Venerable novelistic values like unity, integrity, vision, voice seem to be in danger. Eloquence is being redefined. “Text” has lost its canonical certainty. How does one judge, analyze, write about a work that never reads the same way twice? … How does one resolve the conflict between the reader’s desire for coherence and closure and the text’s desire for continuance, its fear of death?
Predictor: Coover, Robert
Prediction, in context:In a 1992 article he wrote for The New York Times, “The End of Books,” Robert Coover tells of his fascination with hypertext, a term coined by computer populist Ted Nelson, as Coover says “to describe the writing done in the nonlinear or nonsequential space made possible by the computer.” Coover writes about his weekly hypertext workshops at Brown University:”The creative imagination often becomes more preoccupied with linkage, routing and mapping than with statement or style, or with what we would call character or plot ….We in the workshop have … played freely and often quite anarchically in a group-fiction space called ‘Hotel.’ Here, writers are free to check in, to open up new rooms, new corridors, new intrigues, to unlink texts or create new links, to intrude upon or subvert the texts of others, to alter plot trajectories, manipulate time and space, to engage in dialogue through invented characters, then kill off one another’s characters or even to sabotage the hotel’s plumbing … This space of essentially anonymous text fragments remains online, and each new set of workshop students is invited to check in there and continue the story of the Hypertext Hotel. I would like to see it stay open for a century or two. However, as all of us have discovered, even though the basic technology of hypertext may be with us for centuries to come, perhaps even as long as the technology of the book, its hardware and software seem to be fragile and short-lived; whole new generations of equipment and programs arrive before we can finish reading the instructions of the old … There are other problems, too. Navigational procedures: how do you move around in infinity without getting lost? The space can be so compelling and confusing as to utterly absorb and neutralize the narrator and to exhaust the reader. And there is the related problem of filtering. With an unstable text that can be intruded upon by other author-readers, how do you, caught in the maze, avoid the trivial? How do you duck the garbage? Venerable novelistic values like unity, integrity, vision, voice seem to be in danger. Eloquence is being redefined. ‘Text’ has lost its canonical certainty. How does one judge, analyze, write about a work that never reads the same way twice? … How does one resolve the conflict between the reader’s desire for coherence and closure and the text’s desire for continuance, its fear of death? Indeed, what is closure in such an environment? If everything is middle, how do you know when you are done, either as a reader or writer?”
Biography:Robert Coover was one of the pioneers of online literature. He has been a teacher of experimental courses in hypertext and multimedia narrative at Brown University. His 1992 essay on hypertext in the New York Times Book Review, “The End of Books,” described and publicized the idea of digital literature. (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
Date of prediction: January 1, 1992
Topic of prediction: Getting, Sharing Information
Subtopic: Publishing
Name of publication: New York Times
Title, headline, chapter name: The End of Books
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://cas.buffalo.edu/english/faculty/conte/syllabi/370/EndofBooks.htm
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Chick, Jason