Untitled - witz cultural

256HYPERTEXT 3.0 hypertext, and links are reified associations, a poetic mode or form seemsespecially suited to hypertext. Looking at a range of digital works, we see thatmuch hyperfiction actually takes the form of hyperpoetry.Coover himself has expressed the idea that hypertext might turn out to bemore a poetic than a narrative form, and many of the webs at which we havealready looked, particularly those by Guyer and foyce, suggesthat such mightbe the case. They reveal, as Jean Clement has argued, "a shift from narrationto poetry in fiction hyperterts." According to Clement, "hl?ertexts produceatthe level of narrative syntax-the same 'upheaval' as poems produce at thelevel of phrastic syntax." In other words, the way links reconfigure narrativeleads to a defamiliarization that parallels the effects of characteristically poeticdeparrures from word order, common usage, and the like. Clement continues:"Hypertexts free narrative sequences from their subjection to the syntaxof conventional narration to insert them into the multidimension[al] space ofa totally new and open structure, as poems free words from their linkage tothe straightness of the syntagmatic axis to put them in a network of thematic,phonetic, metaphoric (and so on) connections which create a multi-isotopicconfiguration" (71). The explanation may be even simpler: the link, the elementthat hypertext adds to writing, bridges gaps between text, bits of text,and thereby produces effects similar to analogy, metaphor, and other formsof thought, other figures, that we take to define poetry and poetic thought.Yet another ground for believing that hypertext might privilege poetryparticularly its lyric forms, appears in ferome J. McGann's argument that "theobject of poetry is to display the textual condition. Poetry is language thatcalls attention to itself, that takes its own textual activities as its ground subject."He emphasizes that such a claim does not assume "poetic texts lackpolemical, moral, or ideological materials and functions. The practice of languagetakes place within those domains. But poetical texts operate to displaytheir own practices, to put them forward as the subject of attention" (TertualCondition,10-11), or, as McGann explains later, "The object of the poetical textis to thicken the medium as much as possible-literally, to put the resourcesof the medium on firll display, to exhibit the processes of selireflection andself-generation which texts set in motion, which they are" (I4). McGannrefers to the bibliographical and linguistic resources ofwritten and printedlanguage, but hypertext adds a new element-the link-tothe mix. Since thelink and various associated functions, such as lists ofdestination lexias, serveas the defining resources of hypertext, one expects to find them foregroundedin literarywebs, and such is in fact the case. Of course, at this point