Afternoon, a story is a hypertext fiction written in 1987 by American author Michael Joyce. It was published by Eastgate Systems in 1990 [1] and is known as the first hypertext fiction. Hypertext fiction is a genre found mostly online, where a reader steps through the text of the story in a non-predetermined order. ... Michael Joyce (b. ...

Afternoon was first offered to the public as a demonstration of the hypertext authoring system Storyspace, announced in 1987 at the first Association for Computing Machinery Hypertext conference in a paper by Michael Joyce and Jay David Bolter [2]. In 1990, it was published on diskette and distributed in the same way as a book by Eastgate Systems [3]. It was followed by a series of other Storyspace hypertext fictions, including Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden, Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl and Deena Larsen's Marble Springs. The Association for Computing Machinery, or ACM, was founded in 1947 as the worlds first scientific and educational computing society. ... Shelley Jackson (born 1963) is an artist and hypertext author. ...

Plot and structure

The hypertext fiction tells the story of Peter, a recently divorced man who witnessed a car crash that may or may not have involved his ex-wife and their son.

Criticism

This is one of the most discussed works of electronic literature, and many articles have been written about it. Espen J. Aarseth devotes a chapter of his book Cybertext to Afternoon, calling it a classic example of modernist literature. It is more often thought of as post-modern, as evidenced by its inclusion in the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Fiction [4]. Chapters of Jay David Bolter's Writing Space and J. Yellowlees Douglas's The End of Books or Books Without End also discuss Afternoon. Gunnar Liestøl's article "The Reader's Narrative in Hypertext" in George Landow's Hyper/Text/Theory (1994) uses the theory of narratology to understand Afternoon, as does Jill Walker's "Piecing Together and Tearing Apart: Finding the Story in Afternoon" [5] and Anna Gunders's dissertation work [6]. Espen J. Aarseth is a major figure in the emerging field of video game studies. ... Modernist literature is the literary form of modernism, it should not be confused with modern literature. ... Narratology is the theory and study of narrative and narrative structure. ...

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Afternoon, a story

Image File history File links i would like to see some quotations by or about goebbels. ... Wikiquote is a sister project of Wikipedia, using the same MediaWiki software. ...

External links

• The Electronic Literature Organisation