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Degree: M.F.A.
Format: HTML StorySpace
Description:
In the MFA program at Emerson I have focused on nonfiction and poetry forms, synthesizing these in study of hypertext literature. Indirectly, my project will use theory to explore hypertext and other writing genres, applying multiple approaches of nonfiction and poetry to the material. The project will also address, again mostly by reflection and indirection, issues and uses of writing and reading technologies as expression. However, I do not consider this to be a "multiple-genre" project; it is a hypertext, and the very nature of hypertext is to exist at the boundaries of genre, exploring lines between fiction and nonfiction, narrative and non-narrative modes.
StorySpace, the hypertext authoring software that I will use, contains text and images within boxes that the writer can move about. Boxes can contain other text boxes, resulting in three-dimensional nesting or ordering of the textual elements. My text will lie within and beneath twelve boxes, arranged as a clockface. Links between elements of the text -- the heart of hypertext composition -- appear as arrows between the associated boxes. Therefore, the initial entry to the document and navigational map appears as both clock and wheel spoke. Rather than relying on linear narration within the text itself, I will employ the structure of the clockface/wheel to represent the movement of time: each top-level box represents simultaneously an hour, a month, and a year. The center space (the hub) represents the reader's present moment
One level, the hypertext will be a memoir of the twelve years between my undergraduate and graduate education. It will include simultaneous and intersecting threads of narrative text in journal, essay, and poetry forms to account for events between 1981 and 1993. Information, action, and commentary will be arranged such that differing reading choices create, in effect, slightly different life stories. But this will not be a "create-your-own-ending" type work; each discrete story contains the same underlying and overlaid thematic and emotional content.
Eventually, I will convert the project to HTML for the web.
URL: http://www.ziplink.net/~pcb/and/start.htm