Nonlinear Writing
- 1. N O N L I N E A R W R I T I N G N O D E S , N E T W O R K S , & A S S O C I AT I V E L O G I C
- 2. N O N L I N E A R W R I T I N G • 1) a writerly activity • 2) a specific type of document • 3) a readerly activity • 4) playful, associative, combinatory • As opposed to linear and sequential Non-linear plot lines, illustration from Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–67)
- 3. - A S T R I D E N S S L I N , “ N O N L I N E A R W R I T I N G ” Nonlinear writing: “their macrostructure follows an associative logic, which assembles its composite elements (paragraphs, text chunks, or lexias) into a loosely ordered network. These networks offer readers multiple choices of traversing a document, which can facilitate specific types of reading strategies, such as keyword searches or jumping between main text and footnotes, and complicate others, such as reading for closure or completeness.”
- 4. H I S T O RY O F N O N L I N E A R W R I T I N G • Middle Ages (glosses and annotations) • Baroque period labyrinth poetry (poetic machines) • Printed encyclopedias during Enlightenment
- 5. N O N L I N E A R P R I N T F I C T I O N • Emerges with the novel as a nonconformist literary genre • Explodes in 20th century (modernist and postmodernist literature) • Examples range from experimental novels, to concrete poetry, to experiments with mathematical constraints, to choose your own adventure books Marc Sarporta, Composition No. 1 (1961) Lawrence Sterne, Tristam Shandy (1760)
- 6. Raymond Queneau, A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems (1961) Choose Your Own Adventure books popular during 1970s Digital text (hypertext and HTML (Hypertext Markup Language)
- 7. T W I N E & I N T E R A C T I V E F I C T I O N
- 8. – J A C Q U E S D E R R I D A Linear writing is “rooted in a past of nonlinear writing, … a writing that spells its symbols pluri-dimensionally; there the meaning is not subjected to successivity, to the order of a logical time, or to the irreversible temporality of sound” “The end of linear writing is indeed the end of the book” Linear / Nonlinear Writing
- 9. R AY M O N D Q U E N E A U , “ A S T O RY A S Y O U L I K E I T ” ( 1 9 6 7 ) reverse engineer: examine the construction or composition of a product, typically in order to create a duplicate or similar product
- 10. – I A N B O G O S T, U N I T O P E R AT I O N S “any medium—poetic, literary, cinematic, computational—can be read as a configurative system, an arrangement of discrete, interlocking units of expressive meaning. I call these general instances of procedural expression unit operations.” U N I T O P E R AT I O N S