Introduction
As a sort of introduction it might be useful to
explain in detail what is the main purpose of this paper and which essential
aspects are going to be dealt with, as well as to provide the reader with some
valuable information about the author and the hypertext which I am going to
analyse.
What is the main purpose of this paper?
The very aim of this paper is to analyse Adrienne Eisen’s Considering
a baby? from the perspective of the rhetorical tools or devices that
can be found in any work of online
hypertext literature. That includes such aspects as links, images, sound, etc. Here it would be worth remembering some important distinguishing
features of this new kind of literature. As hypertext writer and theorist Deena Larsen claims, “Hyper is a prefix meaning excessive,
above, or beyond. Thus, hypertext with
something more than just text. This term is now usually reserved for electronic
works that use a text node/link structure.” Larsen
describes nodes
as “The electronic literature equivalent to a page, usually one screen”,
whereas she defines links in terms
of “A connection between one node and
another. Users click on the link to get the next node”. Therefore, it is clear
that one of the main differences between traditional print literature and new
electronic literature lies in the fact that the latter takes advantage of
computer technologies in order to add a whole set of non-textual elements (e.g.
links, images, music) to the text. Larsen herself
gives a definition of electronic
literature that comes to support this notion. “I am defining electronic
literature as works that contain text and use some traditional literary
rhetorical devices but that also use electronic capabilities as rhetoric--so
these can not be rendered the same way in a print format.” And she also claims
that “Electronic literature uses links, images,
sound, navigation as well as text to convey meaning”.
Taking into account what has been
said before, it becomes obvious what will be the core idea of my analysis – to
discover the rhetorical devices of the hypertext chosen, not only the
traditional literary ones but also the electronic hypertext ones. Within the
first group we can find such aspects as the kind of language used, the
register, the existence of rhetorical figures like metaphors, puns, irony, etc.
On the other hand, the second group includes such aspects as those mentioned at
the top of the previous paragraph (i.e. links, image, sound, scheme), which –
as explained above – play a particularly prominent role in electronic
literature.
However, before focusing our
attention on such concrete features of the hypertext chosen for my analysis, it
would be interesting to introduce some general information about Considering
a baby? and its author, known as Adrienne
Eisen in hypertext literary circles.
Considering a baby?
A hypertext by Adrienne Eisen
Adrienne Eisen
(legal name Adrienne
GreenHeart, born Adrienne Roston in 1966) is an admired American hypertext writer, indeed
she is the only hypertext winner
of the prestigious New Media Invision Award. She is
also known as Penelope
Trunk in her business writing, and under that name wrote a book titled Brazen Careerist: The New Rules
for Success (Warner,
May 2007). As Eisen herself recognises in an email response published by
Lourdes García in UVPress, she has “a bunch of names” – in fact, she has
changed her name four times.
Her business career (under the pseudonym of Penelope Trunk) has been very
successful; however, it is her literary work as Adrienne Eisen what matters here, and
so we will only focus on this aspect of her life. As published in Bankrate’s webpage,
“(...) she won the New Media Invision
Award for storytelling (other winners were Sony Pictures and the writers of
"The X-Files"), and she has been a visiting presenter at universities
all over the world, including Brown, in Rhode Island, and the University of
Paris, in France. Her writing is in the curriculum at universities throughout
the United States and Europe. She studied creative writing in Boston
University's graduate program, where she was nominated for the Henfield Award. She wrote the novel Making Scenes [which
was published in print instead of on the Internet]. Her writing was praised by
Publisher’s Weekly as "quick, punchy prose that will keep the reader
riveted." “
Apart from Considering
a baby?, other pieces of hypertext literature written by Eisen are The Interview, What Fits,
Winter Break
and her major work of online hypertext, titled Six Sex
Scenes.
In Considering
a baby? we can find some of the most characteristic features of Eisen’s writing: her feminist approach to the post-modern woman’s way
of life, her ironic sense of humour, and her eroticism – sex is a core topic of
all Eisen’s works. In the following sections of this
paper I will try to make explicit how the rhetorical devices used in the
hypertext can help to convey all these ideas to the reader.
Go to: [Analysis
(Part One)] [Analysis (Part Two)] [Conclusion] [References]
Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Ana Albalat Mascarell
almas2@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press
