Sunday, February 9, 2020


Most postmodernist works have aspects of metafiction and reflexivity. Metafiction is when the story has a plot and characters like any other story; however, metafiction rejects traditional narrative conventions. The authors are aware of what typical conventions are, and actively try to subvert those conventions. Reflexivity primarily comes in two forms: authorial reflexivity and intertextual reflexivity. Authorial reflexivity is when the author appears in the text, while intertextual reflexivity is when the author references their own work and other works as text. These aspects of postmodernist works are also present in many hypertext works as well. As previously mentioned, most postmodernists are concerned with metafiction, and hypertext fiction is an excellent medium to change narrative. Hypertext allows the author to create an extremely complicated “choose your own adventure” book by limiting what the reader can read based on their previous choices. In the hypertext fiction afternoon, a story, the protagonist is uncertain if his ex-wife and son were in an accident. Readers are only given a paragraph of text connected by hyperlinks; however, there are many different hyperlinks and different results for the same hyperlink. This is an excellent example of how hyperlink fiction can be used in an innovative way; changing conventional form of the text to paragraphs instead of pages, and not having clear chronological order for a story. This is something that cannot be achieved through traditional text; even stories that reject traditional narrative structures are limited by pages having a certain order. That is what I found interesting about hypertext fiction: it allows authors to alter the form and sequence of stories in ways that were impossible with books. With some hypertext stories you could potentially never read everything, and sometimes there will not be the closer of reading a book cover to cover.

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HAPPY GRADUATION to the VERY first class of TBD majors!!! (I wish we could celebrate in person!)