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≡ Literary Systems ≡

 
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Literary Systems
 
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Hypertextopia

We end here, with this tool, Hypertextopia. It's a website and a writing space and a library, but perhaps the best way to think of it is as an essay. A sustained attempt to figure something out without knowing what the conclusion is, to explore these themes of literary forms, literary systems, and the shape of writing for the web.

Hypertextopia tries to be opinionated on the kinds of literary forms that hypertext lends itself to, pursuing axial structures and link types. It embraces the distinction between fragment and shard: Fragments form the main narrative arc of the story, the axis, the essential bits that you cannot skip or navigate around. Shards are the enriching bits, the citations, the asides, the footnotes, the little pieces that add depth to the argument. The fragment-shard dichotomy provides a continued tension between the essential and the enriching, which, hopefully, serves as a clarifying force while you write, helping to keep your core argument spare and powerful.

I hope that finishing this essay will have brought some of the nature of literary systems to light. If I'm lucky, the next time that you sit down to write, you'll think about the literary forms that you choose. In this, the information/communication age, literature springs eternal.

FIN


 
"Hypertext is, before anything else, a visual form."
— Michael Joyce

There's a long-running thread through hypertext theory, that poses hypertext as not just a non-linear form of writing, but a spatial form. The structure of Hypertextopia is implicated in this argument. Joyce goes on to explain, in "Siren Shapes", that he wants to distinguish exploratory from constructive hypertexts, and pursue both. Exploratory texts are designed to be read, constructive ones are written as an analytic tool to help you organize your thoughts:
"Constructive hypertexts, unlike exploratory ones, require visual representations of the knowledge they develop. They are, in Jay Bolter's phrase, topographic writing."
This directly corresponds to the difference between the writing interface of Hypertextopia, and the reading view. In the writing space one structures an exploratory text, placing shards and fragments, moving them around, trying out different structures of organization. The essay you are reading began as a cluster of topics, radiating out from the beginning, and then eventually was turned into a long sequence. While reading, the spatial aspect of narratives in Hypertextopia is optional or absent.