Hypertext or Networked Text

Unlike the print text, a hypertext is networked text where each text is connected to other texts directly or indirectly. As George Landow points out the links connecting different texts shift "the boundaries between one text and another as well as between the author and the reader" (33) which leads to the disappearance of any fixed central text. In fact the center is continually reconfigured with the transforming narrative trajectory. Jay Bolter notes in Writing Spacethat the fluidity of the electronic medium allows the texts to be "in a perpetual state of reorganization. They form patterns, constellations, which are in constant danger of breaking down and combining into new patterns. This tension leads to a new definition of unity in writing, one that may replace or supplement our traditional notions of the unity of voice and of analyitic argument." (9)

As opposed to the print text with its topographically fixed linear and hierarchical structure, hypertext appears as comprised of decentered, mobile, and fragmented units of text through which the reader can trace her own unique path. Stuart Moulthrop describes the irreducible multiple spatial trajectories of the hypertext environment in term of "geographies of action," so that one needs to reconfigure one's map with the transforming narrative trajectory. Michael Joyce rightly points out that in our experience of interactive arts we create structures which he terms contours that are "transitory, evocable, multiple, and generative...They are in short, what happens as we go, the essentail communication between the artist who gave way and the viewer who now gives ways to see" (207). Judy Malloy's hypertext fiction is an example of a text that changes with each reading. The narrative appears in three main segments--Dawn, Sea, and Song. Each part consists of a series of lexia which can be read in a sequence determined by the computer's pseudo-random number generator. The reader can jump from one section to another or use the default command to read the lexias in each section. This ensures that each reading is different, since each would involve a different sequence of lexias and hence a different system of links thus exposing many different types of spatial relations.