Untitled - witz cultural

264HYPERTEXT 3.0so on) does prove usefirl because these categories directly involve how audiencesof both media find coherence upon encountering the filmic or alphanumerictext-inother words, Metz and Lancini describe what I have elsewheretermed the rhetoic of anival. Metz and other film theorists, like thoseconcerned with the rhetoric of hypermedia, propose techniques that convincethe audience that a newly encountered segment of a larger work iscoherent-that is, that it has a comprehensible relation to something that theaudience previously encountered. In this one sense, both forms of virtual cinemahave much of importance to offer hypertext and hypermedia. Onlysingle-person hypercinema, however, has close parallels with hypertext.ls Hypertext Fiction PossiblelIs hypertext fiction-narrative composed and read within ahypertext environment that encourages branching storylines-possiblel Some years back the New York Timesprinteda novelist's assertion that, contra what Bob Coover said, no one wottld everwrite a hypertext novel. Admittedly, this statement appeared pretfy silly onthe face of it since at the time she wrote hundreds of examples of hypertextfiction had already been written and some famous ones had seen publication.Nonetheless, as one looks at the literature created in hypermedia that hasappeared since then one wonders if perhaps that printJimited novelist mighthave unknowingly hit upon something important. One finds large numbersof digital poems in the form of animated text, hyperpoetry, and a combinationof the two. Where amid all the digital literature that resides on the Weband within other hypertext environments offiine is what Robert Coover hastaught us to call hlperfictionlNo one doubts that digital literature, digital art, and fusions of the twoflourish, and perhaps we are at the threshold ofa new Lucasian age ofliterature.Georg Lukacs's Theory of the Novel (79231proposed that each age has itsown chief narrative form. Thus the classical ages had the epic, the medieval(or Christian) ages the chivalric romance, and the modern age the novel.Reinterpreting Lucas in terms of ages of information technology, we see thatoral civilizations produce the epic, scribal culture the romance, and print culturethe novel. What will be the major narrative form of digital informationtechnology, if anyl Or, put another way, will the major form be hyperfictionorsomething else, perhaps poetryl I believe it's obviously too soon to makeany sure predictions. One can, however, make a few observations, the first ofwhich is that the first decades of digital literature consist largely of movementedor moving text, hyperpoetry, and fusions of word and image. Theexpected explosion ofhlperfiction does yet not seem to have taken place and,