Gripla - 20.12.2016, Síða 79

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are connected by electronic links. By clicking on a link, usually a
highlighted phrase, the reader causes the system to display the con-
tents of a specific node. a fragment typically contains a number of
different links, offering the reader a choice of directions to follow.
By letting readers determine their own paths of navigation through
the database, hypertext promotes what is customarily regarded as a
nonlinear mode of reading. the applications of the idea nowadays
include the World Wide Web, educational databases, the on-line help
files of computer programs, Ph.D. dissertations and other scholarly
texts, and multimedia works on CD roM, as well as poetry and
literary fiction”.72
Hypertext literature, one of many manifestations of contemporary digital
textuality, was first developed in the 1980s; its development has seen sev-
eral phases and rapid advancement, accompanied by growing scholarly
critical engagement and narratological analyis.73 Its hallmarks are reader-
narrative interaction and a process-orientated, collaborative and performa-
tive dynamic, reflexivity, recursivity, multiple-path structures, non-linearity
and fluidity, and open-endedness.
Conceptually, hypertext literature has been likened to a journey,74
a supermarket shopping experience,75 a kaleidoscopic experience.76 Cruc-
72 Marie-Laure Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and
Electronic Media (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins university Press, 2001), 206.
73 See J. David Bolter, Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print
(London and new York: routledge, 2011. Second edition), and George Landow, Hypertext
3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization (Baltimore: John Hopkins
University Press, 2006).
74 “the text as a whole is a territory, the links are roads, the textual units are destinations,
the reader is a traveler or navigator, clicking is a mode of transportation, and the itinerary
selected by the traveler is a ‘story’,” ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality, 218.
75 “the reader browses along the links, takes a quick look at the commodities displayed on the
screens, and either drops them into his shopping basket for careful study or moves on to
other screens. this reader does not feel compelled to read the text in its entirety or to pay
attention to every screen, because he sees the text not as a work held together by a global
design but as a display of resources from which he can freely pick and choose … In a variant
of the supermarket scenario, the reader puts lexias into his shopping basket not to consume
them individually but to use them as material to construct his own stories”, ryan, Narrative
as Virtual Reality, 219.
76 “the text consists of a collection of fragments that can be combined into ever-changing
configurations through the random choies of the reader”, ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality,
219.
THE ICELANDIC SAGAS AND SAGA LANDSCAPES