Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary had multiple different essays to choose from, I selected one by Jonathan Jones titled The Body in Electronic Literature. The essay took a path that I was not expecting. Thinking that this title was a metaphor for some piece of electronic technology that Jonathan Jones was going to educate me on I was quite surprised by the actual content. Jonathan Jones wrote an analysis on Shelley Jackson’s My Body — a Wunderkammer.
What exactly is a wunderkammer? I don’t know and didn’t learn through Jonathan Jones’s essay but I did learn some personal facts about Shelley Jackson’s climb into physical maturity. According to Jones, the website features:
A crudely sketched, black-and-white self-portrait of the author, whose body is divided into separately labeled constituent parts, this work of “hyperfiction” thematizes the fragmentation of the body. By clicking on the various body parts, the reader is taken by hyperlink to other pages featuring textual anecdotes and meditations on a particular body part, new hyperlinks embedded in the text, and other coarse sketches of the author’s body.
Jones goes on to describe some of the stories that are linked to Jackson’s body parts, which don’t need to be shared here on my personal blog. I think the point that Jones was getting at is that the hyperlinks behind Jackson’s crude stories are impressive.
The way that Jackson was able to make one image link to multiple different images is quite innovative. To take the reader to a new site with the click of a different body part is a unique idea, a little strange, but the technology behind it is advanced and interesting.
Jonathan Jones’s essay was somewhat confusing and I couldn’t find a clear point in his writing but what I think he was getting at, being the multiple hyperlinks, was interesting and innovative. Perhaps it is fairly new technology that we don’t know much about yet and Jones displayed all the information that he could gather. Jackson’s website is hyperlink craziness and the stories behind her links are very personal but the advancement in technology, I think, will prove to be very useful.
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