PROVIDENCE -- Reading is in a revolution. Log on to a computer
and see.
You'll find Brown University leading the charge. Its professors and
students are forging the fledgling frontier of electronic writing, also
called literary hypertext.
The difference between books and hypertext is like the difference
between taking a guided tour of a city or exploring it for yourself,
says Robert Arellano, a Brown lecturer in English.
"Hypertext is getting off the train and backpacking," he says.
The hypertext medium isn't linear, like a book, and it isn't passive
either. Through key strokes or mouse clicks, users can steer a story --
to a degree. The hypertext creator determines the number of possible
storylines and options.
"Stories can change point of view in the middle, and jump forward and
backward in time," says Arellano, who produced the first full-length
fiction hypertext on the Internet in 1996. "It's interactive. Your
decisions as a reader make your experience different from anyone else's,
and different every time."
It's reminiscent of the Choosing Your Own Adventure children's series,
which allows readers to determine a story's course by turning to a
particular page. But hypertext is more than a grown-up and computerized
version of that 1979 series. And though it's been compared to an
interactive DVD, its practitioners say it's more.
They call it a unique new medium of communication and expression.
"It allows us to think of narrative art in a new arena," says Robert
Coover, a Brown professor of English. "Movement and sound all play a
part in the way narrative expands and develops."
Writing becomes performance art. Sounds and images augment prose and
poetry. And readers -- viewers, users, whatever you want to call them --
determine the denouement of the art.
Brown, which a decade ago was the first school in the country to offer
electronic writing and which this year became the first to offer a
graduate program in it, is bringing this art to the masses.
Next Tuesday, for the first time, Brown takes its annual literary
hypertext celebration, called Electronic Cabaret, off campus and into
downtown, to AS220.
"It's a kind of missionary work for the students," Coover says.
Emerging new art form
"We are at a nascent stage, barely emerging into cultural
consciousness," says Talan Memmott, Brown's first scholarship graduate
student in electronic writing. "There's still a bit of evangelism about
the medium that needs to happen."
Arellano was technically, although unofficially, Brown's first MFA
student in electronic writing in 1994, where his creative writing
thesis, submitted on computer disc, was on electronic writing.
"I was required to make a printout of it," Arellano says. "I put in all
these disclaimers discouraging the reader from reading the printout."
Hypertext programs, where they exist, are a multidisciplinary field,
involving computer science, media studies, music, visual arts and
English. But hypertext classes are still a relative rarity across the
country.
A year ago, Arellano asked an English professor at UCLA, which does not
have an electronic writing program, what it would take for hypertext
courses to become common in college English departments.
"A lot of professors of English will have to die first," she said.
"There is a certain amount of skepticism on the part of the old-guard
academics," Arellano says.
And while Arellano maintains that hypertext will take hold as computers
get smaller, faster and more portable, Coover looks for the passing of
that old guard.
"Hypertext is not my generation," says Coover, who is 71. "I'm an odd
character in it. The generation that grew up feeling at home with
computers is different from the generation for which it's a novelty."
Coover is sometimes called the Godfather of hypertext for his pioneering
work in the field, introducing hypertext workshops at Brown in 1990 and
'91, three years ahead of its emergence on the Web. Ironically, this
teacher and proponent of hypertext is not a practitioner of it. He
writes novels -- on paper.
At Brown, electronic writing is taught with an emphasis on writing,
which technology may amplify.
"I usually try to contain my students' appetite for hot media and all
the bells and whistles of the computer," Coover says. "It's still
conventional text, black squiggles on a page from which incredible
characters are created."
The Electronic Cabaret starts at 9 p.m., Tuesday, May 6, at AS220, 115
Empire St., Providence. Admission is free. A good source to see samples
of hypertext is www.eliterature.org
.
