Re: QUESTIONS!!!
S.Roche (sbr2y@faraday.clas.virginia.edu)
Thu, 3 Oct 1996 23:20:16 -0400 (EDT)
it seems the "choose your own adventure series" was a hit--basically,
people like to craft their path, have things specially tailored to them.
we are a nation driven by customer service. becuase of all this, i think,
eventually, hypertext will catch on. however, the Hyperbook won't take the
palce of traditional books--they can't take the place of something they
clearly are not. Reading Nabokov's Pale fire, I was struck by the melding
of lit tradition AND nabokov's abitlity to catch a trend before it
happend. There is no closure to this peice. If people want closure,
their are other options. THe issue of closure: do books have closure
anyway? take the postmoderns, they are still turing things Defoe wrote in
the 18th century inside out and upside down; Roxana has yet to be closed
some 200 years later. So in some ways, lit traiditon IS the opp. to
re-read, re-eval, re-think. Anyway, THe Pale FIre is like hyperbooks
becuase it is decentered. The path the piece takes and the identity of
the charactrer (s) isn't coherent. Even the authorship is abig source of
debate-hence the reason this is on the List.
The BOok and The hyperbook are seperate entities to me still, and i don't
think one will beat the other- they aren't fighting the same war.
as for the "undiluted truth..."- no, hyperbooks have no single author and
thi shas been problematic for the Web as a whoole. who can you trust for
information? people have so many aliases and identities that it is
something web users must always be thinking of...however, the idea of no
single authorship, again, comes up in postmoderism as well. the work needs
to stand on its own for postm writers. to do so, many poeple confer and
can work on one piece--no title is attached. so what is the affect on us
when we read postmod lit/crit? do we "buy it" simply becuase it is
wriiten and printed, and therefore true to some publishing body?
so many questions...