Linking Spaces in the Cybertext Novel

Abstract

The “digital galvanization of the arts” at the turn of the century, as Richard Lanham has predicted, will have a long-term effect on the development of literacy and on the future of the codex book as a pivot of Western civilization. This necessitates a search for long-standing but valid approaches in the exploration of the act of reading, taking into account the new medium and the technology used for the creation, dissemination and reading of cybertext fiction. The aim of this paper is to examine the link as one of the salient features of digital narratives. The paper overviews various interpretations of the link from different theoretical perspectives within the area of linguistics and literary theory. The link is analyzed as the main organizational device contributing to the coherence of these otherwise structurally loose narratives, as a rhetorical device on equal par to metaphors and, most of all, as a textual element facilitating the process of “realization” and “concretization” of the narrative itself. The correlation between links in cybertexts and the phenomenological “gaps” or “vacancies” of reader-response theory forms the focus of the analysis in an effort to determine certain strategies the readers employ on encountering digital narratives. The paper refers to some outstanding examples of cybertext fiction.