Toward a Definition of Literary Cybertext: Emilia Branny
(CANCELED)
The paper will be dedicated to the issue of the literariness of cybertext. A definition coined by Electronic Literature Organisation and quoted recently by N. Katherine Hayes in "Electronic Literature" says that electronic literature includes "works with important literary aspects that take advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer". However, having "important literary aspects" has not been explained and is very hard to determine for a work which only partly consists of texts.
Instead, I would like to propose an approach which is pragmatic, allows to takes full advantage of the literary tradition in interpretation but is at the same time deeply rooted in the work itself. Even if it seems too simple to define literary cybertext as a cybertext claiming to be literature, this very starting point opens a promising theoretical perspective. The places where the claim is made are paratexts, including external references and links leading to the cybertext.
This presupposed literariness becomes the guide to the use of the cybertext and its interpretation by the reader. It makes a work of electronic literature an autopoietic system, where literariness becomes the main unifying factor. In fact it is the user who is used by the cybertext to maintain its unifying claim and reproduce itself. Interpretation, which aims at relating the work to literary tradition, becomes a conspiracy invented and pursued by the work, with the reader in the role of the operator.
This approach to literariness promises new readings of the works of electronic literature. It can be shown on Joyce's afternoon, of which I will propose a new and different reading, closely related to the literary tradition. The hypertext discloses three interdependent plots: the narrative, the psychological and the moral, which do not take a typical form of linear suspense and surprise but are subject to reconstruction. This reconstruction is only possible if the reader, conscious of the literary aspect of the novel, is looking for narrative structures and tensions related to the cultural tradition. Peter's search for his family appears to be an ironic tragedy and his life is structured as a Faustian plot of selling the soul to the devil. The story of reconciliation is the last one, and the most difficult to find. The three plots are represented by aporia-epiphany lexia structures and must be found by the reader. None of them is reducible to the aporia-epiphany pair (Peter's anxiety - account of the accident) that marked narrative closure for Jane Yellowlees Douglas.
I would also like to sketch the possible readings of a Polish hypertext short story "The Bus Stop", showing the possibility of interpreting not only the texts inscribed in the work but also its mechanism. The latter can also be attributed a sense related to literary tradition, thus falsifying the claim that the literary aspects of a cybertext can be reduced to the literary aspects of texts presented within this cybertext. I will refer here to a broader theory explaining how a cybertext mechanism obtains meaning in relation to the texts within this cybertext.