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Hypertext & Hypermedia:
A Study of Cross-genre Texts & Forms
Begin (course description)
The World Wide Web allows hypertext writers to create fiction and nonfiction texts exclusively for Web presentation. 

As writers, artists, photographers, animators, and filmmakers experiment with new software and equipment, they are producing hybrid texts and hypertexts that defy classification under traditional genres. 

Students will read the first electronic hypertext novel Michael Joyce's Afternoon (non-Web), a multimedia art book on CD ROM entitled Scrutiny in the Great Round, and as well as a variety of Web-based texts. 
Now, in the incunabular days of the narrative computer, we see how twentieth-century novels, films, and plays have been steadily pushing against the boundaries of linear storytelling. We therefore have to start our survey of the harbingers of the holodeck with a look at multiform stories, that is, linear narratives straining against the boundary of predigital media like a two-dimensional picture trying to burst out of its frame.

Janet Murray,
Hamlet on the Holodeck:
The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace

Readings will include text-only constructions as well as multimedia, interactive and 3D textual environments.  Students will read and respond to a variety of hypertexts and multimedia texts including work from Word and The Remidi Project.  

Because much of the reading will be online, students must have access to the Web through personal or lab computer equipped with a sound card; some of the readings may require that students download free players or plug-in for their browsers.

Students are expected to participate in face to face and online discussion.  In addition, students must propose and complete a final paper in response to issues and questions raised by our examination of these texts.

Prerequisite English 200; students should be comfortable with online interaction and searching; the class will meet in a computer classroom.

If you have further questions, contact mkeller@vcu.edu
http://saturn.vcu.edu/~mkeller