Hypertext (semiotics)

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Hypertext, in semiotics, is a text which alludes to, derives from, or relates to an earlier work or hypotext. [1] For example, James Joyce's Ulysses could be regarded as one of the many hypertexts deriving from Homer's Odyssey ; Angela Carter's "The Tiger's Bride" can be considered a hypertext which relates to an earlier work, or hypotext, the original fairy-story Beauty and the Beast . Hypertexts may take a variety of forms including imitation, parody, and pastiche.

The word was defined by the French theorist Gérard Genette as follows: "Hypertextuality refers to any relationship uniting a text B (which I shall call the hypertext) to an earlier text A (I shall, of course, call it the hypotext), upon which it is grafted in a manner that is not that of commentary." [2] So, a hypertext derives from hypotext(s) through a process which Genette calls transformation, in which text B "evokes" text A without necessarily mentioning it directly ". [3]

Note that this technical use of the word in semiotics differs from its use in the field of computing, although the two are related. Liestøl's study of Genette's narratological model and hyperfiction considers how they are related and suggests that hyperfiction narratives have four levels: [4]

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hypertext</span> Text with references (links) to other text that the reader can immediately access

Hypertext is text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access. Hypertext documents are interconnected by hyperlinks, which are typically activated by a mouse click, keypress set, or screen touch. Apart from text, the term "hypertext" is also sometimes used to describe tables, images, and other presentational content formats with integrated hyperlinks. Hypertext is one of the key underlying concepts of the World Wide Web, where Web pages are often written in the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). As implemented on the Web, hypertext enables the easy-to-use publication of information over the Internet.

Genre is any form or type of communication in any mode with socially-agreed-upon conventions developed over time. In popular usage, it normally describes a category of literature, music, or other forms of art or entertainment, whether written or spoken, audio or visual, based on some set of stylistic criteria, yet genres can be aesthetic, rhetorical, communicative, or functional. Genres form by conventions that change over time as cultures invent new genres and discontinue the use of old ones. Often, works fit into multiple genres by way of borrowing and recombining these conventions. Stand-alone texts, works, or pieces of communication may have individual styles, but genres are amalgams of these texts based on agreed-upon or socially inferred conventions. Some genres may have rigid, strictly adhered-to guidelines, while others may show great flexibility.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Narrative</span> Account that presents connected events

A narrative, story, or tale is any account of a series of related events or experiences, whether nonfictional or fictional. Narratives can be presented through a sequence of written or spoken words, through still or moving images, or through any combination of these. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, which is derived from the adjective gnarus. Narration is a rhetorical mode of discourse, broadly defined, is one of four rhetorical modes of discourse. More narrowly defined, it is the fiction-writing mode in which a narrator communicates directly to an audience. The school of literary criticism known as Russian formalism has applied methods that are more often used to analyse narrative fiction, to non-fictional texts such as political speeches.

Diegesis is a style of fiction storytelling which presents an interior view of a world in which the narrator presents the actions of the characters to the readers or audience.

Hypertext fiction is a genre of electronic literature, characterized by the use of hypertext links that provide a new context for non-linearity in literature and reader interaction. The reader typically chooses links to move from one node of text to the next, and in this fashion arranges a story from a deeper pool of potential stories. Its spirit can also be seen in interactive fiction.

Narratology is the study of narrative and narrative structure and the ways that these affect human perception. It is an anglicisation of French narratologie, coined by Tzvetan Todorov. Its theoretical lineage is traceable to Aristotle (Poetics) but modern narratology is agreed to have begun with the Russian formalists, particularly Vladimir Propp, and Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of heteroglossia, dialogism, and the chronotope first presented in The Dialogic Imagination (1975).

Intertextuality is the shaping of a text's meaning by another text, either through deliberate compositional strategies such as quotation, allusion, calque, plagiarism, translation, pastiche or parody, or by interconnections between similar or related works perceived by an audience or reader of the text. These references are sometimes made deliberately and depend on a reader's prior knowledge and understanding of the referent, but the effect of intertextuality is not always intentional and is sometimes inadvertent. Often associated with strategies employed by writers working in imaginative registers, intertextuality may now be understood as intrinsic to any text.

Gérard Genette was a French literary theorist, associated in particular with the structuralist movement and such figures as Roland Barthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss, from whom he adapted the concept of bricolage.

<i>afternoon, a story</i>

afternoon, a story, spelled with a lowercase 'a', is a work of electronic literature written in 1987 by American author Michael Joyce. It was published by Eastgate Systems in 1990 and is known as one of the first works of hypertext fiction.

In literary interpretation, paratext is material that surrounds a published main text supplied by the authors, editors, printers, and publishers. These added elements form a frame for the main text, and can change the reception of a text or its interpretation by the public. Paratext is most often associated with books, as they typically include a cover, title, front matter, back matter footnotes, and many other materials not crafted by the author. Other editorial decisions can also fall into the category of paratext, such as the formatting or typography. Because of their close association with the text, it may seem that authors should be given the final say about paratextual materials, but often that is not the case. One example of controversy surrounding paratext is the case of the 2009 young adult novel Liar, which was initially published with an image of a white girl on the cover, although the narrator of the story was identified in the text as black.

The implied author is a concept of literary criticism developed in the 20th century. Distinct from the author and the narrator, the term refers to the "authorial character" that a reader infers from a text based on the way a literary work is written. In other words, the implied author is a construct, the image of the writer produced by a reader as called forth from the text. The implied author may or may not coincide with the author's expressed intentions or known personality traits.

Metatextuality is a form of intertextual discourse in which one text makes critical commentary on itself or another text. This concept is related to Gérard Genette's concept of transtextuality in which a text changes or expands on the content of another text.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cybertext</span>

Cybertext as defined by Espen Aarseth in 1997 is a type of ergodic literature where the user traverses the text by doing non-trivial work.

The term literatronica, also literatronic, was coined by Colombian mathematician and author Juan B Gutierrez (2002) to refer to electronic literature. According to Gutierrez (2006):

A word that describes digital narrative, that is, narrative designed for the computer, is literatronic. It comes from the Latin word litera -letter- and the Greek word which gave birth to the word electricity, electron -Amber. Literatronic means letter that requires electricity, or by extension, letter that requires a computer. Literatronic works could not be reproduced on paper except, perhaps, as a reading path at a given moment.

Focalisation is a term coined by the French narrative theorist Gérard Genette. It refers to the perspective through which a narrative is presented. Genette focuses on the interplay between three forms of focalization and the distinction between heterodiegetic and homodiegetic narrators. Homodiegetic narrators exist in the same storyworld as the characters exist in, whereas heterodiegetic narrators are not a part of that storyworld. The term 'focalization' refers to how information is restricted in storytelling. Genette distinguishes between internal focalization, external focalization, and zero focalization. Internal focalization means that the narrative focuses on thoughts and emotions while external focalization focuses solely on characters' actions, behavior, the setting etc. Zero focalization is seen when the narrator is omniscient in the sense that it is not restricted.

Judy Malloy is a poet whose works embrace the intersection of hypernarrative, magic realism, and information art. Beginning with Uncle Roger in 1986, Malloy has composed works in both new media literature and hypertext fiction. She was an early creator of online interactive and collaborative fiction on The WELL and the website ArtsWire.

Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree is a 1982 book by French literary theorist Gérard Genette. Over the years, the book's methodological proposals have been confirmed as effective operational definitions, and have been widely adopted in literary criticism terminology.

A narrative network is a system that represents complex event sequences or characters’ interactions as depicted by a narrative text. Network science methodology offers an alternative way of analysing the patterns of relationships, composition and activities of events and actors studied in their own context. Network theory can contribute to the understanding of the structural properties of a text and the data contained in it. The meaning of the individual and the community in a narrative is conditional on their position in a system of social relationships reported by the author. Hence, a central problem when dealing with narratives is framing and organising the author's perspective of individual and collective connections to understand better the role of both the witness and its testimony as reflected by the text. However, the category of narrative network is in its formative, initial phase and as a consequence it is hard to view as a stable and defined notion in linguistics, and beyond sociology.

Hypotext is an earlier text which serves as the source of a subsequent piece of literature, or hypertext. For example, Homer's Odyssey could be regarded as the hypotext for James Joyce's Ulysses.

<i>These Waves of Girls</i> 2001 hypermedia novella by Caitlin Fisher

These Waves of Girls is a hypermedia novella by Caitlin Fisher that won the Electronic Literature Organization's Award for Fiction in 2001. The work is frequently taught in undergraduate literature courses and is referenced in the field of electronic literature as a significant example of early multimodal web-based hypertext fiction, placing Fisher "at the forefront of digital writing".

References

  1. Martin, Bronwen (2006). Key Terms in Semiotics. Continuum. p. 99.
  2. Genette, Gérard (1997). Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. U of Nebraska Press. p. 5.
  3. Herman, David (1998). Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (review). MFS Modern Fiction Studies. pp. 1043–8.
  4. Liestøl, Gunnar (1994). "Wittgenstein, Genette, and the Reader's Narrative in Hypertext". In Landow, George P. (ed.). Hyper/Text/Theory. Johns Hopkins UP. p. 97.