Untitled - witz cultural

Reconfiguring the TextFrom Text to HypertextAlthough in some distant, or not-so-distant, future all individual texts will electronically link to one another, thus creatingmetatexts and metametatexts of a kind only partly imaginable at present, less far-reaching forms of hypertextualiry have alreadyappeared. Translations into hlpertexfual form already exist ofpoetry fiction,and other materials originally conceived for book technology. The simplest,most limited form of such translation preserves the linear text with its orderand fixity and then appends various kinds of texts to it, including criti cal commentarytextual variants, and chronologically anterior and later texts.lHypertext corpora that employ a single text, originally created for printdissemination, as an unbroken axis offwhich to hang annotation and commentaryappear in the by-now common educational and scholarly presentationsof canonical literary texts (Figure 7). At Brown University my studentsand I first used Intermedia and Storyspace to provide annotated versionsof stories by Kipling and Lawrence, and I have since created more elaborateWorld Wide Web presentations of Carlyle's " Hudson's Statue" and other texts.TheDickensWeb,acorpusofmaterialsfocusedon GreatExpec-tationspublishedin Intermedia (IRIS, 1990) and Storyspace (Eastgate, l992l,differcfromtleseprojects in not including the primary text, as does Christiane Paul's UnrealCity: A Hypertert Guide to T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" (19941.A second case appears when one adapts for hypertextual presentationmaterial originally conceived for book technology that divides into discretelexias, parricularly if it has multilinear elements that call for the kind of multisequentialreading associated with hypertext. An early example of this formof hypertext appears in Brian Thomas's early HyperCard version of Irnitqtio