Search Results
Summary
Up until quite recently, narratives, no matter how disordered the chronological sequence whereby they develop, have been disseminated in Western culture primarily through the medium of the book, and the book demands to be read in an essentially linear fashion. Such is not the case, however, when we read electronic hypertext. When narratives appear in the medium of the book they are generally sequentially and durationally unambiguous; when narratives appear in electronic hypertext, temporal uncertainties accrue to both plot and duration. Shelley’s Jackson’ self-reflexive electronic hypertext Patchwork Girl, for example, both disables us from assessing it in terms of a causally connected beginning, middle, and end, and from making the one-on-one correspondence between the physical space of the narrative (its length in pages) and the temporality of our reading. By using Jackson’s text as an exemplary literary hypertext, I examine the effect that the temporal indeterminacy of hypertext has upon us. If, as I will argue, narrative serves as a means whereby we can attempt to master our own experience, allowing us to assess it in terms of a plot that develops over time and ultimately reaches a conclusion, hypertext may expose the illusion of such thinking.