Annotation #1 (Beginning with Silko and Joyce)

As an opening assignment, I ask the students to think about two kinds of literature that in some ways "flank" the traditional literary fiction that serves as the core of the course. Leslie Marmon Silko's "Language and Literature from a Pueblo Perspective" introduces students to the idea of "oral literature" and the function that it serves in cultures based on oral transmission. In contrast, I also ask students to read Michael Joyce's pioneering work of hypertext fiction, Afternoon.

Afternoon can only be read on a computer. As a work of hypertext fiction, Afternoon is written in a series of screens that can be read in myriad ways. The reader's actions in part determine the reader's progress through the story. At the center of Afternoon is the possibility that a father has seen his son in an accident. But it is also a series of recollections and conversations about love, relationships, loss, memory, aging, and other issues. The first thing that I asked students to do after reading Afternoon, was to get into groups and share with each other their notion of the "plot" of the story. Of course, because of the work's hypertext form, everyone has a different version of the plot.

It works well to ask them to consider this completely new, electronically enabled type of literature to the oral literature of Silko's Pueblo culture. In her discussion of Pueblo literature, Silko explains how oral literatures differ from Western written literature in a number of ways: including having a very different sense of beginnings and endings, a resistance to narrative closure, a more heightened tradition of narrative embedding where one story leads to another story (to digress is to progress), and strong sense of the communal function of storytelling. Without minimizing the differences, I ask the students to consider the similarities between the formal characterstics of Silko's oral literature and the nature of hypertext fiction.

I don't expect students to understand the implications of the comparison right now, but I know that it will serve us again and again throughout the semester to open up questions of story vs. plot, of alternative narrative and literary traditions, of the impact that form has on meaning, and the role or readers/listeners in making a text's meaning.