Untitled - witz cultural

219RECONFIGURINGNARRATIVEfiction, therefore, one can expect individual forms, such as plot, characterization,and setting, to change, as will genres or literary kinds produced bycongeries of these techniques.When I first discussed hyperfiction in the earlier versions of this book,the novelty, the radical newness, of the subject appeared in the fact that almostall the sources cited were unpublished, in the process ofbeing published, orpublished in nontraditional electronic forms: these sources include unpublishednotes on the subject of hypertext and fiction by a leading Americannovelist, chapters in forthcoming books, and prerelease versions ofhypertextfictions. Now, a few years later, substantial numbers of examples of bothhypertext fiction and critical discussions ofthe subject have appeared. Followingthe strategy used in previous chapters, I shall therefore take almost allof my examples from widely available work, using whenever possible materialpublished on the World Wide Web.Quasi- Hypertextuality inPrint TextsOne approach to predicting the way hypertext might affect literaryform has pointed to Tistrarn Shandy, In Memoriam,Uysses, and Finnegans Wake and to recent French, American,and Latin American fiction, particularly that by Michel Butor,Marc Saporta, Robert Coover, and forge Luis Borges (Bolter, Writing Space,132-391. Such texts might not require hypertext to be fully understood, butthey reveal new principles oforganization or new ways ofbeing read to readerswho have experienced hypertext. Hypertext, the argument goes, makescertain elements in these works stand out for the first time. The example ofthese very different texts suggests that those poems and novels that most resistone or more of the characteristics of literature associated with print form,particularly linear narrative, will be likely to have something in common withnew fiction in a new medium.This approach therefore uses hypertext as a lens, or new agent ofperception,to reveal something previously unnoticed or unnoticeable, and it thenextrapolates the results of this inquiry to predict future developments. Becausesuch an approach suggests that this new information technology hasroots in prestigious canonical texts, it obviously has the political advantage ofmaking it seem less threatening to students of literature and literary theory.At the same time, placing hypertext fiction within a legitimating narrative ofdescent from "great works," which offers material for new critical readings ofprint texts, makes those canonical texts appear especially forward-looking,since they can be seen to provide the gateway to a different and unexpectedliterary future. I find all these genealogical analyses attractive and even