This Web Research Activities provides a rich set of links to resources on alternative forms of storytelling, especially hypertext fiction and digital storytelling. Within this platform are some connections made to Native American storytelling and to the oral and visual storytelling cultural traditions (such as Chicano murals) that represent nonlinear, nontextual ways of telling stories. In short, the theme of this Web research revolves around ways to think of stories apart from traditional print narrative.

One reason for thinking about new Web-based narrative forms, in the context of older or non-European narrative traditions is to remember to what extent certain forms or writing which we may think of as natural or inevitable are really conditioned by culture. This is important to keep in mind when reading any of the examples of hypertext fiction (nonlinear and multilinear narrative) linked from this platform. Hypertext writing (fiction or poetry) is possible only in an electronic environment. Below are links to numerous sites which will explain what hypertext fiction and hypertext poetry are. Some sites tell stories through multimedia and mixed media.

Hypertext writing shares some interesting features with, for example, Native American storytelling traditions: there is a digressive element (stories within stories); what is called a story is really a Web of stories; and like oral tellings, no two tellings of a hypertext narrative are exactly the same for readers. Naturally, other key differences make them dissimilar as well. In hypertext fiction the focus is on the reader and the appearance of choice and some determination of how to read, as every part of a hypertext narrative presents multiple choices for the direction and sequence of reading.

Below are questions and links looking at hypertext fiction, poetry, and other multimedia stories and artistic and critical expressions, some of which resist any particular genre of writing we have a name for now.

Questions and Activities

1. Explore some of the sites below that link to examples of hypertext fiction. What are the qualities of hypertext fiction? Where does it differ from traditional fiction? What makes it hard to read? How is that like and unlike what makes difficult traditional fiction difficult?
   
   
2. Many of the sites below evidence what two critics, Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, call remediation. That is, they argue that all new media remediates older media by incorporating and including it in new forms and shapes. For example, look at an example like Urban Diary or Ignatius Donnelly and the End of the World. What older media are explicitly incorporated into the new forms?
   
   
3. One of the things we talk about a lot when talking about literature, is how the form of the work (story or poetry) helps create meaning. In some ways, studying the form of literature is about studying how complex meanings result from the author doing the most within the constraints of the form. In hypertext and hypermedia (nonlinear multimedia) there appear to be no constraints on form. Are there? In groups, after looking at a number of these projects, talk about the idea of form and structure. Is there form here? How do you know what structure a work has? How important is form or structure in these works to understanding some meaning?
   
   
4. What about your own writing? If you wrote a traditional academic paper in one of the styles or manners of the examples here, what would it look like? Would it be harder or easier?

Web-Text Connections

On the Web		In Beyond Borders
1.	Hypertext Fiction The Color of Television by Stuart Moultrop and Sean Cohen Quibbling, A Gift by Carolyn Guyer (excerpt) The Heist: A Hypertext Story by Walter Sorrells The Electronic Chronicles by Adrianne Wurtzel Ignatius Donnelly and the End of the World by Richard Meehan	1.	There are a lot of ways that stories and storytelling get raised throughout Beyond Borders, particularly in Chapters 1, 3, and 4. In many instances, the use of stories and narrative is a theme in writings in Beyond Borders; writers are exploring the ways that certain narratives or scripts control or influence one's life, whether it is through shared memories, as in Tim O'Brien's "Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong," or poetic reworking, as in Rita Dove's "Arrow."
2.	Hypertext Fiction (multiple authors, students) Wingspan by David Micko and Julieann M. Brown-Micko CITYTHREADS, Stories of Seattle, group authorship Mystory/Myseum, students of Greg Ulmer	2.	Some of the stories and essays in Beyond Borders also play with narrative form as a way of exploring multiple stories and influences that shape one's identity, such as Anna Deavere Smith's "Fires in the Mirror" or even Mary Gaitskill's "On Not Being a Victim."
3.	Hypertext Poetry/Graphic Art Hypertext poetry and Web art (links to many sites and works) "Paradise Flossed, An Exploration" (hypertext poem) "Insomnia," a hypertext graphical poem by Daniel Jewell, Steve Wilson, and Anita Pantin
4.	Multimedia/Mixed Media Essays Glasshouses: A Tour of American Assimilation from a Mexican American Perspective by Jacalyn Lopez Garcia Urban Diary, mixed media art exhibition, memoir, essay, narrative	3.	Finally, some selections in Beyond Borders stress the visual and multimedia nature of experience, ranging, for example, from the cyberspace descriptions in Turkle's "TinySex and Gender Trouble" to the graphic memoir/novel of Art Spiegelman, "MAUS: A Survivor's Tale," and Jack Jackson's graphic novel Comanche Moon. And of course the images in Border Visions: An Image Portfolio tell stories in different ways, invoking the fluidity between narrative and visual representation. Look at, for example, "La fruta del diablo" ("Fruit of the devil"), a digital mural in the Chicano tradition, or Pedro Meyer's "Biblical Times" and "Biblical Times Annotated."
5.	Some Resources to Go Further Hyperizons: Resources on Hypertext Fiction, edited by Michael Shumate Eastgate Publishing Systems, a publisher exclusively devoted to electronic fiction, poetry, and expression Voice of the Shuttle: Technology of Writing page

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