HYPERTEXT FICTION
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perception
internal and external
perception non-linear
context genre
mutable
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In Western World & the Individual, I use Barthes’s right-wing myth to explain how a contemporary system takes on an air of being ‘natural’ and ‘eternal’. He argues that left-wing myth, that aims to transform rather than conserve the existing order, is inevitably "artificial" and "reconstituted" (Barthes, 1973: 148), as it is unable to draw on the way the world is. "Statistically," he writes, "myth is on the right... the very end of myths is to immobilize the world: they must suggest and mimic a universal order which has fixated once and for all on the hierarchy of possession." (ibid, 148, 155)
Postmodernism is by and large in the position of a left-wing mythology: in common-sense, in terms of what everybody knows, the author is not dead, cause-and-effect stand firm, we all watch the same film, and we all get the same meaning. Hypertext fiction, however, can offer postmodernism some of the strength of right-wing myth, by making its tenets observable, literal, and obvious. At the same time, just as chemical work clarified the abstract thinking of the alchemists’, so hypertext fiction can clarify and act as a corrective to postmodernism’s more extravagant claims. I argue this by looking at four aspects of postmodernism in relation to hypertext fictions: non-linear thinking; the role of context; hybridisation of genres; and mutability of meaning.
internal and external perception non-linear context genre mutable
Postmodernism
Jung's Alchemy
Western World & The Individual
Hypertext Fiction
Process of Transformation