In this sense, it is akin to print texts, from Sterne to Saporta, that defy closure and challenge readers formally and thematically. It is mainly due to hypertext literature’s subversive and nonculinary aesthetic that this form of digital writing has never reached a popular audience. Mainstream commercial success is not an important consideration for Eastgate, as Bernstein (2004) makes clear but the low sales, and more significantly, the near invisibility of hypertext to the vast majority of readers, must make those of us who are interested in new-media storytelling wonder what is ‘blocking’ hypertext fiction from a wider audience. The only commercial publishers of hypertext fiction, Eastgate Systems, report that their hypertext fictions ‘sell in the low thousands – in other words, they sell about as well as literary fiction on paper’ (Bernstein, 2004). The main audience for fiction published on the web, or fiction that blends itself with multimedia, is other writers. I don’t think that the general reader would particularly think of fiction as something they’d log onto the internet to experience, even with e-books and fiction-based web magazines in the picture. Andy Campbell, developer of the Dreaming Methods website, says, Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Laura Miller noted, ‘What’s most remarkable about hyperfiction is that no one really wants to read it, not even out of idle curiosity’ (Miller, 1998). afternoon is widely praised, and yet after 18 years, regarded as a classic of hypertext fiction, it is hardly heard of beyond academia.
Hypertext fiction has been available since 1987 when Michael Joyce published afternoon, a story.
Consider all of the hugely successful video games that privilege story, many of which are heavily reliant on text as an essential part of how their stories unfold.”Ī Future for Hypertext Fiction – James Pope “I disagree with the premise that hypertextual fiction does not have a mass audience. Probably it is because linear text’s so well-built for it that it has become the dominant narrative style in the novel. There’s no question that hypertext will lose or never acquire those readers for whom a fated slalom toward the finish line is the defining literary experience hypertext’s not built for that. Shelley Jackson quote on hypertext’s difficulty It’s a mistake commonly made, which doesn’t recognize hypertext fiction for what it is: a historical verbal art form that sought and still seeks to exploit the affordances of interactive, multilinear textuality for narrative experimentation rather than for culinary, capitalist purposes. Storyspace) hypertext by the same yardstick as popular and commercially produced narrative media. I think it’s important to emphasize again that we need to move away from “judging” electronic literature like first gen (e.g.
It is therefore important to recognize important preservation and documentation efforts being undertaken globally by electronic literature scholars and digital humanists to save these texts from technological obsolescence. Electronic literature has, from its beginnings, sought to contravene mass phenomena such as AAA gaming, and to offer experimental, self- and medium-critical ways of dealing with everyday political and (meta-)fictional themes … we need to move away from “judging” electronic literature like first gen (e.g. ‘it’s important to realize that the Storyspace School … never intended to appeal to a mass readership. Astrid Ensslin private interview with me:
0 kommentar(er)
