Welcome
Welcome to my hypertext: "Metaphor: From Plato to the Postmodernists." This project explores the role of metaphor in Plato's texts, postmodernist works, culture, and technology. I have braided together citations from Plato, Derrida, Barthes, Bakhtin, and Lakoff & Johnson, while maintaining a 'journey' metaphor throughout.
Here are just some of the topics my hypertext covers:
- Plato's metaphorically-constructed Theory of Forms
- metaphors we use in speaking about the Internet
- how we construe basic human experiences, like arguing and understanding and loving, in metaphorical terms
As a navigational aid, I have created an Overview of
Topics. From this page, you can pick a topic that interests you, say
"Derrida" or "Technology" or "Reading and Writing." When you click on a
topic, you are presented with a list of lexias related to that topic.
Click on any of these to jump into the web. I created the Overview of
Topics with the realization that this is a multidisciplinary project,
and, as such, appeals to a wide variety of readers with varying interests
and motivations. The Overview is especially useful for readers who wants
to sink their teeth into one particular aspect of the project right away.
One of the advantages of Storyspace is the ability to make several links
from one source. So, when you click on a chunk of text that has multiple
links emanating from it, you are presented with a dialog box of options
for the different links. In HTML, however, you can only associate a given
chunk of text with one outgoing link. This disparity only affects the
starting point of my hypertext (if in fact a hypertext can have a
starting point). The "start" lexia of my Storyspace version has branching
links. To preserve this freedom for my reader in the HTML version, I
simply created lists of links to choose from.
The Writing
I originally created this hypertext in Storyspace, an
electronic writing tool that has as the unit of content the "lexia", or
chunk of text. This is in contrast to the World Wide Web, where the
fundamental unit of writing is the page. As I created the project, I
wrote in small Storyspace lexias. Once I transported these lexias into
HTML pages, they seemed too small to fill the big shoes of the page
metaphor: I loaded the pages in Netscape, and saw a tiny area of text on
the top of each page, with the rest of the window empty. To correct this,
I enlarged the font, and narrowed each lexia by circumscribing it with
the highway images.
How to Navigate
Unlike most other web sites, the links you have already followed in
"Metaphor" do not turn a different color than the links you have yet to
follow. This might be a trifle trying for the hurried reader who does not
want to revisit pages. However, I wanted to emphasize the circularity of
the hypertext, and encourage the reader to build multiple bridges between
the lexias.
HTML versus Storyspace Version:
In the Storyspace version, I emphasized the multivocality of this
hypertext more, by associating each theorist's quotes with a unique font.
Unfortunately, the present state of HTML is such that I have much less
freedom with fonts with this WWW version.
Erica Jean
Seidel