Hypertexts for Homework

Mark Bernstein writes:

The trees in New England are just about bare, and at Eastgate the annual textbook rush is winding up. Cartons of hypertexts have gone out to schools and colleges and universities all over the Northern hemisphere. . . . So, people all over the place are studying hypertexts like afternoon and Victory Garden and Patchwork Girl and Samplers. These are not new hypertexts — literature courses prefer to study work that has been mulled over and argued about for a few years.

As someone who has ordered, assigned, and taught three out of four of the above I thought I’d offer some brief comment as to why those particular titles. Not from the standpoint of literary or aesthetic value—that’s a different conversation—but structurally, how they fit into a syllabus:

• afternoon. I teach it for its historical significance and because it’s as close to “canonical” as electronic literature is likely to get. (Yes, I realize that statement is tautological.) Every semester some few students will have actually heard of afternoon ahead of time. The large body of secondary literature offers students concrete models of what hypertext criticism can look like.

• Patchwork Girl. Teaches well in conjunction with Frankenstein (obviously) as well as films and other remediations of the original tale. Might pair it with Ellen Ullman’s recent novel the The Bug, for example. PG opens doors to discussions of cyborgs (especially if Haraway’s also on the syllabus) and AI. Not to mention intellectual property.

• Samplers. Its hypertext “short stories” are the most manageable of Eastgate’s titles for beginning students and most flexible for me in terms of assignments. I can ask students to read one or more of the nine stories and then use one that they haven’t read as the basis for an exercise. Or split students into groups and give each group a different “sample” to play with.

I’m a little tardy with my own book (ahem) orders for the spring, so I hope there are still some hypertexts left.