Untitled - witz cultural

304HYPERTEXT 3.0 the poem more easily in ways that the print version already encourages oreven demands. Its added interpretative link paths serve as readings, or ratheras records of readings, that, if we wish, we can make into our own.Most student academic webs, however, rely less on either central printtexts or on ways of writing associated with them. Once students began to useStoryspace, a hypertext environment that easily imports text, I began tonotice something that I have since rcalized characterizes hlperwriting-itstendency, already observed in the discussion ofhypertext as collage, to takethe form of appropriation and abrupt juxtaposition. For example, TomMeyer's Ploteaus appropriates and interlinks a broad variety of materials toexplain the relation of Deleuze and Guattari's thought to hypertext. In addition to Meyer's substantial discussionlexias and material garnered from theInternet, his Storyspace web has folders containing multiple documentsfrom A Thousand Plateaus, the Cabbala, Calvino's Invisible Cities, Burrough'sNaked Lunch, and The Satyricon.In addition to this tendency to exploit electronic collage for purposes ofinterpretive juxtaposition and comparison, the student webs share otherqualities, one of which involves joining what one might consider academicand so-called creative writing; that is, poetry and fiction. Again, this tendencyappeared in some of the earliest Storyspace webs. Adams Bookstoreby AdamWenger developed in two stages, the first as hyperfiction and the second as alaboratory for theory. As a midterm exercise Wenger created a Borgesian talethat readers can enter and leave at any point, something enforced by the facthe provided no title screen and arranged his lexias as a circle in the Storyspaceview (see Figure 32). For his final project, Wenger, who was highly skepticalof Barthes's approach in S / Z, applied the theorist's fi ve codes to his own work,producing a very heavily linked web. Of the fifty-one lexias and 354links thatconstitute Adamis Bookstore, approximately half consist of the original storyand if one clicks on the hot text in a specific lexia, one receives a list of six,eight, or even more links, the first several constructing the narrative, thosethat appear farther down in the list constructing Wenger's Barthean reading.Although few webs thus self-consciously apply critical theory to thestudent-author's own terts, a large number move effortlessly betvveen theoryand fiction or poetry. Karen Kim's Lexical Lattice, Shelley fackson's PatchworkGirl, and Michael DiBianco's Memory, Inc. (crealedin HTML and now part ofIhe Cyberspace Web) allthus interweave substantial lexias containing text similarto standard academic discourse with fiction or poetry.Lars Hubrich's In Search of the Author, or Standing up Godot, first createdin Storyspace and then recreated by him for the Web, exemplifies the plalul