The Shape of Stories: Digital Storytelling, Hypertext Poetry, and New Multimedia Expressions

One reason for thinking about new Web-based narrative forms, in the context of other older or non-European narrative traditions is to remember to what extent certain forms or writing which we may think of as natural or inevitable are really conditioned by culture. 

This is important to keep in mind when reading any of the examples of hypertext fiction (non linear and multi-linear narrative) linked from this platform. Hypertext writing (fiction or poetry) is possible only in an electronic environment. Below there are links to numerous sites which will explain what hypertext fiction and hypertext poetry is. There are also sites that tell stories through multimedia and "mixed media."

Hypertext writing shares some interesting features with, for example, Native American storytelling traditions: there is a digressive element (stories within stories); what is called "a story" is really a Web of stories, and like oral tellings, in hypertext, no two tellings of a hypertext narrative are exactly the same for readers. Naturally there are other key differences that make them disimilar as well. In hypertext fiction the focus is on the reader and the appearance of choice and some determination of how to read, as every part of a hypertext narrative presents multiple choices for the direction and sequence of reading. 

What you'll find below are questions and links looking at hypertext fiction, poetry, and other multimedia stories and artistic and critical expressions, some of which resist any particular genre of writing we have a name for now. 

If you know of a resource you think should be added to this page, please write and we'll try to add it. 

[Images: "New Media," by Jeremy Sutton, and  Winter Count Calender, Battiste Good, Sichangu nation]

• Explore some of the sites below that link to examples of hypertext fiction. What are the qualities of hypertext fiction? Where does it differ from traditional fiction? What makes it hard to read? How is that like and unlike what makes difficult traditional fiction difficult? 

 
• Many of the sites below evidence what two critics--Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin--call remediation. That is, they argue, all new media remediates older media by incorporating and including it in new forms and shapes. For example, look at an example like Urban Diary or Ignatius Donnelly and the end of the World. What older media are explicitly incorporated into the new forms? 

 
• One of the things we talk about a lot, when talking about literature, is how the form of the work (story or poetry) helps create meaning. In some ways, studying the form of literature is about studying how complex meanings result from the author doing the most within the constraints of the form. In hypertext and hypermedia (non linear multimedia) there appear to be no constraints on form. Are there? In groups, after looking at a number of these projects, talk about the idea of form and structure? Is there form here? How do you know what structure a work has? How important is form or structure in these works to understanding some meaning? 

 
• What about your own writing? If you wrote a traditional academic paper in one of the styles or manner of the examples here, what would it look like? Would it be harder or easier? 

• The Color of Television, by Stuart Moulthrop and Sean Cohen
• Quibbling, A Gift, by Carolyn Guyer (excerpt)
• The Heist: A Hypertext Story, by Walter Sorrells
• The Electronic Chronicles, by Adrianne Wurtzel
• Ignatius Donnelly and the End of the World, Richard Meehan

• Wingspan, David Micko and Julieann M. Brown-Micko
• CITYTHREADS, Stories of Seattle, group authorship
• Mystory/Myseum, students of Greg Ulmer

• Hypertext Poetry and Web Art (links to many sites and works)
• Paradise Flossed--An Exploration (hypertext poem)
• Insomnia: A hypertext graphical poem, Daniel Jewell, Steve Wilson, and Anita Pantin

Multimedia/Mixed Media Essays:

• Glasshouses: A Tour of American Assimilation from a Mexican American Perspective, by Jacalyn Lopez Garcia
• Urban Diary  Mixed media art exhibition, memoir, essay, narrative.

• Hyperizons, resources on Hypertext Fiction, edited by Michael Shumate. 
• Eastgate Publishing Systems, a publisher exclusively devoted to electronic fiction, poetry and expression. 
• Voice of the Shuttle: Technology of Writing Page

Find something relevant? Send it along to the author and I'll add it. 

In many instances, the use of stories and "narrative" as a theme in writings in Border Texts, writers are exploring the ways that certain narratives or scripts control or influence one's life, whether it is through the memories of Marianne Boruch's "The Quiet House," or the ironic poetry of Ann Sexton's storybook cliche-busting version of "Cinderella."

Some of the stories in Border Texts also play with narrative form as a way of exploring the multiple stories and influences that shape one's identity, such as in an essay like William Kittredge's "Home" or Leslie Marmon Silko's two stories "Yellow Woman" and "Storytelling." In both of these stories, which go together, Silko plays with the boundaries of identity at the same time she plays with boundaries of narrative form (see the end of reading questions for "Storytelling," for example, in Border Texts.

Finally, there are selections in Border Texts that stress the visual and "multimedia" nature of experience, ranging, for example, from the interspersed memories of home movies in Judith Ortiz Cofer's "Silent Dancing," to the graphic memoir/novel of Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale. And of course there are the images in Border Visions: A Image Portfolio, with all kinds of images that tell stories in different ways, invoking the fluidity between narrative and visual representation. Look at, for example, "La Fruta del Diablo" [Fruit of the Devil], a digital mural in the Chicano Mural tradition, or Pedro Meyer's "Biblical Times" and "Biblical Times Annotated" [Plates #15 and #16].