aina

Toft explores hypertextuality as a ‘strange medium with unpredictable narrative spaces’. Hypertext continues to ‘defy definition and remains open to each new reader and susceptible to new approaches’. 

Darren Toft has pointed out that hypertextuality has long been present prior to today’s modern form of text presentation via the internet in web/on-line articles. He has used Joyce’s ULYSSES (Shakespeare company, 1922) as an example of literature in a hypertext form: ‘with its discontinued textual poetics ….non-linearity’.

Although, as Ulysses was first published, was it not in a form of a book, with a front cover, beginning and ending with a back cover? From previous readings, and with the examples of online articles, I thought of hypertext as a form of text in which the reader can ‘become the author’ by allowing for independent trains of thought in which ever way the reader depicts the reading and deciding on which direction they wish to continue. Without having read Ulysses myself, from this article, I have assumed that it can be a form of hypertext due to Toft describing it as having ‘discontinuous textual poetics that anticipate the paradigmatic non-linearity of hypertext theory’.

~ by aina nott on March 31, 2008.