Jill Walker
ABSTRACT
This paper presents a historical view of hypertext looking at pre-web hypertext as a domesticated species bred in captivity, and arguing that on the web, some breeds of hypertext have gone feral. Feral hypertext is no longer tame and domesticated, but is fundamentally out of our control. In order to understand and work with feral hypertext, we need to accept this and think more as hunter-gatherers than as the farmers we have been for domesticated hypertext. The paper discusses hypertext in general with an emphasis on literary and creative hypertext practice.
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Index Terms
- Feral hypertext: when hypertext literature escapes control
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Reviews
Richard Weld Bailey
"Feral texts," in Jill Walker's view, have escaped from human domesticity and roam the Web transforming themselves. "Feral hypertexts," she writes, "are the large collaborative projects that generate patterns and meaning without any clear authors or editors controlling the linking" (page 47). In a careful and well-documented essay, she traces the history of computer-generated fiction from the invention of hypertext to the present. "The death of the author" has been a cry of literary theorists for more than half a century, beginning with the New Critics of the 1940s and 1950s, who debunked the biographical approach to literature as the "intentional fallacy." The literary work had to speak in its own voice. French philosophy and postmodernism have only extended that idea. Authors cannot be knowing; not even works can be known. Only knowing can be known. The "wilding" of hypertext takes place through "distributed narratives." In studies of the story telling of adolescents, researchers have found that boys tended toward monologue and girls toward "group narrative," in which a past event is recalled in an interlace (and overlap) of narrative voices. Weblog clusters, in an ebb and flow of linkages, are typical of feral hypertext in action. This is a clearly written and engaging paper. Online Computing Reviews Service
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