Table of Contents
After exposing the main principles of electronic literature, it is time to dig into the subject and find some good examples to show what it really is. As you’ll probably see, it is very difficult to define clear boundaries between genres and sometimes even  distinguishing between prose and poetry. However, this is just another consequence of the critical questions electronic literature helps us – if not to answer – for sure to pose. I’ll try to follow an order as chronological as it can be, and you’ll notice how full of events this hypothetical timeline is, even though it has not been long since electronic literature has started to be identified as a literary genre.
Katherine Hayles uses 1995 as a watershed in the history of electronic literature. From then on a new phase starts, that is, the so-called second generation. This moment is characterized by a vast use of the Internet that opens up to the great public outside the academic context. It was destined to be the most efficient, rapid and multi-functional means of communication ever existed. At the same time, another revolution was taking place: computer were getting more and more “personal” as the costs for buying one were decreasing. However, some pieces of electronic literature already existed before 1995. This was way back when the Storyspace school started developing the eponym hypertext software.
Before going any further, I think we should define what hypertext means. It was 1963 when this term was used for the first time: Ted Nelson thought of hypertext as a method to collect texts and allow readers to link them freely through hyperlinks, so to adapt the nonsequential structure of our minds to a nonsequential organization of information. This is what he said in an interview with Jim Whitehead:
I particularly minded having to take thoughts which were not intrinsically sequential [. . .] because print as it appears on the paper [. . .] is sequential. There was always something wrong with that because you were trying to take these thoughts which had [. . .] a spatial structure all their own, and put them into linear form. Then the reader had to take this linear structure and recompose his or her picture of the overall content, once again placed in this nonsequential structure. [. . .] you had to take these two additional steps of deconstructing some thoughts into linear sequence, and then reconstructing them. Why couldn’t that all be bypassed by having a nonsequential structur e of thought which you presented directly? That was the hypothesis – well, the hyperthesis really – of hypertext, that you could save both the writer’s time and the reader’s time and effort in putting together and understanding what was being presented.
In his famous though curious and almost incomprehensible a book of sketches, Writing Machines, Nelson exposes his project, Xanadu. He is still working on that and many criticisms have been moved to it in time. Maybe it is as out of reach as Coleridge’s Xanadu, but still, it describes an ideal platform for hypertext: “By hypertext I mean nonsequential writing, text that branches and allows choice to the reader, best read at an interactive screen”.
As in an information web, Nelson’s hypertext is made of links and nodes, and the final realization of it was called  docuverse, a system for global information in which every text in the world is at immediate disposal of the reader. She can then link any other branch of text to the main one, making it personal and, through interaction, alive.
Nelson’s idea had a strong impact on the world of computer science and some years later Vannevar Bush – one of the forefathers of human-machine interaction – wrote a famous article, “As we may think” in which he described a device called memex which had a lot to share with the docuverse:
A memex is a device in which an individual shares all his books, records and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.
1989 was the year in which hypertext became eventually popular and widespread. Even though Nelson still claims that that did not respect his initial conception of it, the acronyms http (hypertext transmission protocol) and html (hypertext markup language) show the close relation between hypertext and the Internet. According to what Tim-Berners Lee says, the Internet was first conceived at CERN. It was a way to connect the different departments of the center and to share their information:
The aim would be to allow a place to be found for any information or reference which one felt was important, and a way of finding it afterwards. The result should be sufficiently attractive to use that it the information contained would grow past a critical threshold, so that the usefulness the scheme would in turn encourage its increased use. The passing of this threshold accelerated by allowing large existing databases to be linked together and with new ones.
That being said, we have to analyze what hypertext means in a literary environment, that is, what differences the suffix hyper- brings to the traditional and apparently well-established concept of text. According to what Nelson says about Xanadu, hypertext lives on many chronological and spacial axes, it’s animated through links and needs to be surfed, interconnected and played by a user so to become alive. Moving this idea into a more literary field, we realize that the writer by herself is not enough anymore to impose her authority on a text – it is actually shared between reader and writer. The “author” is a fusion between the two, the result of their asinchronous though conjunct cooperation that allows a story to be narrated: The different branches of texts or lexia are pieces to put together.
It is well worth noticing that this definition of hypertext doesn’t exclude many works that were not born-digital, such as the Choose Your Own Adventure books. Apparently there is no difference between those books and an electronic hypertext: it asks the reader to make a decision and among the many links proposed, to click on a hot word and open the relative lemma. Looking closer though it is clear that the difference in the means through which  a text is delivered is crucial to understand not only what meaning the text can convey, but also  how the delivery of text happens. The reader is asked to face the problem of navigation of a text in a completely different way. It is necessary, I believe, to spend some time in analyzing the aesthetics of hypertext in a digital environment, so to understand what impresses our artistic taste and detect some characteristic features of electronic hypertext.
First of all, electronic literature is said to be ergodic. This term was coined by Aarseth from the Greek, ergon meaning “work” and hodos meaning “path”. According to Aarseth, everytime a reader deals with a cybertext, she is dealing with a long, difficult, effortful journey. Speaking of hypertext, the effort lies in choosing among manifold links, open them up, reading, choose again, until you realize you have reached the end. There is another sense in which a text can be considered ergodic, that is, in the hyperlinear reading it requires. Whilst a book can support both a omolinear reading strategy – sequentially, page by page – and a eterolinear or tmesis one – that is, skimming and skipping from one point in the text to another, the digital hypertext prevents us from enjoying this kind of freedom. You cannot impose your own will to the mechanized structure of a hypertext: once you choose your own path, you cannot come back unless you start over and see what would have happened if you had opened another link. There are many other characteristics that could be developed and analyzed but it is better to extrapolate them through the direct analysis of some good works.
At the very beginning of this chapter, I mentioned Storyspace, a software that allows you to create hypertext. Michael Joyce was among the programmers before becoming one of the most famous hyper-writers: afternoon: not only are a story and twelve blue one of the first works created using Storyspace, but also they are considered two masterpieces. The first one is usually labelled as the first attempt of a narrative hypertext. The other one is way more fascinating, in that it communicates an ongoing incompleteness in its lexia. Each of them has been profoundly pondered and written so to give a sense of fiction that lacks narrativa: bearing in mind that “Twelve blue isn’t anything. Think of liliacs when they’re gone”, we as readers can collect the different hues of blue along the way and reconstruct the plot they should be part of.