CONCLUSION
The principle behind Chicken Soup for your Corporate Ass is the butterfly effect, globalisation. It presents us how decisions taken in a global scale can affect the local communities and how our decisions affect us and the world around us. The importance of spatial references, then, is one of the keys to understand this hypertext. Behind the text lies a strong political protest which brings to mind the relation of hypertext and politics, in fact, how hypertext becomes a means for political expression and awareness. According to Moulthrop, citing Frederic Jameson, who calls for:
an “aesthetic of cognitive mapping”, a “pedagogical political culture” in which we would begin to teach ourselves where we stand in the networks of transnational power. At this moment, as the West reconsiders its New World Order in the aftermath of a war for oil reserves, we seem in especially urgent need of such education. But such a cultural pedagogy clearly needs something more than the evening war news, especially when reporters are confined to informational wading pools (Moulthrop1991).
William Gillespie and his Newspoetry project seem to follow this line. He is taking cultural pedagogy out there, although as he reveals in an interview with Sandra Ahten, he is doing it for his friends who are not bothered with reading the newspapers. It seems like content and form want to lead us to the same road. As Stuart Moulthrop (1991) will put it, “Literacy under hypertext must extend not only to the “content”of a composition but to its hypotextual “form”.
Furthermore, from a spatial point of view, the complexity of this hypertext is found in the interweave of the stories and the conclusions we, as readers, can draw from the facts that the author gives us. By reading the text once, we are missing the greatness of this hypertext, we will miss the interconnectivity of the characters, we won´t be able to know who the characters really are and the irony that lies behind these stories. As Joyce (1991), said “The new writing requires rather than encourages multiple readings. It not only enacts these readings, it does not exist without them”.
In CSCA there is no introduction, no main body and no conclusion. This is due to the nature of exploratory hypertexts. Any reader will come to the same conclusions if, as said before, the s/he is prepared to re-read the text. I hope some of you agree with me that there are hints of irony in these stories. My favourite one is Jerry´s. Jerry Armantrout needs a liver operation, but his health insurance company won´t cover it, in addition, he also runs a tombstone engraving business which unfortunatly is not at its peak. If the author allows me, I imagine him improving his business performance thanks to all those high executives who are passing out in CSCA, and probalby being able to pay for the operation himself. To summ up, as Moulthrop (1991) stated “The text gestures toward openness—what options can you imagine?—but then it forecloses: some options are available but not others, and someone clearly has done the defining”.
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CHARACTER SPATIAL
ANALYSIS BACKGROUND SUMMARY WORKS CITED
Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
©Ana Ruth Contreras Fernández
Universitat de València Press