In our first week, we were asked to define “literary.” If I learned anything about literature from that session, it was that terms like that or “literature” are more appropriately described by examples than defined by a few sentences. With that in mind, the best example of this in hypertext is that “My Boyfriend Came Home from the War” is literature, and “Hegirascope” is not.<\/p>\n
I don’t believe in the concept of assigning some sort of quality inspection on what is literature. The idea that something is literature because some people with degrees decided that they liked it is silly and elitist. What makes literature, and literary, is a story narrative.<\/p>\n
Literary and literature are not synonyms to “art,” so when I say “Hegirascope” is not literature, I’m not saying it’s not a quality piece of art. But in order to be literature, a linear, definable story must be conveyed throughout the text. In “Hegirascope,” there is no linear story being told that connects directly through the various links. Specific pieces of “Hegirascope” would qualify as literature, such as the very short stories present in it. But piece itself doesn’t use it’s parts to create a linear narrative, it uses them to evoke a surreal and emotional connection.<\/p>\n
“Boyfriend” is like Hegirascope in that it can be told in different orders based on user interactivity. What separates it into the separate genre of literature is that beyond the different order of choices, the story is the same. It tells a concrete story of a man coming home from war and finding himself distanced from those around him.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, “Boyfriend” is not an honestly interactive text. The user cannot change the outcome of the stories as we can in our adventure books – the beginning and end will always be the same. I don’t think that makes it any worse than those books, but in this case, I find the veneer of interactivity to be a cheap trick to keep the user engaged. That doesn’t make it any less literary, but I dislike its hypertextuality being used to shield a lack of overall depth in the story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In our first week, we were asked to define “literary.” If I learned anything about literature from that session, it was that terms like that or “literature” are more appropriately described by examples than defined by a few sentences. With that in mind, the best example of this in hypertext is that “My Boyfriend Came … Continue reading On Being Literary<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reflections"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":219,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218\/revisions\/219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}