film about the building of the West: Once
Upon a Time in the West (1968). |
| (continued
in next lecture) |
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References
- Martin Campbell-Kelly and William
Aspray, Computer: A History of the Information
Machine (New York: BasicBooks / HarperCollins, 1996)
- Paul E. Ceruzzi, A History
of Modern Computing (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1998)
- Herman H. Goldstine, The Computer
from Pascal to von Neumann (Princeton: Princeton Univ.
Press, 1993)
- Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon,
Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996)
- Ken Polsson, Chronology
of Events in the History of Microcomputers
- Robert H'obbes' Zakon, Hobbes
Internet Timeline 4.2
- Stephen Segaller, Nerds 2.0.1:
A Brief History of the Internet (New York: TV Books,
1998)
|
Some Influential, Early Primary Works:
- Michael Joyce,
afternoon, a story (Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems,
1986) (purchase
from Eastgate)
- Stuart Moulthrop, Victory Garden
- Shelley Jackson, Patchwork
Girl (Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems, 1996) (Eastgate)
- Mark Amerika, Grammatron
|
Some Notable Recent Primary Works:
- Carolyn Guertin and Marjorie Coverley
Luesebrink, The
Progressive Dinner Party (2000) ("tour of
the works of women who write hypertext and hypermedia
literature on the WWW")
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| Home Pages of Some Leading Hypertext Authors/Critics:
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| Selected Publishers and Journals for Hypertext Literature:
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| Hypertext Literature Organizations, Programs, Events:
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Secondary Resources (Bibliographies, Theory, Criticism):
- Indexes, Bibliographies, Chronologies
- Formative
Early Theory and Criticism
- Vannevar Bush, "As
We May Think," Atlantic Monthly, July
1945
- Ted Nelson, Literary
Machines (1981) (online excerpts published
by Feed) | "Ted
Nelson and Xanadu" (Electronic Labyrinth)
- George P. Landow, Hypertext
2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory
and Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ.
Press, 1997) [first version of this book published
1992] For online excerpts, see: Hypertext:
The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and
Technology (chap. 1) &
"Hypertext: An Overview"
- Jerome McGann,
"The
Rationale of Hypertext"
- Stuart Moulthrop,"You
Say You Want a Revolution: Hypertext and the Laws
of Media," Postmodern Culture 1 (May 1991)
- Selected Later Theory and Criticism
- Espen J.
Aarseth, Cybertext:
Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Johns Hopkins
UP, 1997)
- J. Yellowlees Douglas, The
End of Books–Or Books without End?: Reading Interactive
Narratives (Ann Arbor, MI: U. Michigan Press,
2000)
- Michael Joyce,
Othermindedness: The Emergence of Network Culture
(Ann Arbor, MI: U. of Michigan Press, 2000)
- George P. Landow, Hyper/Text/Theory
(Johns Hopkins UP, 1994)
- Janet H. Murray,
Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative
in Cyberspace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997)
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| M. D. Coverly (Marjorie Luesebrink)
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Other Works
Supplementary
links for this class on Study Materials page
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