In the case of that online literary genre known as blogs, spatial hypertext connections and a linear narrative may develop together… with the actual writing of the hypertext/blog providing the basis of the temporal linearity that Marie-Laure finds necessary as a backbone for narrative. Of course the readers of the blog may circulate through its links and texts in a number of ways, further structuring that narrativity through their reading and interpretive trajectories, and adding to the text’s hypertextual complexity as well. But the timeline of actual history, the writing of the blog, is inscribed into its structure and thereby provides a strong linear backbone, a sequential structure which must be taken into account by author and readers alike. Blogs of course challenge most vividly the notion of “narrative literature” as an already finished and pre-packaged product with a clear frame separating it from “life”, but… that is what makes them interesting.

Thanks for the review–I’ll definitely check out the book. And glad to see it’s going to CHUM.

I also particularly like that you engaged with the book so personally and so thoroughly. You don’t preclude another reader forming a different opinion overall, yet you do give a roadmap to some best bits in what could be a daunting read.

My only editorial suggestion would be that the second mention of Andrew’s name at the beginning of the third paragraph, separated from the first mention by a paragraph dense with other personages, is a bit dislocating. Perhaps a smoother transition could be found there.

http://www.press.jhu.edu/press/books/titles/f03/f03ryna.htm

About my neglect of the founding figures of Hypertext (“Ryan did no do her homework”): I believe I am reasonably familiar with this tradition, but I chose not to treat it because (1) a lot has already been written about the history of hypertext; and (2) the topic of my book is narrative, so I had to neglect the use of hypertext for informational databases. This forced a focus on Landow, Bolter, Joyce, etc. who have dealt with Hypertext’s supposed ability to “reconfigure narrative.” My question was whether or not the hypertextual format is compatible with the basically linear meaning structure of narrative. Though many texts have developed a “spatial” type of meaning (for instance, lyric texts), I believe that pure spatiality is a cognitive dead-end because the mind needs some continuous thread to hold information in memory and to keep interest alive. Even with a non-narrative essay, we are driven by the desire to know what comes next, and how it connects to what we have already read. It has been said that hypertext is closer to how the mind works than standard linear textuality because it creates analogies between seemingly disconnected elements. But if analogy is an important source of creativity it is not the only one. Look at any philosophical text, persuasive text, narrative text: the creation of meaning—what we may call thinking– is to a large extent a process of linearization. Of course it could be said that “new media literature” does not want to be ready-made meaning, but a tolkit for making meaning, what Lev Manovich calls a database. As Landow puts it, we should freely fish out of this database and make our own meaning. (But how can we, if the fragments have been selected and linked by another mind ?) Alternatively, we could make meaning by “spatializing” a linear text. Literary critics have been doing that for years. I personally find it easier (and more productive) to spatialize the linear than to linearize the spatial in a meaningful way, because the linearity of the text holds it together in my mind, and allows me to wander back and forth along this line. To me, the maintenance of some kind of narrative, and consequently linear coherence is crucial to whether new media literature will remain an academic fad, or will reach the wider audience of the educated public. Note that I am not even dreaming of an audience comparable to that of computer games, which have mastered the art of combining choice and linearity, but at the cost of narrative diversity.

Well, enough rambling for today. I realize I have been carried far away from my original purpose—commenting on Noah’s review. But I did so in a linear way, so perhaps you did not notice.

Of course I agree with you that the early chapters of NaVR are important to your overall project. And I quite enjoyed some of the close readings early on — the review should probably mention a couple of them. But all told (perhaps just because of my background) those chapters didn’t feel as though they were making as big a contribution to the field as the later ones. And, when I started thinking of recommending to people that they read only the latter chapters, I went through to see if I felt those chapters depended for readability on the presence of the earlier ones, and it seemed to me that they didn’t. Certainly, on their own they make a different book than they do when wedded to the earlier chapters — but they make a book that I feel I can recommend to a wider group of people.

I’m guessing we’re going to have to agree to disagree about hypertext. But for what it’s worth, here are two points that occur to me.

First, I believe that if you’re going to critique new media theories based on particular new media systems, you must take the specifics of those systems into account when mounting your critique. Moulthrop, Bolter, Landow, Joyce, and company were using particular hypertext systems, which blurred the distinction between author and reader in particular ways, when they did the writing you critique in NaVR. But your critique seems based on the examination of systems that don’t function in the same ways — even if they are still called hypertext systems, or even if (as with Storyspace) they bear the same name despite their very different functionality.

Second, as you can probably tell from The New Media Reader, I’m passionate about the importance of new media’s history. I think we are a field, we have a history, and to ignore that history (as is sadly common) is intellectually irresponsible. Acting as though “hypertext” was coined by Landow is similar to acting as though “deconstruction” comes from Crews. It’s not an option one can choose within the field, in order to focus on one aspect or another — it’s simply inaccurate.

If we look at where the term actually comes from, we get definitions very different, and more interesting for discussion of new media narrative systems, than those at work in NaVR. For example, Ted Nelson (who coined the term) wrote of hypertext and hypermedia in 1970:

“‘Hypertext’ means forms of writing which branch or perform on request; they are best presented on computer display screen. . . . Hyper-media are branching or performing presentations which respond to user actions, systems of prearranged words and pictures (for example) which may be explored freely or queried in stylized ways. . . . Like ordinary prose and pictures, they will be media; and because they are in some sense ‘multi-dimensional,’ we may call them hyper-media, following mathematical use of the term hyper-.’”

I understand that you see NaVR as asking “whether or not the hypertextual format is compatible with the basically linear meaning structure of narrative.” I’m saying that NaVR starts out trying to answer this question using a definition of hypertext that is the product of relying on a specific, dated set of secondary sources (which are then seen through the lens of the web and the Storyspace Reader) and by starting from this perspective it can only come to incorrect conclusions.

Which is not to say that I think NaVR is somehow fundamentally flawed by this. I just wish the topic of hypertext had been left aside altogether, because the book’s strength lies in other areas.

BTW, I was excited to read on the JHUP site that you’ve got another book in the works: Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling. Any chance you’d be willing to let us know a little more about it?

Reading the above quote snippet of Nelson’s definition of hypertext and hypermedia, I’m not seeing how it is larger or different than what would describe the hypertext or hypermedia we see on the web, or from Storyspace… Do you imagine the difference lies in the “queried in stylized ways” part? Or that web / Storyspace hypertexts don’t typically allow the user to “explore freely” enough? (I’m thinking back to that keen observation Espen makes in Cybertext about the promise of hypertext liberating the reader – that in fact, hypertext can actually limit the reader’s freedom when compared to reading a traditional book. When reading a book, the reader is technically unconstrained to jump around to any page at any time in any order, even though of course we typically read books in a linear fashion.)

For a moment I wondered if Nelson’s definition could encompass what we think of as cybertext; but the “prearranged words and pictures” part of the description seems to prevent that interpretation, since cybertext is capable of constructing its own arrangements of words.

Sorry if this discussion has already occurred elsewhere in the past; if there’s a paper you can point me to that addresses this, that would be great.

Just a quick answer (after my perhaps over-long answer above).

For some examples of hypertext/media — from that same 1970 article of Nelson’s — which are a bit different from what’s possible with HTML and Storyspace, see the series of 10 or so slides that begins here (part of a larger talk on ewriting):

http://hyperfiction.org/talks/ewriting_hypertext/#slide07

As for the distinction between hypertext and cybertext…. Well, one thing you see a hint of in what I excerpted above is that Nelson had a very strong view of hypertext/media as being authored. You could say that he was constructing his view in opposition to the “let’s build an AI to figure out how to present it” point of view. And cybertext definitely embraces both the hypertext kind of work and the AI kind of work.

Of course, now there’s this Expressive AI business, which might be seen as using AI tools in an “authoring” way, and therefore perhaps bring them under the umbrella of hypertext. And to some extent I think people in the CS hypertext community think that AIish work can be hypertext, as we see in some of the “adaptive hypertext” work (which I have to admit I haven’t read that much of, but it looks interesting from afar).

I have a question, which is not meant to be dumb or difficult (in the sense of causing a fuss), but which may be both:

Why would an author *want* to yield the authorial control of a piece to some sort of AI engine? I find I can grasp why an author would want to make the work modular, rather than linear, but I can’t make the next leap. (Perhaps this is because I’m not a gamer?)

And yet, and this is probably a huge inconsistency, I have been teaching others what to make of Dramatica for years now. It is, in a way, trying to replicate how the human mind solves a problem, so perhaps it qualifies as a primitive AI engine. I suspect my understanding falters here at the brink between being able to manipulate software and being able to program it.

At any rate I have to say this:

of all chapters of NaVR, the hypertext one was the most difficult to write, because so much has been doe about HT, and I found it very difficult to have something of my own to add. I may or may not have succeeded–but I rewrote the chapter several times and left a lot of the early drafts out. On the other hand I felt that I HAD to treat hypertext, or my book would be incomplete, because so many people associate digital narrative with hypertext.

Second Noah asks about my forthcoming book (2004) “Narrative Across Media.” It’s nice that JHUP mentions it because they turned it down when it was still in outline form, and that’s why it ended up with Nebraska. For a table of content and short presentations you can go to my web site,

http://lamar.colostate.edu/~pwryan, and follow some self-explanatory links (Marie-Laure, books, narrative across media.

While I agree to the opinion voiced here that the book hasn’t received the attention it deserves, my review focuses much more on the first part of the book, rather than the second.

I’d love to read the review, but don’t have a subscription to Tekka. Is there another way to get it? I’m interested in the ways in which print narrative relates (and doesn’t directly relate) to electronic narrative, in historically important ways — although some would warn against over-historicizing. I haven’t seen NaVR yet, but from this discussion it seems the first part of the book might relate more to New Media Reader‘s historical emphasis than is obvious at first.