Masters
thesis: Influence of the World Wide Web on literature
School of Literary and Communication Studies
Deakin University
Geelong Victoria Australia
Supervisor: Dr Lyn McCredden, Research and Graduate Studies Convenor
November 25,
1997
RETURNABLITY to PhD
#TerrellNeuage PhD 
Ph.D thesis on "Conversational Analysis of Chatroom 'talk'"
Contents:
A
GLOSSARY OF COMPUTER ORIENTED ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS
TERRELL_WEB
search engine for PhD and etc.
Computer terms
BIBLIOGRAPHY
LURKING
The essential element, if a work is to be classified as poetic or fictional
in the Aristotelian scheme, is imitation, (Wilson p.5).
Aristotles
distinguished three manners of poetic imitation:
- 1. One can speak invariably in one's own person.
- 2. One can use actors to imitate the whole thing as though they were living it themselves or
- 3. One can imitate partly by narration and partly by dramatic dialogue (as Homer does) (Potts)
- We can now add a fourth manner of poetic imitation and that is through the
use of hypertext. Poetic imitation using multimedia through the World Wide
Web combines all three of Aristotles manners of poetic imitation.
Poetry has the widest possibilities in the Internet environment. Poetry has
always had its experimental bohemian side to it. To play with words is the
essence of poetry. In the 1950's there was
concrete
poetry (
Shaped , pattern , Cubist poetry). Shaped poetry can be traced to classical
Greek times and was adopted in the 1950's as a new style by Dylan Thomas,
cummings and Mayakovsky to name a few.
During the 1960's two concrete poets;
Charles Olson and
Susan Howe
with their scribbled poems that go in circles (Olson) or in Howe's case,
of cut lines glued upside down and backwards, were early attempts of unstable texts which the Internet now incorporates. Along with experimental poetry there are the Objectivism poets such as George Oppen,
Louis Zukofsky and
Lorine Niedecker and the Beat poets including Allen Ginsberg
and
Leroi Jones (Amirir Baraka). These poetry movements now are being explored
and experimented with on the World Wide Web canvas.
What the World Wide Web does for poetry is to make reading an experience.
Reading becomes a performance taking in both creator and witness.
There are millions of examples of how present and past poets present
their poetry on the Internet, some are more dramatic than others. One search
engine stated, 'About 607760 documents match your query,' under the keyword
'poetry',
showing how many people are willing to share their verses for free with the
world. And each author hoping to be discovered and loved and understood by
the tens of millions of Internet viewers we are constantly told are wandering
the web.
In the Preface to the
Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth wrote,
'My purpose was to imitate, and, far as is possible,
to adopt the very language of men...'
NEW SITE = JULY 2014 - http://neuage.us/2014/July/ - Today's language of woman and men surely is the language of hypertext
as it links narratives from node to node. One thing we know about
language is that it keeps changing. Expressions keep changing, the meanings
of words keep changing. (Spender p. 09) Narrative is now reader driven.
The Internet as a transformation of literature as we know it has the good
and difficult sides to it. On the plus side is that anyone can put their
writing on at anytime. On the difficult side is the massive amounts of
narrative which appear on the World Wide Web. There is also the difficulty
with knowing who the actual creator of the web site we are witnessing is.
As an author creating text there are dangers to contend with. With a
computer it is so easy to lift chunks out of texts and copy them. It becomes an
almost impossibility to know whether someone will take sections of your writing
and use it with their own document, and if they do what can be done?
There is also the issue of money. I doubt that anyone will pay to go to
someone s sites and read their poems, stories, articles, thesis or even novel.
Being published on the internet is a long ways from being published by a book
publisher. There is just too much stuff on the Internet for anyone to care
about what an individual has to say to pay to read them unless they are already known.
With printed literature the reader was able to identify with the text.
This identification had a morbid affect on many readers of
Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, who either committed
suicide or attempted it. Every romantic young man felt that he was Werther.
(Koestler p. 345) As people have associated and projected themselves into the narratives contained within books what becomes of the association with characters within web pages on the World Wide Web?
Point of view selects and shapes the meanings of texts. It is not so much a
single concept as a cluster of concepts,
covering several aspects of the relationship between narrator, story and reader:
the style and structure of the telling, the perspective from which things are
seen, and the assumptions and values that pervade the text. (Reid p.12)
Hypertext's greatest value is in its reshaping of the textual landscape of the
narrative as it has been presented in the past.
The danger of writing hypertext literature is to have too many links so that everything breaks down into incoherency. It would be like having Susan Howe write a novel instead of just one of her poems. Howe explains her work:
First I would type some lines. Then cut them apart. Paste one on top
of another, move them around until they looked right. Then I'd xerrox that
version, getting several copies, and then cut and paste again until I had it
right... (Keller, p.5)
This is close to what many people do with their World Wide Web pages, they combine so much on to one page that it all becomes as incoherent as a Susan Howe poem. If her poems are impossible to make sense of what would a hypertext novel from her be like?
There have been attempts to have a poem with every word linked to another site,
what happens in these situations is that the reader becomes lost and may never
find the way back to the origin
of the poem. A poem of this sort is at http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~benedett/lit/mercury.
html.
Produced below to give a feeling of a poem with many links.
The poem on the left shows the poem without the links and on the right with the links.
next-page
Wordpress (blog)
Youtube
substack
Flicker
Live Journal
Foursquare
Screencast
Twitter
Instagram 
Linkedin
Caffeine
Goodreads,
tumblr
myportfolio
Behance
gab 
Quora 
reddit 
deviant art
MeWe, 
coderwall
fiverr
OK
