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The mystery of "lust"

Published: 09 August 2004 Publication History

Abstract

Mark Bernstein has stated that there are no really good hypertext mysteries. This is a puzzling remark since reading hypertext often seems to require "detective work" on the part of the reader to first ferret out the clues/pieces of the work and then put them together in a reasonable order to form an understanding. While demonstrating a close reading of Mary Kim Arnold's hypertext story, "Lust," this essay explores how the concept of "mystery" applies to the act of reading hypertext and how that affects the role reader (now a "reader-detective") who must search both content nodes and pathways in order to bring cohesion and a sense of completeness to the reading experience. As a close reading, this essay looks at the characters and events described in "Lust" and finally stresses the need to consider the links and paths while reading the hypertext.

References

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Arnold, M. K. "Lust." Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext 1.3 (1993). Diskette. Eastgate.
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Baldwin, D. "The Detective Story." The Riverside Anthology of Short Fiction: Convention and Innovation. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1998. 101--103.
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Baldwin, D. "The Love Story." The Riverside Anthology of Short Fiction: Convention and Innovation. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1998. 178--181.
[4]
Bernstein, M. "No Mystery." HypertextNow. 2002. Eastgate Systems. 26 Jan. 2002. <www.eastgate.com/ HypertextNow/archives/Mystery.html>.
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Bernstein, M. "Patterns of Hypertext." Proceedings of Hypertext '98 <<http://www.eastgate.com/patterns/Print.html>>
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Burbules, N. "Rhetorics of the Web: Hyperreading and Critical Theory." Page to Screen: Taking Literacy into the Electronic Era. Ed. I. Snyder. London: Routledge, 1998. 102--122.
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Chandler, R. "The Simple Art of Murder." The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1947. 222--237.
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Cohen, E. A., Bolter, J., Joyce, M., Smith J. B., and Bernstein, M. Getting Started with Storyspace for Macintosh. Watertown, MA: Eastgate, 1996.
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Forss, P. M. "Detective Story." Commentary on Michael Joyce's Afternoon by Students from Brown University & The National University of Singapore. <<http://www. cyberartsweb.org/cpace/fiction/afternoon/forss.html.>
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Joyce. M. "Nonce Upon Some Times: Rereading Hypertext Fiction." Modern Fiction Studies 43 (1997): 579--597.
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Malmgren, C. D. "Anatomy of Murder: Mystery, Detective, and Crime Fiction." Journal of Popular Culture 30.4 (1997): 115--135.
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Miall, D.S. and Dobson, T. "Reading Hypertext and the Experience of Literature." JODI: Journal of Digital Information 2.1 <http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v02/i01/ Miall/>. Article No. 46, 2001-08-13.
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Miller, J. "Why Hyperfiction Didn't Work." M/C Reviews. <http://reviews.media-culture.org.au/sections.php?op= printpage&artid=126>>.
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Ong, J. "Detective and Mystery." Commentary on Michael Joyce's Afternoon by Students from Brown University & The National University of Singapore. <<http://www. cyberartsweb.org/cpace/fiction/afternoon/ong.html.>
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Ryan. M. Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001.
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Walker, J. "Piecing Together and Tearing Apart: Finding the Story in afternoon, a story ." Proceedings ACM Hypertext '99. <http://huminf.uib.no/~jill/txt/afternoon.html>.

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cover image ACM Conferences
HYPERTEXT '04: Proceedings of the fifteenth ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia
August 2004
284 pages
ISBN:1581138482
DOI:10.1145/1012807
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 09 August 2004

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  1. "lust"
  2. Arnold
  3. fiction
  4. literary hypertexts
  5. mysteries
  6. narrative

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HT04
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HT04: 15th Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia
August 9 - 13, 2004
CA, Santa Cruz, USA

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