While completing today’s assignment, I particularly enjoyed my time exploring Judy Malloy’s “Uncle Roger”. Malloy’s integration of more traditional text (in the form of short storytelling poems), with hyperlinks enabling readers to chart their own story within the poems, well-illustrated the non-linear storytelling potential of hypertext. Though the poems themselves were fixed, the ability for readers to “randomly” select the next poem in their larger narrative (sight-unseen), mimics the randomly accessible affordance of print literature. After clicking through the first “File” of “Uncle Roger”, I began thinking of successive clicks of the hyperlinks to the act of flipping the pages of a more traditional print text. However, unlike a print text, hyperlinks, though listed in an order, don’t require readers to engage with them in any particular way, nor with all of the sections. In fact, after making many clicks through the various hyperlinks, certain options became unavailable, ultimately adding the effect that certain storylines couldn’t occur after certain “actions” were taken. Readers make these actions almost arbitrarily, being given vague terms like “jane”, “food and drink”, and “semiconductor chips”, to choose from when constructing their own narrative from the poetic pieces. The second and third “File’s”‘ enable readers to make similarly arbitrary decisions by clicking one of three picture-links surrounding the text or an unlabeled key on a keyboard, respectively. Ultimately, through “Uncle Roger”, Malloy presents readers with the opportunity to engage with traditional text in a non-linear format while taking advantage of hyper-links and construct a hypertext of fixed pieces.
Today’s reading also prompted me to consider the role of hyperlinks and hypertext in my own online experiences. Nelson’s conception of, “a literature”, as, “a web of interconnecting documents”, enabled me to establish an understanding of how hypertexts fit into my typically more restricted definition of literature (Rettberg). More commonly thinking of the “canon” of print texts read in English classrooms, I never before considered the potential for seemingly unrelated texts I discover online to be literature in their own right. I began to think of my own experiences on Wikipedia, a website on which I frequently fall into a hole of clicking hyperlinks until I forget the place I started. Before reading Nelson’s conception of literature, I never would’ve considered my forrays into the depths of Wikipedia or times playing the Wikipedia Game with friends in middle school, as literary acts. Now reflecting on these experiences through Nelson’s lens, I regard them in a new light. Though clicking through links from an event, to a space, to an object, to a person, (and so on) doesn’t necessarily construct a clean narrative, the underlying logic constructs a web of text, or literature, and so engaging with a platform like Wikipedia, enables users to participate in a literary experience without picking up a book, or reading an article. Considering the plethora of information readily available on such sites, the literature constructed through hyperlinks then becomes essentially infinite and nearly entirely customizable by each reader, an affordance print text cannot achieve.
Ultimately, consideration of “Uncle Roger” and the affordances of hypertexts enabled by Nelson’s definition of literature, prompt me to ask the class the extent to which they agree with Nelson’s understanding of literature, and the infinite texts that subsequently contribute to the modern literary canon?