Hypertext is now broadly used as an electronic literature genre called hypertext fiction, characterized for using links, providing new contexts all the time. This makes a story deeper, and gives it the chance of having more potential. It also is popular for the interaction with the reader, as in interactive fiction. That is the real spirit of this literature.
But it of course existed way before the internet was born, as it is used to describe books like Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela (1963), which gives you the oportunity of changing the story by taking your own path even if it doesn’t use the hypertext.
It can create not only hypertext, but also multimedia, animated text, and algorithmically generated text, created with HTML, Flash, other Web software, or Storyspace on either Windows or Mac.
As some like to state, when we read a book we don’t see the words, but images and scenes written by the writer, whereas hypertext fiction allows you navigate your way around the text creating your own story. And that is the reason why it’s an innovation in the field of literature: the way it changes the traditional author – text – reader relationship.
In Yellowless Douglas‘ (University of Michigan) words:
By examining in detail both the similarities and differences between interactive and print stories, we can begin to understand the satisfactions we derive from being drawn into fictional worlds not of our inventing—one of the opportunities afforded us when we encounter reading, stories, plots, and characters outside a print environment so familiar to us that we are scarcely aware of print as both medium and technology. By bringing together disparate studies in the fields of psychology, narratology, artificial intelligence, and literary theory, we can begin to understand which elements of storytelling are changeable, open to further development and invention in interactive narratives, and which are changeless and immutable across media and millennia alike.
References:
- Hypertext fiction. (2009, September 21). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 18:31, September 25, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hypertext_fiction&direction=prev&oldid=320049344
- Robert Kendall, Electronic Poetry and Fiction. http://wordcircuits.com/kendall/htclass-1.htm
- “The End of Books – Or Books without End? Reading Interactive Narratives,” by Jane Yellowlees Douglas (University of Michigan Press, 2000)
- Christopher W. Dean on Interactive narrative, University of New Hampshire http://english.ttu.edu/Kairos/5.2/binder.html?reviews/dean/Douglas.htm
