Linearity, Hypertextuality and Multimediality 131

Patrizia Nerozzi, Paola Carbone, Monica Lancini

Teaching Literature: Linearity, Hypertextuality and Multimediality

1. Introduction (Paola Carbone)

The shift from a mass media society to a personal media society,

as a consequence of the so-called digital revolution, implies a new
conception of knowledge as value. In an age where science and tech-
nology prevail, what could be the sense/significance of studying
humanities and, more specifically, literature? Rather than ask “why
devote ourselves to literary studies?” I believe we should consider the
relationship between literature and technology, or, better still, be-
tween literature and the means of communication since Information
Technology determines and shapes our time in today’s world.
Nowadays it is important not only what one knows, but also what
one is able to learn and communicate. In this context, education plays
a central role both in forming the internal processes of thought and
in teaching social and cultural interaction, which is more than ever
a mediatic one. Today both literary theoreticians and computer sci-
entists point to a convergence which indicates a dissolution of the
borders between the different scientific subjects, as intuited by
Postmodernism. All agree on the necessity of substituting conceptual
systems based on the ideas of centre, edges, hierarchy, and linearity,
with other concepts such as multilinearity, nets, links, webs,
rhizomatic space, and nomadism.
Even though Marshall McLuhan did not live in the digital era,

Textus XVI (2003), pp. 131-154.

132 Patrizia Nerozzi, Paola Carbone, Monica Lancini

he had already observed how Gutenberg had moved us from a total

and simultaneous perception to a perspective perception of space,
built on concepts of linearity and sequentiality, which has led to the
definition of centres, margins and “situated” positions for observing
the world. The global member of the tribe became the fragmented
man of Gutenberg. Circular, continuous oral space became linear,
Euclidean, measurable, divisible printing space. A similar idiom is
employed today to describe digital space itself and electronic writing.
It is even more important to highlight the fact that the Canadian
academic found a fil rouge from literature and the arts to the means
of communication, a path determined not as much by the kind of
message given as by the medium, or rather by the nature of the
communication and of the means used. Communication is never
immediate, but always mediated. More specifically, according to
McLuhan, professor of English literature and expert on Modernism
before becoming a media guru, language is the medium par excel-
lence; but at the same time it is also the medium par excellence of lit-
erature.
As further confirmation of the mediacy of communication, the
inspiring and essential analysis by Bolter and Grusin, Remediation,
underlines the fact that the history of the arts has always been char-
acterized by an alternation between concealing and unveiling the
presence of the medium. Better still, the arts alternate transparency,
immediacy and hypermediacy. The pictorial perspective, as Albrecht
Dürer noted, and as Panofsky reminds us, means “seeing through”,
that is to say, immediacy through transparency (Bolter et al. 1999),
or the mimesis of the product. It is also a commonplace that tradi-
tional literary realism aimed at creating a transparent interface that
erased itself, so that the user would no longer be aware of the me-
dium employed, but instead would have the impression of being in
a direct relationship with the content. In bringing social and histori-
cal references to the fore, writers applied literary conventions that
were essentially strategies of communication (what Ian Watt calls
“formal realism” is what the visual arts refer to as “perspective”).
The appeal of this idea of immediacy was felt up to the advent of
Modernism. Since Impressionism, through Matisse and Picasso, art-
 Linearity, Hypertextuality and Multimediality 133

ists have always tried to explore the interface between content and
medium. The mechanisms of creativity-in-process have been
brought to the forefront by the rejection of objectivity. Modernist
“narrative introversion” took shape as an internal crisis of presenta-
tion which showed up the process of the novel’s “making” and
dramatized the means by which the narration was achieved. The
attention paid by modernist authors to language and literary con-
ventions revealed the “mediacy” of the poetical communication, in
this way unveiling the poetical process to the reader. Joyce’s aware-
ness of language as a means of communication convinced McLuhan
(nicknamed for this reason “Joyce applied”) to consider how media,
seen as extensions of ourselves, both induce a trance-like state which
dispossesses us of the clarity that comes from a thorough and har-
monic perception, and reconfigure our perception of space. From
this we arrive at: the medium is the message; the content of a me-
dium is another medium; the global village is the pattern of post-
mechanical and post-Gutenbergian modern society.
The break with Gutenbergian linear space is, however, more
clearly suggested by Postmodern art, which is responsible for making
us conscious not so much of the complexity of the text as of the
semiotic production, identified in the production of reality as a lin-
guistic and cultural construct. Self-reflexivity disrupts the codes and
conventions which now have to be acknowledged. The medium is
thus revealed to the reader even though the textual device is still
Gutenbergian and for this reason still bound to the linearity of the
page. The page itself empowers the theorization of Derridean
decentering and of metanarrative praxis, but is unable to actualize its
premises because it is still tied to a sequential and striped space.
Digital narrative embodies all these deconstructionist premises.
Before discussing hypertextual narrative or cyber-texts, we wish to
clarify that the culture of the fragment finds its main expression to-
day, from the point of view of communication, in the transition
from mass-media to personal-media: from a “one-all” communica-
tion to an “all-all” communication, typical of molecular reality. In
the same way, the book, intended as a learning machine that gave
birth to a civilization and generated the modern concepts of subjec-
134 Patrizia Nerozzi, Paola Carbone, Monica Lancini

tivity, author, creativity, copyright, a reader distanced from the au-

thor in time and space, limitless copies of the same text, the immu-
tability of information, the transmission from centre to periphery,
has been integrated (not replaced) by hypertexts, multimedia and
virtual reality.
Today virtual reality aims to give the reader a “sense of presence”,
or rather the sensation of being part of that world which the compu-
ter graphic interface evokes through typical virtual equipment (hel-
met, glove). We can legitimately wonder if this sense of presence has
anything to do with the “sense of reality” suggested by realist narra-
tive and/or perspective in painting. But the sense of presence is
probably activated when we perceive, or suppose we perceive, the
world we are immersed in with our five senses. We have a sense of
reality when we believe that we can experience what we perceive
from within a fictitious/virtual reality. The first kind of experience is
a physical experience, the second one is mainly an intellectual one.
All this implies a different way of using the medium: in virtual real-
ity, the user/explorer becomes the protagonist as performer and
actualizer of the new environment.
On the other hand, the logic of hypermediacy rather than cancel-
ling the representational act, recognizes it and makes it evident.
Hypermediacy multiplies mediation signs, giving rise to a rich vari-
ety of sensory experiences. In present-day digital media, hyper-
mediacy is represented by the use of windows on the World Wide
Web, videogames, and overlapping desktop interfaces: this results in
our no longer being limited to a single point of view, but rather ac-
quiring heterogeneous spaces in which representation is conceived of
as overlapping windows or different boxes.
Concentration on the means of communication – remediation
(that is, a medium is mediated by another medium) – is characteris-
tic of contemporary digital art and electronic narrative. The user is
made aware of the creative process of a communicative performance.
He must be aware of the medium which is conveying the informa-
tion and therefore, by implication, of the artistic, interpretative and
critical process of a particular performance. It may be said that
remediation makes media mimesis visible and, as a consequence,
 Linearity, Hypertextuality and Multimediality 135

also reveals communication processes indissolubly linked with the

nature of the media used.
As we have already seen schematically, literature has always been
played out between the message and the medium, but today the
medium has become, on the one hand, the subject of the fiction,
and, on the other, an anomalous entity. Linear literary form (read-
able through a paper device, or better, the book) is also found in
hypertexts and cybertexts. Is it still possible to talk about literature
using books and linear critical argumentation exclusively as instru-
ments? If it is true that Eliot influenced Shakespeare, today we can-
not ignore the influence of digital technologies on our perception of
time and space, and therefore on our cultural heritage. As humanists
we have to contemplate precisely what our role is in the context of
today and as men/women of letters what kind of contribution new
technologies can bring.

2. A Case Study: IULM University (Paola Carbone)

At the Humanities Laboratory Research Centre of IULM Uni-

versity, the complex relationship between humanistic sciences and
digital technologies has for many years been a subject of analysis.
More specifically the professors of English Language and Literature
II and III have undertaken several projects focused on understand-
ing the logic of digital communication. The Centre has set up vir-
tual classrooms for specific courses on a) content editing, formulated
with the specific intent of implementing the TristramShandyWeb
website (www.tristramshandyweb.it), a commented online version of
Laurence Sterne’s novel; b) hypertextual creative writing; c) online
research.
The acquisition of both computer competence and an awareness
of the logical processes which make the telematic medium a builder
of meaning as well as a means of communication (computer lit-
eracy) have become powerful expressive tools for students of litera-
ture, who are used to investigating the principles and dynamics of
verbal message communication.
136 Patrizia Nerozzi, Paola Carbone, Monica Lancini

Our aim has been to bring students closer to digital technologies,

not to make them simply use one software or the other, but to make
them understand with critical awareness the expressive and cognitive
potentials of Information Technology. More specifically, the dual
perspective, critical and creative, of literary studies appeared to us
fundamental to their perception of both the work of the author and
that of the reader. Hypertextual rhetoric brought to light the much
discussed overlapping of these two figures, central to the literary
process. We have asked our students not to linger only on the
thought of an author, but to consider the semiotic mechanism in
relationship to its transmission. Another decisive element has been
to ask the students to force the traditional means of communication
to its limits: for example, to use a word as image.

3. Criticism and Hypertext: TristramShandyWeb (www.tristram-

shandyweb.it) (Patrizia Nerozzi)

TristramShandyWeb began over two years ago as a digital version

of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-
1767) by Laurence Sterne. In some way TristramShandyWeb was
born as a consequence of my academic course on the eighteenth
century novel which happened to take place at the same time as our
new research projects and growing interest in the relationship be-
tween the humanities and the new technologies. Consequently, our
original goal was to develop TristramShandyWeb as a tool for schol-
ars, researchers, and students and to offer a virtual space dedicated to
the study of “the most typical novel of world literature”, according
to the well-known definition by Viktor Shklovskij.
It has now become almost a critical truism to read Tristram
Shandy as a deliberate attack on contemporary literary conventions,
specifically on fiction conceived as a story presenting a coherent se-
quence of events following a chronological order and supported by
an adequate dose of realistic references. There is no need here either
to go into details concerning the innovative techniques of Sterne’s
novel or to insist on his experimental overturning of the autobio-
 Linearity, Hypertextuality and Multimediality 137

graphical progression. In a letter to Dr. John Eustace (February 9th

1768) Sterne writes: “[Tristram Shandy has] more handles than one
[…] every one will take the handle which suits his convenience”.
Imagining his novel as a house with many different rooms into
which the reader can choose whether to enter or not, or if we want
to risk the definition, as a hyper-novel ante-litteram, Sterne satisfies
the eighteenth-century interest in compendiums, treatises, dictionar-
ies and encyclopaedias with a play on intertextuality which has no
parallel in the history of the novel.
Since Tristram Shandy can be considered an investigation into
the nature of knowledge as well as an early demonstration of
decentering, fragmentation, and network distribution according to
non-linear logic, we aimed at showing its complexity in accordance
with the advantages of the hypertext format while avoiding a
deconstruction of the text.
Despite the use of the printed page, Sterne successfully expands
the concept of writing so as to include other forms of visual artistry
and communication, thus prefiguring a new type of narrative space
where the presence of the visual is not just figurative but rather cog-
nitive. Not only typographical signs such as pointing hands, aster-
isks, and dots but also graphics, straight and sinuous lines, one page
totally black, or another ornamented with an intricate marble pat-
tern, extend writing into a multimedia, interactive type of commu-
nication.
A few words on text processing and text surfability (see also:
Nerozzi 2002). The source used for our work is the SGML version
deposited by Diana Patterson in the OTA (Oxford Text Archive).
Oxford Computing Service gave us access to three text versions. The
one we adopted is the first edition. We also chose to maintain the
original carriage returns: the line breaks and page divisions are both
based on the original eighteenth-century edition whose layout we
intentionally preserved unaltered. Flouting the rules of “good”
cybertext syntax we paradoxically decided to keep Sterne’s text at the
centre of the screen, while the index of the novel and the menu of
the nine sections are placed on either side of the text, whose position
signals its centrality and determines the framework of the site.
138 Patrizia Nerozzi, Paola Carbone, Monica Lancini

Being both an anatomy and an encyclopaedia of the eighteenth

century, Tristram Shandy is the ideal novel to be explored through
different approaches and using different disciplines such as the his-
tory of literature, the history of art, philosophy, science, music, fash-
ion, according to a multiplicity of interpretative paths each con-
nected to the other through a dense intertextual network supervised
by experts (sections on the Arts, Fashion, History, HyperTristram-
Shandy, Irishness, Language and Rhetoric, Music, Novel, Poetry).
Each area is a sort of miniweb, divided into three or four parts: Es-
says (which contains articles on specific subjects), Net resources and
Bibliography (which contains bibliographies, with reference material
available both on the web and on paper), Miscellaneous, Computa-
tional Linguistics (the results of a computational analysis of the text
carried out with TACT-Text Analysis Computing Tools).
TristramShandyWeb is a project which rests on “collective intelli-
gence” as theorized by Pierre Lévy. He defines the virtual commu-
nity on the web as a shared space forum where each member is a
sense-producer at the same level, part of a collective intelligence
which produces shared knowledge. Therefore, the new figure of re-
searcher must be equipped with the intellectual flexibility required
by the multidisciplinarity implicit in research. This range of inter-
pretative approaches was what we had in mind when we planned
the various sections of TristramShandyWeb; we were also fully aware
of the importance of supervision and keeping information fluid.
Since it is very easy to publish on the net, we thought it necessary to
name a committee of experts in charge of vetting the material to be
published. As to the “impermanence”, or validity through time of
the site’s contents, we are well aware that they rapidly become obso-
lete, but our intent is certainly not to have the last word on Sterne’s
novel but to create a place for learning and research. The coopera-
tion of students in the project has proved functional both to their
learning the dynamics of multimedia rhetoric and to the analysis of
the whole narrative project of Sterne, who was looking for new solu-
tions not only to the linearity of narration but also to its printed
format.
 Linearity, Hypertextuality and Multimediality 139

4. Creative Writing (Paola Carbone)

The course in creative writing taught at the IULM University

Humanities Laboratory over the last three years has been entirely
dedicated to hypertexts and multimedia. Our programme in hyper-
fiction has evolved through important adjustments during this time,
partly due to the ever-growing interest and active participation of
students in the course and partly to the rapid evolution of hypertexts
as a literary and artistic form.
In their first year, students were free to either elaborate their own
individual project or to take part in experiments in collaborative
writing such as Mother Millennia (www.mothermillennia.org). They
wrote short stories in English in a linear and/or hypertextual version
using HTML and Storyspace. The following year, we organized a
hypertextual creative writing workshop inspired by the course taught
at Brown University by Robert Coover and Robert Arellano. This
initiative was aimed at promoting the use of the English language
and the testing of new forms of narration.
Hypertext and hypermedia represent a specific form of narration,
determined by the surface of the screen, which makes writing, as Jay
David Bolter puts it, a writing game of signs. The computer is the
place where we can store texts, images, and sounds and make them
accessible thanks to new techniques for shaping content. We might
say that the medium not only makes the text available, but also af-
fects the content, as literature and media archaeology has taught us
through the years. The literary text renewed as hypertext is deter-
mined by readers’ involvement, better known as interactivity, by a
modified author-reader relationship, and by a different interpretative
and analytical process. It is necessary to make a distinction between
hypertext and cybertext. Hypertext generally means a non-linear
textuality made of lexias that are interconnected by the use of elec-
tronic links. Cybertext, on the other hand, can be defined as an “ex-
periential” environment that rests on contexts where it is hard to
determine what is real and what is virtual (as far as sensory percep-
tion goes) (Ferri 2002). Hypertext still relies on a verbal dimension,
whereas cybertexts are characterized by multimedia environments,
140 Patrizia Nerozzi, Paola Carbone, Monica Lancini

whose interface, close to that of videogames, changes according to

the principles of “affecting computing”, that is to say, ways of com-
munication which strongly engage the user’s emotions.
Generally speaking, creative writing programmes are based on
lessons where a teacher tells his/her students “how to write”. Person-
ally, I consider this practice a highly dangerous one, since, although
it produces good results, it also standardizes writers, thus making it
difficult for them to experiment with new literary frontiers. On the
other hand, in our creative writing course, we expected peer-to-peer
collaboration from our students. This methodological choice, justi-
fied by our desire to see them actively participating, was additionally
motivated by the impossibility of teaching them how to write a
hypertext, since there are no codified rules at present, as hypertext is
a relatively new form of writing.
During the first workshop we asked students to write hypertexts,
because they were familiar with the idea of literature as verbal com-
munication. Furthermore, cybertexts have been developed during
the last three years or so and, compared with hypertexts, they re-
quire a greater amount of technical knowledge. No matter what
kind of digital textuality they are dealing with, the first thing stu-
dents have to get used to is the shift from the stable, monumental,
Euclidean space typical of Gutenberg’s printing linearity to the fluid,
interactive, rhizomatic, multisensorial, electronic writing space.
Digital narration entails a narrative method which is not devel-
oped in a progressive and continuous form, as in traditional fiction,
but rather by association in a paratactic and multidimensional struc-
ture. Hyper-textuality is an endless net of decentralized texts: each
node (or lexia) is a potential transitory centre with links, which,
once activated, lead the reader to abandon that node and its focus.
We must underline that any hypertextual work has its own organi-
zational principles or focal point, but the work itself can be endlessly
re-centered. Each document provides both information (message)
and directions on how to choose the next destination. George
Landow maintains that “[…] knowledge is distributed throughout
the network […]. The representation of knowledge […] is distrib-
uted among the strengths of the connections between the units”
 Linearity, Hypertextuality and Multimediality 141

(Landow 1997: 26). Hypertext modifies the logic of writing since it

is no longer an indexed sequence of letters (words, paragraphs, chap-
ters), but a net of possible readings. While the electronic writer de-
fines hypertextual links, the electronic reader employs them which-
ever way he likes, thus revealing the virtual nature of hypertext as a
connection between possible texts. Any act of reading actualizes only
one text. Hypertext, then, is a virtual text in that it is a chain of
possible texts only one of which is set up for each single reading.
We first suggested to the students two possible approaches to
writing, asking them to choose one. According to the first approach,
a hypertext is a living organism which develops naturally, so that a
limited core of nodes generates many more to form that creative
cohesion we call hypertext. This approach is typical of those creative
works on the WWW which, in order to survive, need the participa-
tion of cybernauts. Cybernauts can indeed add lexias, expanding on
a subject or ushering in new narrative paths. The second approach
to hypertextual writing, on the other hand, recognizes, from the
beginning, the presence of a “structure” or an organizational archi-
tecture for the narration that dominates, informs and conditions
text, context and hypertext, even though its decentralized nature
does not change at all.
Students had to learn to think in terms of blocks of meaning,
and to create the proper interaction among them. This implied the
planning of a complex non-hierarchical architecture of lexias mirror-
ing argument (which is never denied in a hypertext). The students
tended to bifurcate, building arborescent structures (the paths bifur-
cate to create a tree structure). Instead, we showed them (more effi-
cient) alternatives such as: total combinatorial structure (all lexias are
connected to each other, which may result in communicative atro-
phy because of an excess of communication), partial combinatorial
or network structure (lexias are only partially connected amongst
themselves in a net), axial structure (incunabula hypertexts created
by texts and notes, for instance), and false hypertext structure (with
only one link per lexia, so that reading is essentially linear). Even
without graph theory, hypertextual architecture reveals not only the
form of narration, but also the form of the thought we are hyper-
142 Patrizia Nerozzi, Paola Carbone, Monica Lancini

textually organizing by using hypertextual tools. Defining a structure

is essential in organizing a graphic interface and navigational menus,
which, in the case of digital art, cannot be considered just paratext.
A digital writer is asked to build a plot, but also a net of possible
fabulas and readings, as well as providing a set of possible interpreta-
tions the reader will elaborate on during the process of reading. The
author needs to anticipate the kind of use that will be made of his
information (contents of the lexias plus links). Not everybody knows
that hypertext lives in the interstitial spaces among lexias. Elsewhere
(Carbone 2001), I have defined hypertextual poetics as the “poetics
of suture” since the reader is responsible for seaming together what
he sees on the screen in a performance which changes from reading
to reading (there are different paths that can be followed) and from
reader to reader (there are different possible misreadings and logical
connections to be established). The construction of narrative corri-
dors implies the consciousness of this natural and implicit reaction
on the part of readers. The role played by the digital reader is essen-
tial in the organisation and creation of hypertextual discourse, espe-
cially with regard to links which activate the text. Digital readers do
not abandon sequence, but neither do they explore each node (espe-
cially when the text moves around the screen or is made indecipher-
able by the graphics). Thus the author must write while “thinking
hypertextually”, in order to guide the reader towards certain narra-
tive crossings.
Student-authors were challenged to keep suspense alive so as to
bind the reader to their work, not so much coming up with a coup
de théatre on the plot level, but rather making each block of mean-
ing interesting, and choosing engaging hot words (links) and strate-
gies of hypertextual connections.
A digital writer must be very skilful in scattering information
along more than one overlapping reading path, while bearing in
mind that any lexia can be polysemous (in actual fact it can be
reached from different directions) and must satisfy any kind of com-
municative need. A lexia may be either explicative or functional to
the progress of the story. In any case, it must fulfil the grammar and
the rhythm of the text. This not only implies training in rhizomatic
 Linearity, Hypertextuality and Multimediality 143

writing, but it accustoms the mind to nomadic thought: digital

thinking, in fact, includes re-reading.
Multiple reading of the same nodes is typical of electronic writ-
ing, but it represented a difficult hurdle for the students, as they had
to learn the art of digression and the use of anaphora. Re-reading
focuses the attention of readers not only on the contents, but also on
the tracks left by their desire for knowledge, on their curiosity about
the facts narrated and on the hypertextual links followed. In oppo-
sition to postmodern poetics, which considers this process as the
subject of the narration, hypertextual poetics turns it into the form
of narration. Elsewhere (Carbone 2001) I have observed how the
fruition of electronic textuality enables us to know both the story
and how we may live it. Furthermore, a hypertext caters to various
kinds of public on the basis of their competence and interests, read-
ers will be directed towards certain narrative and thematic nuclei,
unlike the single “traditional” implicit reader of the printed page. In
fact, the author should take into account the existence of more than
one “particular” kind of reader with his/her own specific cognitive
needs and curiosity.
Links carry out an important task since they are not simple elec-
tronic connections, but significative units connecting blocks of
meaning: as literary topoi, they determine meanings. When a text is
put into a net of other texts, it has to exist as a part of a complex
dialogue, and links contribute to determine that dialogue. Keeping
all this in mind, we presented the students with different kinds of
links according to George Landow and Mark Bernstein’s categories
which include different figures of speech.
The electronic link modifies the experience of a text by affecting
its temporal and spatial relationship with other texts. All nodes co-
exist at the same time, and it is up to the reader to establish hierar-
chies and logical/chronological sequences within the information
provided. If a traditional text suggests everything a priori (the way
we acquire information, and facts in logical and chronological se-
quence), the new writer has a sort of arena in which his material,
organized in advance, can in part be experienced autonomously.
Looking at the mechanics of digital literary communication from
144 Patrizia Nerozzi, Paola Carbone, Monica Lancini

a creative point of view, was useful to the students both as a means

of testing the hypertextual theories presented during the lectures,
and as a means of reflecting on literary writing in general. Albeit the
main reference was postmodern literature, from which digital crea-
tive writing developed its fundamental tenets, it has been our con-
cern to stimulate student comments and observations about litera-
ture from the point of view of the medium (paper or electronic), of
the tools used to transmit knowledge (language and multimedia)
and of communicative strategies (literary conventions and multime-
dia languages). Our course in creative writing was thus articulated
according to a triple perspective: that of linear literature, that of the
creative/interpretative principles of narratology, and that of hyper-
text and multimedia modes.

5. The Workshop in Hypertext Fiction (Monica Lancini)

People attending classes on hypertext fiction get a feeling of what

they are dealing with when asked to go through some of the best
works, such as Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson, Afternoon by
Michael Joyce, Grammatron by Mark Amerika, Hegirascope by
Stuart Moulthrop and others. One does not need to be well trained
in George Landow’s or Jay David Bolter’s critical theories to under-
stand that a hypertext is “something else”. No linear sequence and
no sense of an ending: these are the two things that quite naturally
strike anyone. “So, what am I supposed to do?”, students ask. When
I was a student myself, I was told: “Write a paragraph that has a
character, a setting, and a time dimension. This is your lexia. Then,
try to turn all these elements into links to some other information.
Just do it naturally. Hypertext will grow”.
The best definition of lexia is that of aphorism, something that
has its own meaning yet is, at the same time, polysemic. A lexia ac-
quires a connotative and/or denotative value, depending on its local
relevance, through a process of manifold combinations. Try to
think, as Italo Calvino did, of tarots (Calvino 1977 [1973]). A lexia,
as a verbal expression is a part of a unified, although decentered,
 Linearity, Hypertextuality and Multimediality 145

multi-linear, pluri-dimensional discourse. The process of linking bits

and bytes together is not just a progressive movement inside the
story (if one is still allowed to talk in a paper-like critical idiom), but
a patchy cognitive effort which takes place thanks to intuition and
meditation (Tosca 2000). It is legitimate to conceive of the logical
association underlying a link, the virtual gap between writing spaces,
as a rhetorical figure. Indeed, a link is a juxtaposition of mental as
well as real images and hypertext structure itself can be conceived of
as a sort of imperfect syllogism, where any understanding comes
from a main premise (1st lexia), plus a minor one (2nd lexia), plus a
logical deduction (3rd lexia), which comes to be the main premise in
the continuing process of getting things together. A hypertext re-
quires a complex procedure and a rigorous mind.
“From a rhetorical point of view, you do want to persuade your
audience. Right? So, think the same way and act identically. Try, as
much as you can, to build up alternative paths on the basis of meta-
phors, synecdoches, metonymies, periphrases, emphasis, hyperboles,
and synesthesia… The reader will get to know your style click after
click, don’t simply deceive him/her”. That’s what I tell students at-
tending classes on hypertext creative writing. I cannot teach some-
one how to create a masterpiece, since I don’t know myself, but
what I can do is make suggestions on how to translate thoughts into
logically organized patterns and technical devices that best suit artis-
tic aims. A talented hypertext writer is the someone who is able not
only to think of his/her work from a theoretical and critical point of
view, but also to rely on the technological media so as to make them
an artistic feature, perhaps the dominant one.
Just to make an example, let us consider Stuart Moulthrop’s
Hegirascope (Moulthrop 1997 [1995]), where HTML code is the
only thing that allows you to fully understand what you are going
through. When you face a totally black screen, which looks like a
dead end on your reading journey, then you might put the author’s
word into question. How is it that someone who has written won-
derful and convincing papers on “hypertext revolution” makes you
stop in the middle of nowhere? That’s not reasonable. We have read
George Landow’s, Jane Yellowless Douglas’ and Michael Joyce’s
146 Patrizia Nerozzi, Paola Carbone, Monica Lancini

claims about the openness and fragility of hypertext contours. So

much so that here the interface is treated ironically as its opposite.
Furthermore, the interface is the reversal of Bolter’s basic requisites
of transparency and hypermediacy. In a provocative way, Moulthrop
turns the interface into an equivocation, a sort of blind hiding a sec-
ond and deeper communicative level not on the screen, but through
the screen. Contrary to all the rules of Web usability, Hegirascope
requires a special wreader.
As a matter of fact, the interpretation of the source code –
through the selection of the browser’s option “View page source” –
is a dialogue with the machine, a way of looking for the real mean-
ing of what is in front of the viewer; this sets in motion a many-level
interpretative process, best known as anamorphosis. Anamorphosis
literally stands for the representation of a situation from a deformed
perspective, as in many examples from visual art. In the digital field,
it can be defined as a “visual trick of perspective based on hidden
codes and structures of signification” (Raley 2001). As one is sup-
posed to agree with the basic notions of visual perspective to under-
stand what a deviation is, you must understand some of the
hypertext basics to be fully aware of what is going on.
This is different from technical superiority or hyper-élitism.
What I call anamorphosis is a very significant example of how rel-
evant “technological consciousness” is today as an analytical and
investigative tool (see, for instance, <http://iat.ubalt.edu/moulthrop/
hypertexts/HGS/HGSXX2.html>). Understanding HTML code lets
you bring words to the surface, meaning that the author, the ma-
chine and the reader share the same idiom, as the foundation of a
reciprocal understanding.
It is impossible to transcend the strict relation between technical
features and critical notions. They are interconnected and very
much so. If form and content do not match, the work will never be
convincing, that is, effective and persuasive. Each technical level
undermines conceptual stability and is, as Mikhail Bakhtin would
say, a “vision of the world” that reshapes ideas into an interface is-
sue. New technical features often correspond to techno-logics, the
underlying principles according to which you think of and conse-
 Linearity, Hypertextuality and Multimediality 147

quently design your work. How many ways of envisioning a hyper-

text do we have at the present stage of techno-logical development?
I would say at least four, which we can call by their technical names:
Storyspace; HTML; DHTML, and finally the Plug-in generation
hypertext.
Storyspace is a software that works off-line. It was developed by
Eastgate Inc. Systems about twenty years ago as a development of
Intermedia, Dyna Text, and other authoring tools such as the well-
known Macintosch Hypercard. Since then, it has been constantly
upgraded. Storyspace is the source of today’s hypertext. It is very
easy to use and does not require any programming skills (this is the
main reason why we introduce students to it at the very beginning
of the course). Storyspace automatically translates your work into
three different visual representations of the map. No matter where
you are, you never feel lost. Students need a perfect mechanism
where, in just the way they want it to, every wheel turns enabling
innocent writers to master all the lexias at the same time.
Michael Joyce, apart from referring to Storyspace as a “structure
editor”, writes that it “originated as an attempt to develop a text-
processing tool to enable writers of interactive fictions to exploit
multiplicities” (Joyce 1998: 95). Storyspace produces conceptual
intricacy as opposed to a simple interface made of mostly white
pages, pure text and no image. It is not that the system created by
Bolter, Joyce and Smith is unable to import other formats apart
from word processor. Storyspace can handle images, sounds, and
colourful interfaces, but this is generally not the case. When back
ten or more years ago Storyspace was the only authoring tool
around, all the critical attention was devoted to conceptual specula-
tions about the power of words to evoke mental associations and
make them real through the use of digital links. Nobody really cared
about graphic design… then came HTML.
The WWW (1989) immediately meant two things: world wide
circulation of ideas and graphic design. Browsers made textual com-
munication mainly visual. The first generation of online writing was
a mixture of the still dominant verbal expression and the newly ac-
quired iconic dimension. HTML totally hid the map, the structure
148 Patrizia Nerozzi, Paola Carbone, Monica Lancini

of the whole work, in favour of the local dimension of the Web

page. Furthermore, paratext immediately became so relevant that in-
formation was soon extended beyond simple words. Web designers,
media theorists, people doing research in cognitive science have
elaborated interesting ideas about what interface is and how it
should work.
DHTML (1999), that is, dynamic HTML, complicated the writ-
ing space a little bit more by making things move inside the page.
The invention of Java Scripts and other programming features led to
what Talan Memmott defines as the complication of the traditional
notion of lexia, newly renamed as perplexia. Perplexia is “the ability
to overlap text, image, any object on the page [that] alters the con-
cept of the document on the Web” (Amerika 2001). The static en-
vironment of first generation hypertexts thus became mobile, dy-
namic.
Finally, what I call “Plug-in generation” is made of consoles ap-
pearing on the page in order to integrate words and images with
sounds and movie clips towards a cinematic form of communication
and an overheating of the medium. Hypermedia has brought us to
hallucination, to the solicitation of all senses: the visual, the hearing
and the tactile.
Hypertext, hypermedia, cybertext, no matter how you call it: the
WWW is like a blender where many things are put together and
mixed up. But as any good cook knows, the quantity and quality of
the ingredients should be well selected. For this reason, we generally
assign a lot of reading of hypertext fiction during the first weeks of
the course and talk about it in class. Each student is supposed to
critique a work and to confront other people’s opinions about it.
On a regular basis, one person at a time is in charge of making an
oral presentation to the class of the readings. Then students can ask
questions or, even better, agree or disagree with what the speaker has
just said, which helps increase their critical skills.
In the second part of the course, each class hour is dedicated to
the critique of the students’ own creative projects. Every week one
person presents his/her work in progress to the class. At this point,
the students are not “defending” somebody else’s hypertext, but
 Linearity, Hypertextuality and Multimediality 149

their own. They are exposed to criticism of their technique as well as

to conjectural speculations, experimenting with the author encoun-
tering the audience’s feedback in real time. Students offer useful
suggestions on how to improve ongoing projects. At the end of the
course, they have finished their individual projects. Most of all, eve-
ryone knows not only what writing a hypertext technically and theo-
retically means, but how their works might be placed in the literary
panorama. They are able to answer a question such as “what has my
work to do with Shelley Jackson, Stuart Moulthrop, and Michael
Joyce?” as well as “to what extent is it techno-logically significant?”.
From a pedagogical point of view, we introduce these technical
elements – how to use Storyspace, how to write HTML tags, how
to scan and modify images, how to create Flash animations – at the
very beginning of the course, while we are concentrating on the
readings. Acquiring the principles of hypertext design and aesthetic
is necessary in order to practice with both compositional tools and
reception theories. Any creative process is preceded by the awareness
of compositional dynamics and by a valuable intertextual dialogism.
Some works written during the 2000-2001 workshop at IULM
University were then presented at DAC (Digital Art and Communi-
cation) Conference 2001. Let us start from a Storyspace hypertext
called Sms by Doriana Costa. She collected thousands of short mes-
sages that she got through her cell phone and then built up some
lexias. What I find remarkable about it is the “deviated” use she
made of the software genre. As we said before, it is typical of all local
hypertexts written with Storyspace to make an essential, or better
quite irrelevant, use of graphics. You won’t fail to notice it by simply
taking a look at Afternoon, Victory Garden, Quibbling and many oth-
ers. Somehow Storyspace defined its own genre by giving much
more importance to the word, still black-ink like on a white page,
than to graphics. But Doriana Costa appropriated a Web-oriented
logic where the audience would expect the exact opposite, making
use of invasive colours and sounds which is very far from the con-
solidated Storyspace tradition.
However, viewed in the context of HTML, the reverse is also
true. As a series of HTML documents, Sms looks like a first-genera-
150 Patrizia Nerozzi, Paola Carbone, Monica Lancini

tion hypertext that owes a lot to Storyspace. This significantly un-

dermines the uniqueness of hypertext techno-logics. Apart from the
fact that one cannot fully convert a Storyspace document into
HTML without revising the whole code, each technological system
has its own rules and ways of encoding and decoding information.
Doriana herself says that the two main problems she has had in
passing from Storyspace to HTML are due to the rebuilding of both
structure and interface, which are not at all secondary elements.
When I attended George Landow’s course on Hypertext Criti-
cism myself (1999), the midterm assignment consisted precisely in
developing the same project both in Storyspace and in HTML. You
were not allowed to change any word or make significant variations.
It was soon obvious that the same thing, even if within two different
environments, generated two different results in terms of the reader’s
expectations. If content and form don’t match, your work won’t be
convincing, or effective. You are deceiving your audience.
Two very much Web-oriented projects are Mariangela Venezia’s
Veins like Roads – <http://web.tiscali.it/veins/> – and the untitled
work by Manuela d’Ercole – <http://web.tiscali.it/manuela_d/>.
Both of them make such a wide use of images that the visual mean-
ing is an integral part of their works. Consider, for instance, that in
Manuela’s case there is a total correspondence between what is
metaphorically called the “home page” with an almost full screen
picture of a house. You enter the work by every possible opening, as
hypertext is, in Eco’s terms, an “open work” itself. Once you have
entered, pictures are both redundant as well as allusive. For example,
in <http://web.tiscali.it/manuela_d/grandma.htm> the image of the
grandmother might be interpreted as a repetition of what words al-
ready tell us.
But if you consider <http://web.tiscali.it/manuela_d/4th.htm>,
the hourglass image does not immediately refer to the words on the
left side. On the contrary, the picture establishes an instantaneous
mental association to the hot word at the origin of the link leading
to this page. In order to understand the meaning of the picture, you
must go back to the word “stop” on the previous page. As a matter
of fact, if you question the structure of the page and not that of the
 Linearity, Hypertextuality and Multimediality 151

work, you might ask about the relation between: “This is the least
wise solution! Staying in the same place without making your mind
up is surely self-defeating. That means making fun of oneself and on
this subject I have something to tell” and the hourglass, whose con-
notation is temporal rather then spatial. It is the picture that accom-
plishes the logical association underneath the link bringing the
reader to this page, whereas words are the additional part that, from
this page, leads you ahead. Thus, the picture creates a backward
movement and the words create a forward movement. Although the
use of graphics is dominant on the Web, verbal expression is not
restricted to a caption function. Manuela d’Ercole’s work offers a
very good example of media integration.
A third use of images is made by Mariangela Venezia. In Veins
like Roads pictures are the objective correlative of the narrator’s
monologue. See, for instance, <http://web.tiscali.it/veins/inglese/
mezzogiorno.htm>. The orange background and the intensity of the
sun refer both to sentences like “from the foliage of the trees is now
filtering a very warm sun tiring you a little…” and to the intensity
of thoughts, to the passionate feelings inside the narrator’s mind. See
also <http://web.tiscali.it/veins/inglese/ele.htm>. The image of the
sun is recurrent, and serves somehow as a unifying factor. In a frag-
mented form of communication, images are important in preserving
a certain amount of coherence inside the work.
Finally, Sara Rossetti’s MetroMind delicately filters the use of
graphics. The author plays with background and text colours – red,
black, and white – in a very simple but effective way. The text is
well written, letting words speak far beyond any other visual element
she might have placed there. See, for instance, <http://web.tiscali.it/
softysit/dipinto.htm>. Despite Mark Rothko’s picture as back-
ground, words are so much telling in themselves that the image is
totally subsidiary. Or again, see the perfect symmetry in the way she
puts words down in <http://web.tiscali.it/softysit/tutto.htm>, play-
ing with them graphically and elegantly. Whether on a page or on a
screen, as a long literary tradition has shown us, words are signs that
can be arranged so as to form visual as well as enigmatic disposi-
tions. In this case, no matter how you resize the page, words keep a
152 Patrizia Nerozzi, Paola Carbone, Monica Lancini

homogeneous order. That is, they can make either short or long sen-
tences according to the dimension of the page, nevertheless they
don’t detract from a well balanced structure. Furthermore, despite a
simple interface, the conception of the whole work is quite sophisti-
cated.
As a conclusion, last year we asked students who were taking the
course for the second time to work on a common project that had
more to do with hypermedia than hypertext. The main idea was
that of including words, pictures, video, audio, and animations, to
see what would happen if the reader was allowed to proceed either
by subtraction or by combination of media. What if someone were
to go through the story by choosing one code and contact at a time?
What if he/she were to build up the narration by combining two or
more media at the same time? What if he/she wanted the whole
range of possibilities at one time? Take, for example, a story of a girl
leaving her home town. We might trace her profile by written
words, pictures, video, and audio. We might give the reader all these
possibilities. The reader chooses how to combine them. For any a
single event in the story, student writers might compose: 1. a short
written description; 2. a picture; 3. a taped dialogue; 4. a video.
We tried to imagine how to make the whole thing work. Should
one person in the group take care of one medium? Should all the
people together react to each event by exploring all media at the
same time? Could people work together? Were there enough class
hours on a weekly schedule to do all that? As a result, we started
working on the project at the end of the course, but after all these
speculations about hypermediation, we are convinced that we will be
able to produce the actual work in the 2002-2003 academic year.
As a result of students’ involvement and enthusiasm most of
them are now working on their BA (laurea) thesis dealing with sub-
jects that are strictly related to literature and new technologies.
That’s why, in order to improve their critical knowledge, let ideas
circulate and proliferate, we are presently running a seminar on rel-
evant topics such as media philosophy and video games narrative
structures.
 Linearity, Hypertextuality and Multimediality 153

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