honestly now - have you ever read more absurd stuff in your life than bahktin? well except for foucault - and what is this “the juxtaposition of Dostoevsky's world with Einstein's world is, of course, only an artistic comparison and not a scientific analogy” – whhhhat – not scientific - and he just had to bring up Saussure when you know i hate -
oh wait i’m ehrengard
the political cage of language - social/political repercussions for every word we use. the network – this makes so much sense to a student of literature – especially of early modern drama – but also applies to, for example, politics
(btw am having my 104 class read Cixous, Zizek, Baudrillard right now – it was Aquinas, Descartes, Konrad Lorenz, Antonio Damasio the last two weeks)
we had to read patchwork girl (the hypertext novel) for my THE NOVEL class in college (right next to War and Peace and Dangerous Liaisons). really good attempt but complete failure. fiction is already hypertextual by nature - i wonder why fiction doesn’t play well with online hypertext? -
hypertext online works for nonfiction really well (see any online newspaper like Time or the New York Times, or a blog like The Huffington Post or The Daily Dish by Andrew Sullivan)
i guess you can’t separate style from genre (“The Problem of Speech Genres,” pg. 65). Hypertext in fiction is real, concrete, not a function – not something you have to link to – it’s the footnotes to The Waste Land not hyperlinks – come to think of it hyperlinks could substitute for footnotes quite well huh as in this link.
8 comments:
Biological determinism is a scarecrow argument created by Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins (Marxists), Not in the Genes, to misrepresent sociobiology. For a summary of gender and biology, see Stephen Pinker's The Blank Slate, or E.O. Wilson's On Human Nature.
The link might indeed be considered an hypertext version of Eliot's poem, but it is not Eliot's poem. My copy has no textual references to footnotes; they follow the poem (sequentially). Hyperventilating about hypertext does not really help us understand how hypertext functions on the web. Forcing it into traditional written texts abstracts meaning from content and context. Reducing all writing to the social and political connotations of word choice ignores the way many writers compose. Thomas Hardy once thumbed through the dictionary looking for a word that "sounded" right - all the way to S.
I have a few questions. My apologies in advance if I've misrepresented/misunderstood your points.
ehrengard: what do you mean by "Hypertext in fiction is real, concrete, not a function" ? That is, how are you defining hypertext here? Walt's objection aside, I can see what you mean when talking about someone like David Foster Wallace or Kate Atkinson who actually uses footnotes when constructing texts (pardon my lack of lit. sophistication, thanks). I can see intertextuality generally in (print) fiction, but could you clarify hypertext for me?
walt: you say "Forcing [hypertext links] into traditional written texts abstracts meaning from content and context" -- but print versions differ, too. How is reading a hypertext version of The Waste Land any different than reading, say, an Arden Shakespeare (aside from those are both print editions of a work)? I'm reading a Norton Critical ed. of The Sound and the Fury right now, full of annotations and explanations for people like me who otherwise might miss some references. Am I not reading Faulkner's novel?
I wonder if the main effect of these hypertext versions is that it robs certain readers the opportunity to congratulate themselves for "getting" intertextual references without assistance.
my only post is that i am thoroughly confused about the argument/debate between wj and ehrengard. i am not familiar with many of the names (authors)being dropped. so, jumping into this particular blog topic is moot for me.
i detect sarcasm and a hair being split. i don't understand how biological determinism relates to hypertext nor the distinctions of hypertext being real vs functional.
how about a definition of hypertext in 23 words or less for those of us out there who aren't as well read??? i AM being sincere.
Hmm, so perhaps hypertextual fiction is just bad.
What is it about a site like Wikipedia or Everything2 that we do like and that is conductive?
I kind of see them as the old "Choose Your Own Adventure" type books. However, those are kind of de facto kind of limiting the choices.
What I think is that why fiction doesn't work is that there isn't really a form, a regular and knowable reason, for linking to something.
What I propose, and I've actually been trying to create something like this off and on since 2001 (yeah, I work slowly, and am limited financially), is kind of a fiction-wiki. What work I do have has started as a sci-fi kind of story with a lot of characters. Each character would have a link to other stories they appear in, and, rather than have simple "writer" profiles (re: facebook), the characters would have those kind of things.
Multi-media is, of course, awesome.
Your comment as links as footnotes in The Wasteland is interesting. What about more extended use of the footnotes which act not as reference but as further bits to the stories? (e.g., David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and his other, earlier, non- and fiction.)
-hyper: over, above, beyond ~ hence, hypertext is that which is beyond the boundaries of the text (as in links that redirect a reader to another location), or one (not I) could argue that it includes footnotes provided by editors to illuminate meaning that might be outside of a typical reader's purview. The OED offers a definition but it appears to be narrowly focused on computer text and graphics, perhaps because the OED notes the term's first use in 1965 from the proceedings of a computing machinery conference.
Free Wiki creation & hosting:
http://pbwiki.com/
I'll have to check this out. Maybe I don't have to worry about my financial outlay.
More of a note-to-self...
Walter:
"or one (not I) could argue that it includes footnotes provided by editors to illuminate meaning that might be outside of a typical reader's purview"
Wallace put his own footnotes in. And it could be argued that including them in his own fiction would be a requirement to understanding the whole work.
I dunno, I just think they're fun, as a writer, because of the tangents they allow...
Example from a story I just started sending out for publication (cross fingers): just why is it the Golden Gate Bridge 2...because Fred Phelps descendants and his idiot colleagues blew up the first one...and what happened because of that?
Would that fit in the regular narrative? Probably not. It could, but it's just fun and it helps me fill out the world I'm creating.
But, I guess, does my purpose really matter, as a writer? No-one knows when they read the story that I just kind of took off on a whim.
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