Chapter 6 Refashioned Dialogues

1. Chapter 6Refashioned Dialogues Presented By: Crystal Hills 10 July 2007

2. The Reading Path • Medieval Codex- spatial structure is the pattern of rubrication and various sizes of letters • Printed Book- arrangement into paragraphed pages • Computers- the pattern of text windows and images on the screen Temporal dimension of a text is created by the reader’s moment-by-moment encounter with these structures. To read is to activate verbal elements in time. • English “read” Anglo-Saxon “raedan” which means “to give counsel, to interpret.” Reading as a derived form of speech. • Latin “lego” Romance languages “lecture”(French) and “lettura” (Italian). Lego literally means to gather, to collect and figurative meaning to make one’s way, to traverse. Reading is the process of gathering up signs while moving over the writing surface. (Appropriate for electronic writing) ? How and to what extent does the writer control the reader’s experience of reading? To what extent does the reader actively participate in choosing his path through the text? • Homeric oral poems vs. Written Texts • Plato’s embodiment of tension between oral and written discourse

3. From Dialogue To Essay To Web Page Dialogue • Platonic dialogue- hybrid of oral and written structures • Herodotus’ “ring composition”- told a story, then digressed on an interesting detail, and then notified they reader or listener that he was resuming the original storyline Essay • The treatise, the encyclopedia, the handbook, books of short poems, and scholarly essays (linear) • Hierarchical structures reinforced by printing (i.e. different letter sizes, different colors) • Linear -Hierarchical style of argument still defines academic writing/scholarly research Web Page • Network as a visible and operative structure. The referential network has often existed “between the lines” of the text– in the minds of readers and writers. • Network visualized as a set of “anchor” phrases or “hotspots” that represent associations on the screen or it can grant linear-hierarchical status

4. The End Of The Line? • Why should a writer be forced to produce a single, linear argument or an exclusive analysis of cause and effect, when the writing space allows a writer to entertain and present several lines of thought at once? • Roland Barthes and Wittgenstein rejected linear argument, but not the physical form, the “look and feel,” of the printed book • Derrida’s Glas was an antibook. Here he laid down a textual space and challenged his reader to find a path through it “Because we are beginning to write, to write differently, we must reread differently.” “The end of linear writing is indeed the end of the book.” • The World Wide Web will eliminate the antibook because it will work with the book to hypertext past manuscripts and link contemporary works. • Digital technology will give earlier texts a new “typography” just as printing introduced.

5. The Hypertexual Essay? • Academic essays still remain primarily in traditional print media because that’s where a traditional academic audience resorts. • Scholars in the humanities continue to regard print forms as authoritative and many feel that hyperlinking could alter the form of the argument. • Written text speaks with the single voice of the author and he or she is expected to take responsibility for a text that will go out to hundreds or thousands of readers under his name. • A hypertextual essay could be fashioned as a dialogue that speaks with more than one voice and therefore shares or postpones responsibility between the writer and reader. • Hypertext could present many possible conflicting arguments and redefine scholarship in a way that reveals “impossibility or irrelevance of producing a continuous, systematic argument.” • Traditional scholars have resisted such a redefinition, apparently believing that the fixed quality of print is necessary to legitimize their arguments. Bottomline: The dialogue between print and electronic forms of verbal writing nor the dialogue between the verbal and the visual has found expression in a new form of scholarly research essay.

6. Educational Dialogue • Critical literacy- the intentional subversion of meanings in order to critique the underlying ideologies and relations of power that support particular interpretations of a text…Hypermedia is a particularly powerful environment for this critical literacy practice…Hypermedia authoring can support the emancipation of one’s self and others through the authoring and publication of critical texts that by questioning representations of self, expand the possibilities for the self in future actions as a member of a community. • Incorporate hypertext and hypermedia to achieve a greater degree of authenticity or immediacy. • This interaction is meant to complement rather than replace face-to-face discussion in the classroom. • Used to examine the politics of identity through the lenses of race, gender, and class. MOOs and chat are well suited to exploring the issue of postmodern identity, perhaps because the student must construct her identity solely through her words. • Educational hypermedia textbooks and hypertextual writing helps overcome the barriers of authority that separate professors from students in traditional classrooms. Bottomline: Scholars attempt to supplement or bypass the traditional essay for their students but continue to present their own results as traditional conference papers and published articles.

7. Multiple Dialogues • Three dialogues are simultaneously refashioned in electronic writing 1. The dialogue between the writer and reader 2. The dialogue between verbal and audiovisual modes of representation 3. The dialogue among various new and old media forms (Web page, the essay, and the textbook) • Just as a printed essay engages the author with other texts as well as the reader, highly designed pages of the Web constitute a dialogue with earlier media forms, as well as an interplay between words and images in the windowed space of the screen.

8. Chapter 7Interactive Fiction • Hypertext fiction has become the most convincing expression of the idea of hypertext. (Hypertext nonfiction barely exists) • Examples: hypertext novels or short fiction, hypermedia narrative forms that refashion film or TV, hypermediated digital performances, and interactive or kinetic poetry. • Traditionalist Reaction: Hypertext writers have abandoned the essence of the art. The essence consisted in the authoritative voice of the author in perfect control of the text. • Avant-garde expression to hypertext offers the reader a new literary experience in which she can share control of the text with the author. • Two Element of Interactive Fiction: episodes or topics (paragraphs of prose or poetry) and decision points or links • The electronic writing space can offer the reader several different perspectives on a fixed set of events Afternoon A story by Michael Joyce written using the hypertext editing system Storyspace, created by Bolter, Joyce, and Smith. afternoon suggest to us that it can reform the act of reading by freeing us from the constraints of print and that it can therefore offer a more authentic narrative form than the forms we have come to associate with print.

9. The Rhetoric of the Multilinear • Hypertext can narrate the same events from different points of view and speak with multiple authorial voices • Hypertext authors have set about refashioning the rhetoric of the linear plot, calling into question the notion that fiction should narrate events in a single, clear order. • Early hypertext fictions of Joyce and others have worked to subvert the ideals of clarity and propriety in narrative. Their rhetoric relies heavily on the violation of the expected and conventional order. • Hyperbaton was the name given in particular to the departure from conventional word order in a sentence but we can also think of the displaced order of episodes in a hypertext as hyperbaton. Displacement and Repetition in Victory Garden • Displacement disrupts conventional meaning by presenting one episode beside another, without • allowing the reader to assume a simple or single relationship between the two. • The reader understands the repeated episode differently precisely because the path she has traveled to • that repetition. Repetition with a difference. • Hypertext exploits repetition because the text is divided into smaller units, which the reader is likely to • encounter more than once and the repetition can be programmed into the link structure of the hypertext.

10. Disrupting The Linear • Hypertext, displacement becomes the customary rhetorical strategy, whereas consecutive, chronological order is the exception. • Hypertext reverses the relative values of ornamented and “clear” narrative. When we read a hypertext, we expect to jump around from one place and time to others. • In exploring hypertext, the reader oscillates between looking through the prose of each episode and looking at the junctures or links between episodes. • The reader is forced to make a choice, which causes the illusion of an imagined world to break down, as the reader recalls the technical circumstances of the electronic medium. The Tradition of Experiment • In disrupting the stability of the text, interactive fiction belongs in a tradition of experimental literature that has marked the 20th century- the era of modernism, futurism, Dada, surrealism, letterism, the nouveau roman, concrete poetry, and other movements of greater or lesser influence. • The experiments of Dada were aimed at breaking down all structures of established art and literature, and in that breakdown the Dadaists worked in the same spirit as writers now work in thee electronic medium. • Modernist writers were trying to establish new relationships between the moment-by-moment experience of reading a text and our perception of the text’s organizing and controlling structures. (Hypertext does the same experimenting) • Just as modern and postmodern authors refashioned the tradition of printed fiction from within, hypertext authors have remediated that tradition from the perspective provided by a new technology of writing.

11. Multiple Reading and Writing • Both hypertext and their “forerunners” seem to define a new kind of reading- multiply • To read multiply would be to resist our desire to close off possible courses of action; it would be to keep open multiple explanations for the same event or character. • What afternoon and other hyperfictions suggest is that there is no simple way to say this in the linear writing of print, that what is difficult in print is simplified in and through electronic media, and that it will soon no longer need saying at all because it can be shown. • Interactive fiction promises to refashion writing as well as reading. • The computer gives the reader the opportunity to intervene in the text itself, an intervention not possible in print, where the text is inaccessible to the reader.

12. Questions