In Search of a Story:
Reading and Writing E-Literature
Rebecca Luce-Kapler
Teresa Dobson
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| Abstract
The authors report on the first year of a three-year study to investigate the reading and writing of e-literature (also known as “hyperfiction” or “literary hypertext”). Specifically, the researchers used two forms of hypertext software—wikis and Storyspace—with 12 undergraduate students whose declared major or minor was secondary (middle or high school) English education. Participants read examples of published e-literature and created their own hyperfiction using wikis. The authors also participated by creating their own hyperfictions. In this article, data from one of the author’s writing journals are compared with reading responses of the 12 participants. The data show that the author and undergraduate students had difficulty creating meaning in e-literature since, as writers and readers, they had come to understand such a process from their familiarity with print and narrative. Rather than relying on a chain of metonymies that connected and developed the overall metaphor of the story, they had to think of chains of metonymies that offered a less cohesive sense of story. The findings suggest that new skills for working with e-literature will need to be developed and taught, particularly for those readers and writers whose experiences have been primarily with print. |
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Introduction | The Genre | Method | Data | Conclusions and Implications | References
Reading and writing literary hypertext (also known as e-literature or hyperfiction) poses a challenge for those schooled in print traditions. While many of the literacy practices learned in the print realm are useful and necessary to understanding hypertext, the medium also demands new skills as it “remediates” (Bolter, 2001) its predecessors. For instance, e-literature may play with form and follow “the path of late–twentieth-century fiction, characterized by multiple perspectives and voices, and episodes linked with associative logic and memory” (Douglas, 2000, p. 8), but it may not provide the opportunity to access the extent of the text visually at one time.
While much debate has occurred about the place of hypertext in education (Landow, 1997; Snyder, 1998), its presence is not widespread in schools. The reasons for this range from teachers’ hesitation about their technical capabilities and the effects of technology in their classrooms (Dobson, 2001; Luce-Kapler, 2000) to a deficit of information about the relationship between learning, teaching, and hypertext (Snyder). Hypertext use appears most often in informational or research assignments, especially those relying on the Internet. With a thin backdrop of studies, discussions continue about the benefits, drawbacks, and processes of hypertextual reading and writing (see, for example, Bernstein, 1997, online document; Bolter, 2001; Burbules, 1998; Dillon, 1996; Miall, 1999; Moulthrop, 1995; Murray, 1997).
In an effort to determine some of the literacy skills employed in reading and writing e-literature, we developed a three-year qualitative study to examine how hypertext can develop and enhance literary knowledge that extends and modifies the processes related to the study of reading print. This research included using two forms of hypertext software—wikis and Storyspace—with 12 undergraduate students enrolled in a bachelor of education program. All were preparing to teach at the secondary level, and all had English as a declared major or minor focus of study. Participants read e-literature such as Shelly Jackson’s (1995) Patchwork Girl and created their own hyperfiction using wikis. As researchers, we also participated by creating our own hyperfictions.
In this article, we present and discuss data from the first year of this study. Specifically, we report on the comparison of the first author’s writing journals with the participants’ reading responses to Patchwork Girl. The data showed that, as writers and readers familiar with print and narrative, both the first author and the study participants had difficulty creating meaning in the hypertext medium. Rather than relying on a chain of metonymies—that is, individual events that contribute to the overall “whole” of what we call the story (Brooks, 1984)—they had to think about multiple chains of metonymies that offer a less cohesive sense of story and a continually shifting sense of meaning. From our analysis of these findings, we recognized that some new skills for working with e-literature will need to be developed and taught, particularly for those readers and writers whose experiences have been primarily print based.
Defining the Genre
Hyperfiction saw its genesis in the mid- to late 1980s when software such as HyperCard for the Macintosh platform was making its debut. The seminal hyperfiction, published on disk by Eastgate Systems, is generally thought to be afternoon, a story by Michael Joyce (1987). This “interactive novel” goes beyond the relatively simple tree-like structure of print literature written according to the “Choose Your Own Adventure” model (wherein readers may branch off along different threads at certain points in the story); instead, it is truly multidirectional, offering brief nodes of text connected in myriad ways such that it would be unlikely that any two readers would ever effect the same reading. In this sense, it challenges our understandings of literary structure in substantial ways. In the nearly 20 years since the publication of afternoon, a small body of literature has appeared in this form; some is freely available on the Internet, and some, such as Patchwork Girl (which is described in more detail later in the article), is distributed on disk.
An Introduction to the E-Literature Form
Figure 1 illustrates a text box from a wiki and its links (in blue) to other text boxes from the initial segment of the e-story “Taliesin” that we created (and are continuing to develop) to introduce our research participants to hyperfiction. “Taliesin” (inspired by a visit to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West) begins in the desert with a woman and a box of photographs. As the story unfolds, the reader realizes that this is an account of three women: Georgia O’Keeffe; her friend, Beck Strand; and a fictional granddaughter who is the narrator.
Clicking on the link “mountains” takes one to a short text box describing a fictional O’Keeffe painting a mountain:
[Georgia] paints the mountain, rivulets of dried blood creased into the flanks, a softening of the peak into white slumber. Blue sky sharpens the lines of determination, hidden beneath stone, saltbush springing up along the path of tears....
Wiki is a Hawaiian word meaning “quick.” In the context of hypertext, it refers to a website that can be edited on an ongoing basis by a community of users. Lamb (n.d., online document) defines the wiki as “a collaboratively-edited website which many people also view as an anarchistic publishing tool. The distinguishing feature of wikis is that they typically allow all users to edit any page, with full freedom to edit, change and delete the work of previous authors.” A wiki has a simple set of text formatting rules with easily created pages and links. A “recent changes” link generally lists the pages that have been edited, enabling an individual to trace the revisions—both her own and others’.
With another software program that we use in our research, Eastgate Systems’ Storyspace, we created a different perspective of the “Taliesin” story, in which the links are hidden (see Figure 2a). In contrast to the wiki, Storyspace reveals the underlying structure of the e-story through a choice of map, chart, or outline views in addition to the text boxes (Figure 2b). (Text boxes can also contain images, sound, and other multimedia.) Unlike the open websites of the wiki, Storyspace creations are discrete entities that, once completed, become read-only documents. While this program gave us ready access to the structures of our story, the flexibility and speed of creation allowed with the wiki were lost.
Overview of the Study’s Method
This qualitative study is being conducted over three years and at two sites: Queen’s University (Kingston, Ontario, Canada) and the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada). Over the course of the research, we are working with adolescents aged 14 to 17 and undergraduate students aged 18 to 24. This age range offers different levels of literary understanding and will enable us to correlate a range of exposure levels to computer technology with participant responses.
At each research site, we are using three primary data-gathering techniques:
Our data consist of transcripts from interviews, commentaries, and group discussions, as well as e-literature files. We code the transcripts thematically to highlight reading and writing processes and to gather participant perceptions of processes.
In the first year of the study, which we report here, we worked with 12 undergraduate bachelor of education students at the University of British Columbia, all of whom had declared majors or minors in secondary-level English education. All students were enrolled in a one-year post-degree bachelor of education program; they ranged in age from 23 to 40 years, with the average age being 26. There were three males and nine females; all were proficient English speakers with a long history of schooling in Canada. Students self-selected for participation, following a blanket invitation made to two English language arts methods classes. The study took place over the course of three months, January to March.
The study was conducted in two phases. First, students participated in a campus-based “Digital Literacy Workshop” that took place in three weeks during January, prior to their teaching practicum. This workshop, facilitated by Teresa Dobson (this article’s second author), entailed approximately 16 hours of scheduled lab activities and a further 6 hours of assisted lab time. Students undertook the following:
Laptops were distributed to all participants for the purpose of continuing projects commenced in the workshop during the first half of the long practicum. Software installed on these machines included the Microsoft Office Suite, Dreamweaver, FTP, and Patchwork Girl. Students were asked to read and respond to the latter and to work on a hypermedia project of their choice over the following eight weeks.
During the March spring break, eight of the students (5 women and 3 men) returned for a second workshop, facilitated by both researchers. It consisted primarily of group discussion about Patchwork Girl, further collaborative creative writing using wiki software, and intermittent one-to-one interviews and two group interviews.
Current Data
The data reported here are the self-recorded commentaries and the individual interviews of participants, focused on readings of Patchwork Girl; also discussed is the first author’s writing journal. While our broader study aims to delineate a number of processes and skills used in reading and writing e-literature, this initial group of participants did not have enough time or opportunity to experience the writing processes in the way we had hoped. (We have adjusted the research protocol to give future participants time to learn Storyspace.) While there are interesting themes about collaboration and authorship that we have coded from the wiki-writing data—as well as an implication for reading e-literature, discussed later—we found the data from their readings offered a more interesting and detailed perspective about the challenges of e-literature. In particular, one of the predominant themes was that of disorientation and, further, how that disorientation could be attributed to participants’ expectations as print readers—a theme echoed in some of the insights from Rebecca Luce-Kapler’s journal as she struggled to write in the new medium.
For the purposes of this article, then, we consider how this disorientation is described and what it might mean for teaching e-literature skills. Specifically, as we coded the data, we realized that the participants came to the text with a sense of how the overall piece would unfold and that often this expectation interfered with their reading of the literature. Brooks’ (1984) study of plot in print narrative offered a way to understand what might be happening. He describes how metaphor and metonymy work within a structure in which plot must use metaphor as a trope of its achieved interrelations. In his view, metonymy is the key figure that connects and moves the details toward a satisfactory, if not a satisfying, end. He identifies the incidents of narration as “promises and annunciations” of final coherence or a sense of metaphor. Like clues in a detective story, markers underline the intentionality of the event and continue to help the reader make connections between different moments. With narrative, one is hearing a repetition of events that have already happened; the creation of plot shows us the significance and interconnection of events. Brooks points out that the narrative structure depends on the desire for the end, albeit through detours and tensions.
We felt that this type of experience with print texts might explain some of the disorientation we and our participants were feeling.
A Writing Journal
As a fiction writer and poet, Rebecca Luce-Kapler decided to work with both Storyspace and the wiki in preparation for her work with research participants. She chose to track her writing in a journal as a way of comparing her responses and processes with those of the student writers. During the first year of the study, she worked on the wiki “Taliesin” with Teresa Dobson and developed a Storyspace fiction entitled “Composed” on her own. Following are excerpts from Rebecca’s journal.
January 8, 2004
Worked on the wiki today and printed out what we have done so far. There are about three strands emerging: dreams/photographs/poems; Georgia past and present; and the grandmother character.... I feel a need to develop some of the points that have emerged already rather than spreading out too much further with the plot at the moment.
February 11/04
I went back to my Storyspace, Composed. It takes me forever to remember the technical details of this. I seem to do so little writing and more struggling with the form. But I do find that I am having to think about the relationships among ideas in a way that is more concrete and upfront than usual. [In comparison,] the Wiki work is so flexible and interesting. You cannot see the structures like you can with Storyspace, but it feels easy and engaging.
February 18/04
I have come up with an idea about the structure for Composed. It will be in layers—like geological layers of time and place. I am thinking of Margaret Laurence’s sense of time in narrative. The personal, historical, and collective cultural time. All this within the geological, the time of place. I want to have a linear connection for each strand and then have cross connections between strands.
February 25/04
Things are working better. I am getting the idea of the software and I am beginning to conceptualize the entire piece. I am again struck by the interplay of the metonymic and metaphoric. On the one hand, I think about the small piece that I am working on, but then I have to think about how it fits into the whole piece, where it should be connected and how it might contribute to that whole. I am very interested in this interplay of thinking—back and forth. Small details, larger picture. I am finding that working in Storyspace is giving me a structure in which to think about my writing even though I am also creating the structure. It is causing me to think about relationships among ideas and the overall shape of the piece in a way that I have not done before when working on a novel for example.
March 1, 2004
It’s interesting—at first I thought I preferred the wiki and indeed I do like the ease of working with it. You can learn it almost instantly, but the bigger our text gets, the more frustrated I become with it because there is not the easy map structure of Storyspace where I can get a sense of the whole and find my way very quickly. I guess this suggests I need a map to find my way around fragmented texts. I do like some certainty. Who has to read a map when we are driving? Who has to scan the maps of any new places she visits? Perhaps the way I navigate in the world is no different than what I seem to need to navigate in texts.
Reflecting on the Journal
These entries from Rebecca’s journal indicate the attention she was giving to the structure of the hypertext. In her previous fiction writing, she generally created characters or thought of story ideas and, as she began to write, paid attention to emerging shapes, themes, and structures, all of which would then influence rewriting. But when writing with these hypertext tools, she could not relegate those qualities to the background. She was aware of needing to decide at what point a text box or window was finished, and what words, pictures, or sounds should be linked to new windows—all the while trying to imagine the larger meaning of the whole hyperfiction. Knowing where one is going next in writing a story is a decision that writers make moment to moment, but in Storyspace, Rebecca was deciding not just the “and” of what would come next, but the “and or and or and....” Instead of her customary way of working with “a chain of metonymies” to create a coherent metaphor, a story, she was hovering in a space of possible stories, trying to keep multiple threads extending and connecting.
Morson (1994) explains that narratives have worked very well to create a single line out of a multiplicity of alternatives, but in traditional uses of them we have tended to give an anachronistic sense to the past, shutting down the more complex and plural nature of experience. He suggests that our tendency is to focus on specific details, make links between them and develop a thread to shape events in a more or less linear path. “Choice is momentous. It involves presentness,” Morson notes (p. 22). In each moment of writing, choices exist. Only through a process of “unpredetermined becoming” (p. 24) can there be any real creativity, he claims. Unfolding along a determined sequence toward an existing conclusion does not allow for multiple possibilities. While Rebecca admitted to enjoying the openness in texts—in her own and in those written by others—she found that trying not only to think of the possible choices but actually to follow through with them was difficult. She recognized that while offering choices to readers is important, she still wanted to limit the possibilities and direct their path. Storyspace anticipates this desire by letting a writer block links through its “guard field,” meaning that a reader cannot access some of the windows until she or he has read others. In ways that are not possible with a print text, the author can deny the reader some information and determine the reading path in ways that are not evident initially.
Rebecca’s difficulty, then, was not in a lack of authorial control. In many ways Storyspace allowed her more control. Her difficulty lay in anticipating and offering different reading pathways for readers. Where she had used language and an unfolding text to invite different levels of interpretation, she now had to provide different physical pathways, anticipating the directions of her audience’s individual readings. She began to feel more like a cartographer mapping something already in existence and less like a writer who created what could be mapped. Bolter (2001) describes this dilemma of hypertext writing:
The elements of the text are no longer fragments of a prior whole, but instead form a space of shifting possibilities. In this shifting electronic space, writers seem to need a new concept of structure. In place of a closed and unitary form, they need to conceive of their text as a structure of possible structures, and they must practice a second order of writing creating coherent lines for the reader to discover without seeming to close off the possibilities prematurely or arbitrarily. (p. 152)
Rebecca clearly struggled with moving from print-based notions about a structured piece of writing to a text that could shift its structure like a kaleidoscope. There were chains of metonymies each reshaping the metaphor. These were her challenges in writing a hyperfiction; however, we learned that readers may have similar struggles in reading a hyperfiction, as became evident when we introduced our study participants to Patchwork Girl.
Patchwork Girl
The premise of Patchwork Girl, Jackson’s (1995) satirical feminist read of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, is that the Orkney Island disposal of the female monster is a staged death, a way of liberating both monster and creator from the constraints facing 19th-century women. Jackson’s interactive novel is a clever parody that combines image and text to tell the story of a female monster, one created not by Victor Frankenstein, but by Mary Shelley herself. The image of the stitched-together monster is employed above all as a metaphor for text, with Jackson undertaking at times a form of patch writing whereby she stitches together narrative and criticism from a variety of sources to arrive at a quirky sort of tale that shifts between narrative and meta-narrative in the telling of the female monster’s love affair with its mother, its sea voyage to America, and its eventual settlement in California (where it buys an identity and struggles to keep its parts in order). Readers of Patchwork Girl encounter in the first instance an image of a woman, reminiscent of a diagram of the homunculus, arms outstretched and palms displayed (Figure 3A). Subsequently, five options are offered in terms of ways to proceed: graveyard, journal, quilt, story, and broken accents (Figure 3B). These paths diverge and converge, and it is therefore unlikely that any two individuals will effect the same reading. The hyperfiction, like the monster, is stitched together, its ruptures (scars/links) plainly visible.
Reading Patchwork Girl
The readers came to Patchwork Girl with a particular metaphor for the text in mind. These metaphors influenced how they tried to make sense of the reading and how they dealt with the individual nodes of the text—the metonymies. One of the more obvious influences in their reading was Frankenstein, either the original story or various popular culture manifestations of it. Here are just two of a number of references made throughout the interviews:
I had this story that I thought was going down this path and I thought “Okay, fine, it’s like a Frankenstein story and now they’ve parted, creator and creation have parted.” Then it goes off on this whole other wild tangent that [I thought] where the heck is this thing going?... That’s what I was really wondering.... I was a little frustrated at points.
I understand what they are doing by making another Frankenstein in terms of making the parts, but I suppose I just like a grounded purpose. I like to have things sort of...grounded.
The first participant quoted above explains how she continued to try to connect the metonymies to that story:
It’s advancing very rapidly.... I go from one page to another page and all of a sudden I’m just like “Okay, where did this come from?” You know right out of the blue...they start to develop their intimate relationship...and I’m finding that it actually jumps so far ahead or faster than it really should be.
While never able to satisfy herself about the meaning of the hyperfiction, she does reach a glimmer of new insight:
The parts where she talks about...writing the text, I found really boring. I found them just kind of self-indulgent. But with the parts where she actually talks about taking the parts of the body and putting them together, that was kind of neat, a metaphor for the way the text works.
Besides direct references to their knowledge of the Frankenstein story, most of our participants revealed the effects of being readers of print literature. One expressed it thus:
Even when I was reading a story, it didn’t read like a story to me. It didn’t feel like things were going places at first.... I found myself getting frustrated at some of the ridiculous situations that they ended up in because they were really such wonderfully developed characters that they could be put in, I think, situations in which the possibility for development of the story would be much richer.
As she worked to make sense of the text, this reader learned that Storyspace would save her readings in a window called “history.” This feature helped her feel like she was reading a coherent story:
Eventually, though, one day...I started reading a journal. And partway through I got a bit more interested in it because I started to see where things were going.... I really did start to pick up that there’s something going on here. That was also when I found out that the creator or scientist is supposed to be Mary Shelley...and so that was when I sort of got curious. When she mentioned her husband Percy, I was like “Oh, okay, now I know what is going on,” and then I got curious as to where it was going because I’ve read Frankenstein and I’ve always really liked Mary Shelley.
While she does begin to find moments of meaning in the hyperfiction, she is never able to background her history as a reader of print. She explains,
I got very excited last night because I finally got to one where I clicked on the page and nothing happened. I thought, “I’ve reached the end. Now I can go and find a new thing,” but when I...clicked on this links thing, really what it was was a choice of going in two different directions.... I still haven’t reached the end....
She alternates between complaints about features of the hyperfiction that do not meet her expectations of good writing (including a mistaken belief that Shelley Jackson is plagiarizing) to moments of insight, such as this:
The idea that it’s the only part of the body that’s really hers, because she’s made up of all these different parts and that it’s the most sensitive...the warmest parts of her body are her scars. So I just thought that it was really quite interesting.... I was really struck too by the idea of the double meaning of it, the idea that it’s a cut and a joining.... I really started to see this text as a struggle for identity.
These moments, however, do not seem to offer her enough satisfaction. She confesses that she did not find the hyperfiction compelling: “I like the people...the characters are quite well done. But they come together in situations that don’t interest me at all.”
Other readers equated Patchwork Girl with a video or computer game rather than a novel. When talking about his experience with this hyperfiction, one participant describes the importance of the map for his reading and explains that he found the text “more like a video game... or like a movie, because...you want read the manual before you read.” The manual, he felt, gave the effect of knowing the whole, similar to the kinds of cues he would receive from picking up a novel. He also described how the structure of the work, as he saw it, was a metaphor for the text:
I really like these, where she has, like, the different people that she took this stuff from. I really enjoyed that part because it would sort of disembody them, while it created a new body of text.
But ultimately, the text was not satisfying for him either—at least not in the way he thinks of the satisfaction of reading novels. He mentions the impossibility of falling into the continuous dream of a story. He compares the experience to reading Choose Your Own Adventure novels, in which the same material is read over and over again:
You’d go back to the same thing you’d already read...and you just skip it to go to the choice. So it was kind of just pointless after awhile to go back and back and back and you just get frustrated.
Another reader, who saw himself as a technophile, viewed the text as a manifestation of the software program. He was determined to “figure out” how the technology worked and disliked being disoriented:
I like seeing a map.... But I read [a section] and I go click on something else. And then I read it again but...I start losing the context of where I’m going.... I’m familiar with the technology, but I need the paper. I need to have something specifically concrete to hold it.... I’d click it again, it would go into another part and I would go “Huh, how did we get here?” And then because the windows—maybe it’s the software function, but because the windows are moving around, I’m having to move three windows around to find the window I just clicked on, which is as hard. [As far as] I as a computer user am concerned, [this] is not the way to do things. When I click something I expect it to stay there until I move it.
The metonymies, for him, did not build into anything meaningful because he felt lost in a structure that for him indicated software inadequacies:
It’s disorienting. It loses the emotion, loses the effectiveness. Suddenly instead of reading the text I’m trying to find the window. So it’s not so effective that way. If I have to hunt to find something, unless there is a purpose for that hunt, I am struck from the method of it.... And so it’s discombobulated. I’m having to read, worry.... I mean it’s like going into your office and knowing that your pencils are on the right-hand side and you open it up and now it’s on the left-hand side.
It appeared that for most of our readers, despite moments of insight, their experience was not very satisfactory. One of our participants, however, really began to think about the process of reading hyperfiction and how challenging understanding can be. He told us that he had started the reading
...thinking about a novel...like something that has a start point. There’s going to be a mid-point and going to be an end point, and that’s when I tried to do a kind of a linear [read], and then I realized suddenly this isn’t going to work. So I had to think of it more like each individual piece. And I just have to...take something out, or get another understanding, or just not like certain pieces and then just leave it at that. Then they can connect later.... I had to stop trying to connect things together, and just kind of enjoy the subtleties of each piece of writing...and then it started to clue me in to that it had been written in bits and pieces, and it just struck me that it’s so true.... It’s like a metaphor...[The author was saying] “You’ll have to learn to do what I do, think the way I think. There’s just no way around it....” And it’s hard reading but it’s kind of—you know, once I put that aside, then you think this isn’t going to go together, there’s no logic to this, I’m just going to read for, you know, content. Just going to read it for individuality, as opposed to [a] universal sense of [a] linear track. And I really I liked that.
Conclusions and Implications
All but one of the participants appeared to come to the hyperfiction with expectations that made reading the text difficult. Either they thought about familiar structures of print literature—searching for a beginning, middle, and end with a building cohesiveness that would leave them with a sense of what the story might be—or they brought their technological expectations to the reading and tried to make sense based on their experience with computer programs or video games. But it was only when they could give up those expectations and find meaning in each individual node that they could begin to develop an overall sense of what the hyperfiction might mean. It seemed they had to be prepared to be lost in the text, something these readers were not used to being.
In writing a hyperfiction, Rebecca also felt lost. Following a number of links from any one window left her feeling in the dark. Nevertheless, as she did so, she began to see new relationships in the writing, and her sense of what was emerging continued to change. She found herself returning, adding connections, erasing some that seem to fade as the work developed.
In both reading and writing this genre, we need to make a point of understanding that hyperfictions are not narratives as we generally understand them. Instead, they are texts as Barthes (1979) describes in “From Work to Text,” written before most writing and thinking about hypertext. Barthes depicts the text as a network—a “methodological field”—where the governing logic is metonymic, consisting of associations, contiguities, and cross-references that liberate what he calls “symbolic energy.” He offers this poetic explanation:
The reader of the Text could be compared with an idle subject (a subject having relaxed his “imaginary”): this fairly empty subject strolls along the side of a valley at the bottom of which runs a wadi (I use wadi here to stress a certain feeling of unfamiliarity). What he sees is multiple and irreducible; it emerges from substances and levels that are heterogeneous and disconnected: lights, colors, vegetation, heat, air, bursts of noise, high-pitched bird calls, children’s cries from the other side of the valley, paths, gestures, clothing of close and distant inhabitants. All these occurrences are partially identifiable: they proceed from known codes, but their combination is unique, founding the stroll in difference that can be repeated only as difference. (pp. 76–77)
Hypertext, it seems, can fracture our sense of literary space. The challenge for a sound education, as Lankshear and Knobel (2003) point out, is how to live in physical space and in cyberspace. Schools, however, are founded on the print medium, and any shift in interpretive power is therefore difficult and contested. Kress (2003) notes that there are profound differences between the reading path of the traditional page and the page that derives from principles of organization on the screen. Reading the printed page involves interpreting what is clearly laid out and organized, while a digital text (or a page derived from the screen) is relatively open in its organization and offers multiple reading paths. “The task of the reader in the first case,” Kress writes, “is to observe and follow a given order, and within that order to engage in interpretation (where that too was more or less tightly policed) and the task of the reader of the new page, and of the screens which are its models, is to establish the order through the principles of relevance of the reader’s making, and to construct meaning from that” (p. 162).
While it might seem that in reading and writing hyperfiction we will have to leave our former expectations at the edge of the valley and be prepared to be confounded and illuminated by the familiar, the strange, and the ambiguous in order to understand, this suggestion does not seem helpful for those of us who want to teach e-literature. Rather than revel in ambiguity, our students are more likely to give up—unless we offer them some specific ways of approaching the genre. For instance, some equilibrium can be gained through further writing in the genre of e-literature and by drawing on the notion of remediation to offer familiarity.
As mentioned earlier, we do not yet have extensive data from participants who have written e-literature; however, one of the interesting themes we have coded in the data to date is their tendency as writers to revel in the very disorienting features that they dislike as readers. One participant told us that “being a person who usually writes in a linear form, it was a very good experience for me, because I learned that often you don’t have to see things go in a certain order.” Another compared the writing to the fun of doing a Choose You Own Adventure. They see the writing as a playful opportunity, perhaps because the work was a collaborative venture rather than an individual pursuit like reading Patchwork Girl; they were not responsible for authoring an individual text, as Rebecca did in Storyspace. Nevertheless, we believe that continued experience writing with hypertext forms could assist students in becoming more tolerant of the ambiguity and disorientation they feel in reading such texts. While we did not specifically point out this discrepancy between reading and writing to our participants (we only noticed it later in coding the data), making such links could be a useful insight for students.
Another way of helping students navigate e-literature would be through a comparison with print literature aimed at recognizing what Bolter (2001) calls “remediation.” He suggests that the increasingly organized and standardized space of the printed page usurped the innovative writing space of the medieval codex, where multilayered critical notes and glosses often formed webs of interpretation that, not unlike today’s hypertext, allowed individual readers a range of choices with regard to sequence and the summoning of marginalia. Bolter notes that “in the late age of print, this refashioning is not complete, and we are now experiencing the tensions and inconsistencies that come from attempts either to reconcile the two spaces of print and digital technology or definitively to replace the one with the other” (p. 22).
By demonstrating the qualities of e-literature that are drawn from print texts (and other technologies), we can heighten students’ awareness of both similarities and differences so that they can come to hypertext with a more informed sense of their reading process. For instance, many print texts are far from linear and demonstrate multiple perspectives and varied structures, not unlike hypertext. A discussion about how readers make meaning from such print texts may help students use such skills in their approach to e-literature.
In recent work with young adolescents, Rebecca used radical change picture books followed by student-created e-literature using wikis. (Dresang, 1999, defines “radical change” texts as those that are related to the “connectivity, interactivity, and access of the digital world” [p. 17].) Working first with a print literature that draws some of its influences from digital creations is a useful way to increase the students’ comfort level and skill at navigating hypertexts.
While it is important for teachers to acknowledge that new skills are needed to read e-literature (and for researchers to continue to delineate what these might be), it is also important to help students find the nooks and crannies of familiarity with the genre so as not to leave them wandering aimlessly through the valley.
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About the Authors
Rebecca Luce-Kapler is an associate professor of language and literacy in the Faculty of Education, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Her work focuses on writing processes and technologies and feminist theory. Her book Writing With, Through, and Beyond the Text: An Ecology of Language (Erlbaum, 2004) brings together her work with women writers and her understanding of learning, writing, and teaching. She has been a fiction writer and poet for over 25 years and is the author of a collection of poetry, The Gardens Where She Dreams.
Teresa Dobson is an assistant professor of language and literacy in the Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. Her research and teaching focus primarily on technologies for writing and digital literacy. She is the most recent winner (with Jeff Miller) of the British Columbia Innovation Award in Educational Technology.
Authors’ note: The study described in this article was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Canada, 501-02-0072.
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Citation: Luce-Kapler, R., & Dobson, T. (2005, May/June). In search of a story: Reading and writing e-literature. Reading Online, 8(6). Available: http://www.readingonline.org/articles/art_index.asp?HREF=luce-kapler/index.html
Reading Online, www.readingonline.org
Posted May 2005
© 2005 International Reading Association, Inc. ISSN 1096-1232