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*Water
Always Writes in *Plural, Linda Carroli and Josephine
Wilson (hypertext)
http://ensemble.va.com.au/water/intro.html
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As technology
changes almost everything in our lives at a head-spinning
pace, reading seemed to be one of the last bastions
of a world rapidly disappearing. With the burgeoning
of hypertext fiction and 'the tantalizing new possibility
of laying a story out spatially instead of linearly,
inviting the reader to explore it as one might explore
one's memory or wander a many-pathed geographical terrain'
(Coover, 2000: 2), reading books may soon be an old-fashioned
pastime.
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One
award-winning example of these 'adventurous quests at
the edge of a new literary frontier', as Coover (2000:
2) calls them, is *Water Always Writes in *Plural,
written in 1997 by a Brisbane-based writer, Linda Carroli,
and a Perth-based writer, Josephine Wilson. The Australian
Network for Art and Technology commissioned the writers
as a joint initiative with the Adelaide-based Electronic
Writing and Research Ensemble, and the result is an ambitious
and far-reaching work that is reflective and circular
in both its content and structure. |
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'Hypertext
is essentially a network of links between words, ideas
and sources, one that has neither a centre nor an end'
(Snyder, 1997: 127). Structurally this is especially true
of *Water Always Writes in *Plural. Every path
except one leads back to the beginning lexia that consists
of the words, 'A woman stands on a street corner waiting
for a stranger', and thus there is no centre or end to
the story. The content dictates this structure and, as
such, it is meaningful and does not hinder or frustrate
the reader traversing the work. |
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