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Hypertext Fiction

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lightbulbAbout this topic
Hypertext fiction is a genre of digital literature that utilizes hypertext links to create a non-linear narrative structure, allowing readers to navigate through interconnected text segments. This interactive format challenges traditional storytelling by enabling multiple pathways and interpretations, emphasizing reader agency in the construction of meaning.
lightbulbAbout this topic
Hypertext fiction is a genre of digital literature that utilizes hypertext links to create a non-linear narrative structure, allowing readers to navigate through interconnected text segments. This interactive format challenges traditional storytelling by enabling multiple pathways and interpretations, emphasizing reader agency in the construction of meaning.

Key research themes

1. How has hypertext fiction evolved as a postmodern, intermedial, and digital literary form?

This research area focuses on tracing the historical development and theoretical underpinnings of hypertext fiction as it emerged from postmodern and poststructuralist literatures in the late 20th century to the present digital era. It examines how hypertext fiction embodies poststructuralist concepts such as fragmentation, non-linearity, and intertextuality while integrating multiple media forms (intermediality). This theme is significant as it contextualizes hypertext fiction within literary and media studies, highlighting its impact on narrative construction, media specificity, and reader interaction across evolving digital platforms.

Key finding: This chapter outlines the genealogy of digital fiction from its roots in postmodern and poststructuralist theory through proto-hypertext novels and television's influence on nonlinear narratives to interactive and hypertext... Read more
Key finding: This chapter maps digital fiction’s development across six phases, emphasizing hypertext fiction as a hybrid form that merges literary texts with digital media through hyperlinks and lexias. It advances the concept of... Read more
Key finding: This chapter critiques and expands common generational and genre-based classifications of electronic literature, including hypertext fiction, by emphasizing global and cultural diversity in digital literary production. It... Read more

2. What cognitive, psychological, and evolutionary factors explain the reception challenges and marginalization of hypertext novels?

This theme investigates why hypertext fiction, despite early bursts of theoretical enthusiasm promising a literary revolution, has remained a marginal form with limited mainstream readership. By integrating cognitive psychology, literary reception theory, and evolutionary perspectives on narrative consumption, this research area seeks to identify the mental processing constraints, reader preferences, and storytelling functions that impact the adoption and enjoyment of hypertext novels. It also critiques prior poststructuralist hypertext theories for ideological biases that neglected empirical evidence on human cognition and literary engagement.

Key finding: This paper synthesizes cognitive processing research, psychological studies of literary enjoyment, and evolutionary theories of storytelling to argue that hypertext novels fail to attract mass audiences due to human cognitive... Read more
Key finding: This work reviews empirical studies indicating that electronic and hypertext reading generally result in slower reading speeds and reduced accuracy compared to print under various conditions, though effects are complex and... Read more
Key finding: By qualitatively comparing print literary reader-response theory (RRT) with interactive digital narratives, including hypertext fiction, this thesis finds that electronic literature embodies and literalizes reader agency via... Read more

3. How do narrative agency, choice mechanics, and second-person narration function in hypertext and interactive digital fiction to shape reader engagement and identity?

This theme explores narrative structures unique to hypertext and interactive fiction, focusing on the mechanics of reader choice, the use of second-person narration ('textual you'), and their combined effects on narrative agency, identity construction, and metalepsis. It examines how hypertext fiction's interactivity negotiates between authorial control and reader co-creation, complicates traditional narratological categories, and uses choice as a literary and ethical device. Insights contribute to understanding how hypertext fiction blends ludic and literary features, expanding narratology for digital media.

Key finding: Through close reading of the hypertext Flash fiction "The Princess Murderer," the paper shows how second-person narration ('textual you') in digital fiction creates polysemous address levels—switching among protagonist,... Read more
Key finding: This thesis theorizes narrative choice in interactive fiction as a form of expressive self-reflection rather than mere branching or quiz-like decisions. It argues that storing a player's pattern of choices enables stories to... Read more
Key finding: Using a hypertext fiction story game, this experimental study reveals that women show strong in-group identification bias (identifying more with characters sharing their gender), whereas men identify equally regardless of... Read more
Key finding: The Hyperbook "Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas" embraces the rhizomatic and associative structure of the source text through hypertextual, interactive digital modalities, positioning the reader as a co-creator who navigates... Read more

All papers in Hypertext Fiction

Иако је сновима литерарних јунака посвећено више пажње, записи аутентичних снова нису често били предмет проучавања у оквиру науке о књижевности. Предмет рада биће поређење одлика кратке приче и мале приче са одликама записа снова из... more
У раду се анализира Речник технологије, објављен у издању студентског часописа Видици 1981, који је и у формалном и у смисаоном погледу представљао необичан искорак из оновремене социјалистичке, теоријске и уметничке продукције. Наишавши... more
Engelbart's proposal for "Augmenting Human Intellect" envisioned innovation in personal workstations, organizational management, and social organization in order to tackle society's most intractable problems. Recent thinking about animal... more
От редакции: Возвращение истории -тема, до сих пор определявшая антисталинские дискуссии в России. Но ее историографический аспект сложнее политического. Если в политике уверенно предполагается, чего стоит опасаться и что заслуживает... more
This paper proposes a novel theoretical framework for understanding the phenomenon of "hype" not as a mere sociological or marketing curiosity, but as the primary epistemic modality of late-capitalist consciousness. Moving beyond... more
Hypertext research has been deeply interested a narrative, and literary hypertext fiction has enjoyed a long and happy relationship to this conference. The literature of Critical Theory, on the other hand, is famously opaque, and our... more
We often treat annotation as a supplement, scribbling tacked on to the real (hyper) text. Instead, we might view annotation as an organic process in which the current hypertext grows and is elaborated in ways that are unpredictable but... more
El uso de imágenes, fragmentos de videos, y demás material que sea objeto de protección de los derechos de autor, será exclusivamente para fines educativos e informativos y deberá citar la fuente donde la obtuvo mencionando el autor o... more
Table of Contents with Abstracts from the book Glitching the 'Machine Artist.' Fear of the ‘machine artist’ reflects a deep cultural anxiety about industrialization, shaped by unresolved conflicts over automation and its potential to... more
This work analyses Pale Fire, a 1962 novel by Vladimir Nabokov, as a literary and dialogic communication game. A massive puzzle of little more than two hundred pages, in which the notions of linearity in literature are explicitly... more
Anne Huffschmid y Pablo Martínez Zárate se conocieron en el proceso de armar el webdocumental Forensic Landscapes (www.forensiclandscapes.info), a partir de un extenso fieldwork audiovisual conducido por Anne sobre espacios y agencias... more
This article analyzes one of the roots of contemporary online participatory writing practices within the literary field, focusing on an object that had its theoretical heyday twenty years ago: hypertextual fiction. Invented in the sixties... more
In a digital era, people live in a cyberspace that they become part of modern society. The information that they have acquired is from the World Wide Web (WWW). This WWW has become an important medium for people in the world to... more
Овај рад се бави новим књижевним феноменима који су проникли из контекста другачијег постхуманог доба, услед експанзије технологије и информатичког кодирања у култури и свеукупности стваралаштва човечанства. Превасходно се сагледава појам... more
Links are the most important new punctuation mark since the invention of the comma, but it has been years since the last in-depth discussions of link poetics. Taking inspiration Raymond Queneau's Exercices De Style, we explore the poetics... more
A review of a collection of concrete and visual poetry by Milan Adamčiak, which is part of the Archive series and includes the author's typescript, stamped and other concrete poetry from 1964-1972.
The paper focuses on the issue of visual accents in the poems of contemporary slovak poetry. visual accented poem is defined as visually arranged poem, in which featured visual elements take the role of partial semantic factor involved in... more
Autofiction is increasingly described in contemporary criticism as a transgressive genre. Its transgressiveness is manifested in the free combination of fiction with real events, which breaks genre conventions and places the reader in an... more
El desdoblamiento en el texto literario desde los pre digitales a la literatura electrónica.
This article begins from a clear thesis: human free will is a useful fiction, not an original truth. Far from being a universal capacity, so-called freedom of choice is shaped by biographical, social, economic, and symbolic conditions... more
This paper explores the conceptual framework behind No Sun For Nu Boricua (xNxSxFxNxBx), an experimental first-person game that merges dungeon crawler mechanics with decolonial critique and glitch aesthetics. No Sun For Nu Boricua... more
Celac, Victor, „Despre funcţia metalingvistică (în cazul limbajul uman şi în alte sisteme de comunicare)”, în: Raluca Sinu, Alexandra Stan, Oana Tatu (ed.), Cross-cultural perspectives in language studies. In honorem professor Marinela... more
Discussion (in French) about the state of the literature on contemporary art archives. Significantly it distinguishes between the way modern and contemporary artists and art historians use archives.
The article focuses on the labyrinth as a model structuring the narrative of Italian neo-avant-garde novels. Classical and mannerist types of labyrinth (according to U. Eco) act as world, consciousness and text models and have an... more
KOČVAROVÁ, Miroslava: Súčasná slovenská poézia v priestore nových médií ako určujúci faktor záujmu knižných v ydavateľov v podmienkach na Slovensku. [Bakalárska práca] / Miroslava Kočvarová. – Žilinská univerzita v Žiline. Fakulta... more
Rad nastoji da prikaže ulogu čitaoca u savremenom svetu, kao i ostvarivanje konstruktivnog dijaloga između pisca, dela i čitaoca u postmodernizmu. Predmet izučavanja je knjiga Aleksandra Jerkova, "Istina (srpske) književnosti:... more
This chapter analyses how the hypertext fiction Patchwork Girl (1995) functions as a palimpsest in its postmodern multimodal rewriting of the myth of Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818). Since digital culture is one of the... more
Одна из главных черт романтического мировоззрения-утопическая мечта о возможности всеохватывающего, универсального синтеза всех проявлений бесконечного творческого духа. Свое конкретное воплощение эта мечта находит в идее новой... more
Propunem aici o interpretare teoretică a unei manifestări speciale a diversităţii lingvistice a românei actuale, conturată ca raportare voluntară a standardului la uzaje marcate, pornind de la un tip particular de referinţă, valorificat... more
Imágenes y signos son formas de reverberación: van más allá de lo denotado por la palabra y son sus connotaciones las que dilatan el espacio hasta lo infinito. Ricardo Gullón, Espacio y novela.
В статье продолжается анализ циклообразующих мотивов в сборнике рассказов Х. Кортасара «Тайное оружие». В фокусе – рассказ «Тайное оружие» и его анализ с точки зрения детализации и композиции. План детализации обнаруживает тяготение к так... more
This paper proposes a discussion and a parallel of two important perspectives on literary textuality, those of Roman Jakobson and Eugenio Coseriu. The aforementioned linguists defined literary textuality starting from a broader... more
Wszechobecność ekranów sprawiła, że o współczesnej kulturze i formacji społecznej mówi się odpowiednio: kultura ekranów lub społeczeństwo ekranów i monitorów. Ekran stał się nową kategorią kulturową i doczekał swoistej typologii. 1 W... more
Известное в логике понятие пресуппозиции применяется к анализу особенностей речевого воздействия и манипулирования в литературе детективного жанра. В данном случае речь идет о прагматической пресуппозиции, которую можно определить как ряд... more
Историческая память и национальная идентичность. Часть II. Семантические и дискурсивные механизмы формирования И 904 исторической памяти (на примере «Истории Армении» Мовсеса Хоренаци и армянского эпоса). С.Т. Золян. -Ер.: Изд-во РАУ,... more
Questo saggio è edito in Le comunità virtuali e i saperi umanistici, a cura di Paola Carbone e Paolo Ferri, Mimesis, Milano, 1999, pp. 219-242 [per acquistare il libro su Internet Bookshop Italia fai click qui]. Questo intervento intende... more
The essay aims to pay attention to the dimension of living as it emerges from the ergodic novel House of Leaves (2000) by Mark Z. Danielewski. The story moves on multiple parallel levels and is held together on the one hand by the... more
Literatronic is an adaptive hypermedia system for hypertext fiction. Its adaptive features are based on an algorithm that simulates a Hamiltonian cycle on a weighted graph. The algorithm maximizes narrative continuity and minimizes the... more
Raymond Federman was a French-American Jewish writer whose works embodied postmodern literary tendencies of the time. His tragic experience with the Holocaust greatly influenced his worldview, leading to the... more
This text (Time beyond Language: the Three Discourse Intentionalities of Speakers) “comes in pair” with another paper also included in the present volume – Temporalitate fenomenologică: primul raport semiotic şi planul universal al... more
This text comes in a tandem with another paper also included in the present volume – Timp dincolo de limbaj: cele trei intenţionalităţi discursive ale vorbitorilor) and deals with Eugenio Coseriu’s “first semiotic articulation”. As is... more
Fiction could be understand as a form of artificial life. Perhaps it is the greatest globally networked AL experiment in history. Are fictional characters alive? Are they real? Starting point for a reality check of claims in the field of AL
Tous droits réservés © Institut d'histoire de l'Amérique française, 1995 Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d'utilisation... more
Anotácia V stálej rubrike časopisu Profil predstavujeme rôzne polohy feministickej a rodovo orientovanej tvorby domácich autoriek a autorov s ambíciou vytvoriť kolekciu feministických a queer diel, ktorú by sme radi vydali aj v knižnej... more
Che in Se questo è un uomo si alternino diversi pronomi personali è noto. Sergio Luzzatto (Primo Levi e i suoi compagni. Tra storia e letteratura, Donzelli) si concentra sul "noi", sul "voi", e, soprattutto, sull' "io". Del martellante... more
Decline And Fall is a Storyspace-style hypertext novel, a school story based loosely on The Trojan Women. Its goal was not to be good, but rather to be exciting-to make an argument that hypertext can be coherent, consistent, and possibly... more
Computer games and the development of popular culture The paper contains an analysis of the phenomenon of computer games and the possibility of their impact on the development of popular culture. Participants games, especially members of... more
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