Hypertext and Character

This is just fascinating reading on the development of Paths in hypertext. If we go back to the original version of the story and compare it the new rendering in Storyspace, we see lots of new developments. This is important to the notion of the environment and its relation to character and character as an aspect of knowledge, and Susan’s work has inspired me to go back to our email rounds with the characters we developed there.

Here’s the idea. We go with the notion that character in fiction is a form of knowledge dependent on the narrative space in which the persona is situated. Paths in hypertext was able to draw out that which went unknown before. Such possibility then.

More to come.

4 thoughts on “Hypertext and Character”

susan December 4, 2007 at 4:28 am

Interesting concept here, and one that I hadn’t been aware of untill Storyspace. Are we affected by the transient, traveling via e-mail nature of Marie, Tom and Frank and so discover different things in blips formatted by Microsoft Express? Do they behave differently because they have those restrictions upon them? Conceived in Send and finding themselves delivered within seconds in a strange Inbox? Where they wait in the dark to be discovered? Does it matter whether they are formed not only by monitor and method, PC or Mac, but from your campus office or living room, my shop or den? What does the storyworld truly encompass?

BTW, it’d be nice to resurrect them; I find myself back nearly in Poe-speak with my writing of late. They in fact influenced my own narrative voice in Paths.

(I shoulda put this on my own weblog, huh…sorry)