The Dickens Web comprises "a collection of electronically linked texts and images concerning Dickens's Great Expectations and Victorian England." It contains sections on:-

• Dickens's biography
• Victorian Religion, Philosophy, Science, and Technology
• Literary precursors of, and techniques employed in Great Expectations
• Assignment questions for students

This relatively early hypertext was written collaboratively by Landow and undergraduates and postgraduates at Brown University and is described as a "snapshot of work-in-progress" which invites the reader to continue adding to its contents. It is perhaps more interesting for its demonstration of the collaborative and pedagogical possibilities of hypertext than as a resource for the Dickens scholar.

--Robert Adlington

Lust is a poetically and prosaically mingled tale that is both disturbing and quietly tender in its (re)combined sequences, or fragments, of connection, creation, and loss between lovers and among a man, woman, and child. Images of violent penetration ("She runs the blade against the surface of her skin ... there is blood") are tempered by those of sensual warmth ("She touches his face, running her hands across the surface of his skin"), and the reader will, perhaps anxiously, experience this hypertext as constantly being "on the verge of exploding into sex, violence, and murder." In the words of Kathryn Cramer (author of In Small and Large Pieces), Lust "undresses the resonances of emotionally loaded words and phrases, revealing unspoken moments, fragments of memory, and muffled screams." Profound and provocative in its explorations of human sexuality and emotion, this tale uncovers for the reader the deep complexities of lust and its often hidden consequences.

--Jeen Yu

We Descend arrives to us from far distant futures, as both an artifact and a story. All very suddenly, the reader is plunged into the futuristic world of a young boy, Egderus. Intrigue unfolds around Egderus, and, having been a witness to something most awful, he is suddenly whisked away to become the secretary to a man–the Good Doctor–who equals in human qualities that awful experience Egderus witnessed. It is not until this point that Egderus meets the Historian, who has landed in the Good Doctor’s hands to be interrogated and tortured. There is some connection between this past event in Egderus’s life and the Historian’s landing in the hands of the Good Doctor. But?? As questions mount about who knows what and why and how, We Descend begins to feel like a Victorian detective novel in electronic clothing. As one critic has written, "This evocative exploration of the slippery nature of knowledge becomes the hypertext equivalent of a good old-fashioned page turner." Intertwined throughout the story of Egderus, however, is another story, which serves as a frame for how we come to ‘know’ the story of Egderus. In an even more distant future, one that looks back on the time of Egderus as quite ancient, a scholar ‘finds’ the artifact that is Egderus’s tale. This scholar is obsessed with the idea of Egderus’s archive being ‘real,’ being authentic. And yet the obsessive quality of his desires for History to preside over Myth, or rather to grant it ‘real’ life, for there to be something–a Remnant–by which to hold onto and even know the past, is deeply unsettling. The scholar's terror of historical loss, coupled with his profound hope in Edgerus's tale, ask the reader of this story to consider the sublime uncertainty of words as well as our deeply felt attachments to them. How much faith should we have?

—Jennifer Jones

As the title suggests, In Small and Large Pieces is a journey (de)constructed through pieces, or fragments, of a "dark fantasy [that] starts and ends at the same horrific moment" (publisher's blurb). Stuart Moulthrop (author of Victory Garden) observes: "reflected in these shards we find desire, fear, sex, delusion, sibling terrorism, [and] some lovely bad poems": ("While I lay against your chest, / Your arms become branches / And your fingers become leaves. / You scare me sometimes. / Sometimes I think / That you are plotting / Against me"...). Yet within these fragments of seemingly incomprehensible but very real (often deeply unsettling) experiences and memories, the reader finds a strange sense of familiarity and coherence. This "obsessive fragmentation" returns the reader to "phrases, poems, hand written notes, and strange images that merge with the text to illuminate this moment of shattered self" (publisher's blurb). In all, this is an arresting and exhilarating (if at times disturbing) journey that will provoke analytic and introspective minds to search in earnest for meaning, or non-meaning, in small and large pieces.

--Jeen Yu

How do we define death? Is it better understood as "all cessation of cardiac activity" or as "the liberation of [the] soul?" I Have Said Nothing asks the reader to ponder this question, a question that unearths both immediately personal and abstractly philosophical answers. The simultaneously meditative and colloquial tone of this hypertext is sustained in a clear and vigorous narrative voice that recounts the accidental deaths of two young women. The strength of the narrative voice, however, lies not in linear cohesion, but in seeming fragmentation, which "bring[s] us closer than we would like to the randomness and loss that are just around the corner in our lives" (publisher's blurb). The reader will appreciate the author's vivid and effective use of metaphor ("Everything is drowned out by the sound of blood running from her ears, just like water running under a sluice"), which contributes to the subtle but powerful sense of coherence within the narrative fragments.

--Jeen Yu

The title is intriguing enough--the description on the cover even more so:

Val Rivson paints with his soul. But no matter how frightening his paintings become, he cannot exorcise the beasts within. Worse, a strange convulsion binds him to Elaine, his lover, and her daughter, Missy, twining new cycles of anger, pain, and loss.

The reader begins his or her journey on the contents page, which presents nineteen provocatively titled choices--or "chapters"--(4. Val lay on, 10. At Elaine's breast, 17. You want me), all of which contain rather lengthy, but compelling text. Through each "chapter," the reader enters "a contemporary nightmare" (publisher's blurb) in which s/he encounters an intense--often confusing--array of dreamlike descriptions ("When we make love I ask God to open my heart and I walk through it like a door into the warm other world our joined self") mixed with some rather disconcerting ones ("Elaine. I'm sick. You should be here for me. You bitch."). In all, this reading experience will prove more absorbing than exhausting, despite--or perhaps because of--the seemingly unending textual paths.

--Jeen Yu

(forthcoming)

 

"Unendurable pleasure infinitely prolonged." This line captures the objective, or at least the essence, of the bizarre and intriguing adventure the reader will experience in this hypertextual journey. "Mahasukha," as the publisher's blurb indicates, is the Nepalese Buddhist concept of transcendence through erotic experience. Mahasukha Halo brings together alien gods and humans in a world that is base and bizarre, yet strangely hypnotic. Characters include "lost missionaries, sex addicts, hyacinth men, and post-millenium religious fanatics" in a world "where sex and religion are polyvalent, and body parts proliferate" (publisher's blurb). Readers will perhaps find the "women with pointing penis noses" and "naked ascetics smeared with shit" to be among their more bizarre and memorable encounters. This adventure will enable the reader to rethink the infinite possibilities of "erotic experience," which--as this hypertext suggests--is a blend of both unendurable and pleasurable encounters.

--Jeen Yu

There is a yearning for the relationships between the various pairs of lovers who populate this story—for their intimacies and distances, for what is said and given and what is not quite said, heard, taken, or given—to somehow stand for the Story of Love in the most general case so that, ironically, it can stand for the very most particular case--our own. Quibbling makes us aware of these longings even as it nurtures them: the particularity with which the story offers us what we might want to read as ‘classical' or ‘timeless' narratives and images of love also works to softly jar us out of any straightforward notion of such generalities, because it is through narrative rhythms made possible by the medium of hypertext that our desire for the generalizable particular surfaces. Particularly since there are frames within frames of lovers looking at the ‘stories' of other lovers, but also as a result of our looking in at all of them from an intimate viewpoint, it becomes clear that the lines distinguishing ‘living' and ‘stories' and ‘living stories' are fine and incomplete. Throughout, the medium of hypertext impressively vivifies both the ‘realness' of the characters, and alongside them the desire, and finally, the necessity, for thinking about our relationship to stories in relation to the media that bring them to us as well as in relation to our emotional lives.

—Jennifer Jones

Patchwork Girl is first and foremost a reworking/retelling of Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein. Shelley Jackson weaves together a female-centered story out of the fabric of this novel, whose primary characters were originally male, by creating the character Mary Shelley from the persona of the author and then resuscitating the female Monster, whose appearance in Frankenstein is both violent and brief (Victor creates her to be the companion of his Monster, but in a fit of horror at the idea of their imminent sexual union, he destroys the female Monster by ripping her body to pieces). In the context of Patchwork Girl, Mary Shelley reanimates the female Monster herself: "I had sewn her, stitching deep into the night by candlelight, until the tiny black stitches wavered into script and I began to feel that I was writing, that this creature I was assembling was a brash attempt to achieve by artificial means the unity of a life-form." Throughout Patchwork Girl, the relationship between Mary and her Monster stands in implicit contrast to that between Victor and his Monster, and this type of allusion and commentary, of a perhaps explicitly feminist bent, is woven into this text throughout. In addition to reworking Frankenstein, however, Patchwork Girl is also a meta-commentary on the nature of hypertext fiction as a medium, which is accomplished by the metaphoric connection always being utilized between the fragmentation/non-wholeness of the Monster and the literal fragmentation via lexia that makes up the experience of Patchwork Girl.

—Jennifer Jones

Afternoon: a story is one of the first hypertext fictions, exciting to read particularly but certainly not exclusively for that reason. This story helped to define the formal distinctions that have become the domain of hypertext fiction: there is no known ending or beginning, and the story unfolds in fits and starts via the linking of one node of the story to another either through the automated forwarding function or through the reader's choice to explore the path(s) of particular words. Michael Joyce writes, in a prefatorial comment on the nature of the mode of reading offered by Afternoon, "Closure is . . . in any fiction, a suspect quality, although here it is made more manifest." This commentary ultimately undergirds not only the formal but also the thematic unfoldings of this story, and the two mutually enforce one another. Against the formal backdrop in which particularly endings and the knowledge that is supposed to arrive with them are suspended from its dynamic, Afternoon unfolds from the point of view of Peter, a technical writer (with poetic aspirations) who makes, sometimes repeatedly, the following assertion: "I want to say I may have seen my son die this morning." Peter's responses to his fear that the car wreck he passed on his way to work and the bodies strewn across the road were those of his ex-wife and son is the environment through which the story both contemplates and provokes the experience of memory, loss, and that aspect of desire that desperately seeks truth and an ending, and yet—

—Jennifer Jones

(forthcoming)

(forthcoming)

 

(forthcoming)

Completing the Circle takes the reader on a meditative journey into a schismatic world of human fantasy and reality. Its language fluctuates, appropriately, between philosophical introspection and psychological, almost clinical, observation. "What is the purpose of our bodies," it asks. "Is the body merely a compilation of base elements and water? Or is it a vessel that carries our very soul?" This tale is described as "a view from Haller's brain, a brain taken over by sex, delusions, mental collapse, and the desperate attempt to keep it all together" (publisher's blurb). Indeed, Haller's desire to fully comprehend sensual and spiritual experiences, and the earnest attempt to integrate their seemingly opposed meanings, result, ultimately, in a realization of the fantasy of achieving completion: "We are ... condemned to the fate of essential isolation. We will always be alone."

--Jeen Yu

(forthcoming)

 

Moments of Victory Garden, a by now canonical work in the context of hypertext fiction, can be disturbingly probing of its reader. "How did it make you feel—scared, depressed, elated, unreal? When History unfolded around you, did you see it as a poison flower (fucked, like the man say, down to its eternal root), or did it seem to you a fantastic firework, some gorgeous portent of the skies?" And yet, the proscribed choices that this passage offers as possible modes of response to the event around which Victory Garden unfolds, the Gulf War, are also indicative of the way in which the story self-consciously mobilizes this aggressive mode of addressing its reader as a means of bringing to the fore the restrictions for emotive response that were so present in the media coverage—and presumably many of our experiences—of the Gulf. As we navigate through Victory Garden, we become immersed in the life of Emily Runbird, a graduate student who had financed her education through government military service, and was called into active duty when the War erupted . Emily serves as our interface to both 'sides' of the War, which are comprised on the one hand by those who found themselves in the middle of a desert in nuclear combat gear with Emily, and on the other by those who remained behind, living with her absence, and continuing to pursue their lives (in this context, as students or professors). This gap, which cannot be bridged, and yet, as the story makes clear, must be pushed beyond a tacit acceptance of the distance, is indicative of other gaps that are powerfully explored in Victory Garden as well--desire, passion, and not least, love.

—Jennifer Jones

Lust is a poetically and prosaically mingled tale that is both disturbing and quietly tender in its (re)combined sequences, or fragments, of connection, creation, and loss between lovers and among a man, woman, and child. Images of violent penetration ("She runs the blade against the surface of her skin ... there is blood") are tempered by those of sensual warmth ("She touches his face, running her hands across the surface of his skin"), and the reader will, perhaps anxiously, experience this hypertext as constantly being "on the verge of exploding into sex, violence, and murder." In the words of Kathryn Cramer (author of In Small and Large Pieces), Lust "undresses the resonances of emotionally loaded words and phrases, revealing unspoken moments, fragments of memory, and muffled screams." Profound and provocative in its explorations of human sexuality and emotion, this tale uncovers for the reader the deep complexities of lust and its often hidden consequences.

--Jeen Yu

Kerman, Judith	Mothering	Eastgate, 1995	Windows	Storyspace
				diskette

"I populate, I fecundate, I fill the empty world with my mind, allies and enemies ex nihilo, out of loneliness." This single line best sums up the fertile revelations the reader will find in this hypertext. The unnamed narrator of this poem, as the publisher's blurb indicates, "struggles with deaths, births, and the lost loves ... who populate her psychic landscape," and these struggles--varied and deeply emotional--ultimately come together to reveal the strange chaos and undeniable beauty underlying the forces that create life. The reader may experience his or her own struggle in reconciling, at least initially, the unsettling conflation of sexual and maternal images, but will be struck, ultimately, by "the marvel [of] how they follow each other." In all, this is a moving and multi-dimensional journey, and the reading experience will indeed mimick the "peaceful contractions" of the text.

--Jeen Yu

(forthcoming)