Untitled - witz cultural

388NOTES TO PAGES156-202text, where the line in fact does not exist unless one invents and imDlants it.("End ofBooks," 1, 1i7I hardly agree with the overheated charge that the traditional novel served only as"the virulent carrier ofpatriarchal, colonial, canonical, proprietary hierarchical, andauthoritarian values," in part because the narratives ofmany traditional novels, particularlythose with multiple plots, are not accurately described as linear and in panbecause much postcolonial fiction appears in the form of the traditional novel-somuch so that African novelists have complained of the difficulties of publishingmore experimental fiction in the west, since publishers, they claim, expect a traditional realistic novel.2. Unfortunately, when one returned to one of them, olderversions of Netscapedeleted the intervening document tities, thereby tuming what been Ariadne's threadinto Hansel and Gretel's breadcrumbs. Furthermore, Netscape and similar browsersnot oniy did not retain records ofthe complete reading path when one backtracked,they also deleted it entirely both after each session and when users closed the viewerwindow even though one hadn't quit the application.3. Intermedia provided two forms of preview information. First, its web viewannounced destinations of all links from the current lexia; activating a link markerwith a single mouse click-clickingtwicefollowed the link-darkened the icons forall the lexias linked to it. Intermedia also permitted authors to attach descriptions toeach anchor, and these descriptions appeared in menus automatically generatedwhen one foliowed a link leading to two or more lexias. In contrast to Intermedia,storyspace allows authors to attach descriptions, not to anchors but to links themselves,though the reader perceives the result as much the same. As useful as thesefeatures were and are, hypermedia authors still have to assist readers by employingvarious techniques that constitute a rhetoric ofdeparfure.4. Clara Mancini's Ph.D. thesis, "Towards Cinematic Hlpertext,,,devotes severalchapters to surveying various attempts to define coherence by psycholinguistics andgestalt psychology. Although she does not mention the fact, almost all the proposed"discourse coherence relations," such as ',exemp1ifies,', ,,supports," and ,,disproves,,'precisely match the forms of typed links proposed in pioneering technical papersabout hypertext systems. Taking a different approach, Marie-Laure Ryan emphasizestotal hypertext structures, which she suggests can take eight different forms,including the graph network, tree, maze, flow chart, braided plot, hidden story andvector with side branches (246-58).5. In my earlier work, beginning in 1987, I attempted to sketch out the begin_nings of a rhetoric of hlpertext and hypermedia, and one way of answering the question,"Is this hlpertext any goodl" involves looking at the degree to which a parricularhypertext observes some of these minimal stylistic rules. This discussion,however, tries to broaden the question, looking for other sources of aesthetic pleasureand success.6. Is this the result of following a link? If one means by "following a link" thatwhen one carries out this action (clicking) new text appears, then by definition onehas followed a link, but in fact it is not clear that one has activated a link or anothercomputational procedure. Both the HTML and storyspace versions of (box(ing)