You should write a minimum of 1000 words in response to ONE of the questions below. Include detailed, and relevant, reference to the readings in your hypertext essay.Each hypertext should contain at least five text blocks.

You may submit your first draft either on your web page, or as a hypertext in Word. However, the final version should be posted on your web page.

1. Christopher Keep and Tim McGlauchlin write of afternoon, a story, “The death of the child is but a fenceline, a narrative limit on which the text momentarily catches, which arrests the reader’s attention for an epiphanic moment, only to release it again to the winds of chance..." To what extent do you agree with this summary of the narrative structure of afternoon, a story?

2. Both Shelley Jackson and Michael Joyce use collage (in different ways) to construct the reading experience of Patchwork Girl and afternoon, a story. With reference to particular sequences of text blocks, or to material within specific text blocks, analyze to what extent collage allows both Jackson and Joyce (you must refer in detail to both texts) to deepen or enrich the reader’s making of meaning.

3. In creating a complex hypertext, the writer has to construct each text block so that it will ‘make sense’ both to readers arriving from different paths at that particular text block, and to readers departing on different paths.

With reference to three text blocks from afternoon, a story analyze what George Landow calls the arrivals and departures, the introduction and conclusion to each text block. What techniques does Joyce use to arrest the reader’s attention at the beginning of the text block, and how does he prepare the reader with the final lines for her/his journey to the next set of destinations?

To complete this question, you should look both at the departure points of the text block(s) that bring you to your chosen blocks, and the arrival points at the text blocks to which your chosen segment links.

4. In dreampools, Joyce writes, “All this waste is merely a vain effort to somehow anticipate the future, to know now what men know will take them decades to understand.” Think of the immediate irony the text throws to the reader: a dominant narrator who works for a company that processes unimaginable amounts of information cannot even say with certainty whether or not his son has died.

To what extent is the one of the themes of this hypertext the impossibility of knowing, our inability to create from proliferating information knowledge, counterpointed against our continual struggle for certainty?

5. You have now read two hypertext novels. To what extent is your experience in reading in this medium radically different to that of reading a conventional text? Think carefully.

Does the medium simply make visible to us the techniques of construction of meaning we should apply to all texts, the choices we make about what language means in a particular configuration? Does ‘traditional’ text’s apparent seamlessness allow us ‘to get away with’ partial understanding, with a not making of full meaning, that the medium of hypertext does not? Refer to both Patchwork Girl and afternoon, a story in your response

6. Joyce uses language very richly and very densely within deceptively ‘easy to read’ text blocks. With specific reference to 3 -5 sentences, phrases or metaphors, analyze in depth how Joyce uses language to create ‘textual meteorites,’ dense nuggets of meaning relevant far beyond their local context.

7. "I can write about these processes, trying to record each turning of the mental gears and map each speculative footstep that leads to some final stage of understanding or confusion. Yet then I'm left with merely a chronicle of effects, an ultimately rather arbitrary catalog of external manifestations."

Although Robert Kendall is writing about his own process as the author of A Life Set for Two, he might equally well be writing about the detailed associative paths through the thoughts and actions of the characters in afternoon, a story. To what extent does the detailed record of the 'turning of mental gears' and the mapping of 'speculative footsteps' in afternoon, a story transcend the 'mere chronicle of events,' the 'arbitrary catalogue of external manifestations'? Use detailed quotation from the text to support your argument.

Tip: look for detailed definitions of chronicle and catalog, and look carefully at the qualifying adjectives, mere and arbitrary.

7. Choose your own question, and e-mail it to me at least a week before the first draft of h’text#2 is due.