Temporal and Spatial Coordinates in Hypertext Fiction

Abstract

Electronic literature, or hypertext fiction, as a new trend in the development of literary works, demonstrates ever-lasting, inexhaustible search for new ways of self-expression by human mind which goes along with investigations and exploitations of new possibilities modern technologies provide for composition of works of fiction that belong to the age-old literary genres. The structure of a hypertext provides a way to link and get access to multiple parts of a text that are joined by various types of relations as a web of nodes. By choosing a certain link from an available number of options, a reader makes a leap in time and, consequently, in space, that is changes what M. Bakhtin defined as a chronotope -a constitutive unit of form and content in literature that combines spatial and temporal parameters into one whole, into a system of coordinates for a certain narrative action. A linked structure of a hypertext, organized into a network of fragments and connections between them forms "a mosaic" of chronotopes. A change of time dimension entails a change of space dimension and results in constant change of chronotopes creating the effect of a kaleidoscope each turn of which forms a new picture from available parts.