Afternoon, a story

afternoon, a story, spelled with a lowercase 'a', is a work of electronic literature written in 1987 by American author Michael Joyce. It was published by Eastgate Systems in 1990 and is known as one of the first works of hypertext fiction.

Cover art for floppy disk case for afternoon

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.^[1] In 1990, it was published on diskette and distributed in the same form by Eastgate Systems. 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. Eastgate continued to publish the work in the 2010s and distributed it on a USB flash drive.^[2]

Plot and structure

The hypertext fiction tells the story of Peter, a recently divorced man who witnessed a car crash. Hours later, he suspects that the wrecked car may have involved his ex-wife and their son.

The plot may change each time it is read if the reader chooses different paths.

Critical reception

Robert Coover reviewed this work i August 29, 1993 in the New York Times Book Review, "Hyperfiction; And Now, Boot Up the Reviews"^[3]

This is a highly discussed work of electronic literature since it was one of the first electronic interactive novels, therefore many articles have been written about it. Espen J. Aarseth devotes a chapter of his book Cybertext to afternoon, arguing that it is a classic example of modernist literature.^[4] It is however often thought of as a work of postmodern literature, as evidenced by its inclusion in the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Fiction.^[5]

Chapters of Jay David Bolter's Writing Space and J. Yellowlees Douglas's The End of Books or Books Without End also discuss afternoon, as does Matthew G. Kirschenbaum's Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination.

A number of scholars have discussed the extent to which afternoon extends or breaks with conventional definitions of narrative.

Early scholarship used and adapted the theory of narratology to understand afternoon. One of the first examples is Gunnar Liestøl's article "Wittgenstein, Genette, and the Reader's Narrative in Hypertext" in George Landow's Hyper/Text/Theory (1994).^[6] Jill Walker's 1998 analysis explores "ways in which the text confuses the reader but also the many stabilising elements that aid the reader to piece together a story".^[7] Rasmus Blok discusses "the sense of narrative" in afternoon.^[8]

This work was analyzed in Astrid Ensslin's work, Pre-web Digital Publishing and the Lore of Electronic Literature (2022).^[9]

Translations and editions

afternoon has been published in many different editions since it was first distributed on a floppy disk with a handwritten label in 1987. Dene Grigar has compiled an overview, with details about each edition.^[10]

The hypertext fiction has been translated^[10] into Italian, German, Polish^[11][12] and French.^[13]

References

1. Bolter, Jay David; Joyce, Michael (1987). "Hypertext and creative writing". Proceeding of the ACM conference on Hypertext - HYPERTEXT '87. Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States: ACM Press. pp. 41–50. doi:10.1145/317426.317431. ISBN 978-0-89791-340-9. S2CID 207627394.
2. Eastgate: afternoon, a story Eastgate, Retrieved August 29, 2016.
3. Coover, Robert (1993-08-29). "HYPERFICTION; And Now, Boot Up the Reviews". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2023-11-25.
4. Aarseth, Espen J. (1997). Cybertext: perspectives on ergodic literature. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press. pp. 90–95. ISBN 0-8018-5578-0. OCLC 36246052.
5. Geyh, Paula; Leebron, Fred; Levy, Andrew, eds. (1998). Postmodern American fiction: a Norton anthology (1st ed.). New York. ISBN 0-393-31698-X. OCLC 37141195.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
6. Liestøl, Gunnar (1994). "Wittgenstein, Genette, and the Reader's Narrative in Hypertext". In Landow, George (ed.). Hyper/text/theory. George P. Landow. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0-8018-4837-7. OCLC 30319895.
7. Walker, Jill (1999). "Piecing together and tearing apart". Proceedings of the tenth ACM Conference on Hypertext and hypermedia : Returning to our diverse roots: Returning to our diverse roots. Darmstadt Germany: ACM. pp. 111–117. doi:10.1145/294469.294496. hdl:1956/1073. ISBN 978-1-58113-064-5. S2CID 17335695.
8. Blok, Rasmus (2004-01-01). I Try to Recall …: A Sense of Narrative in the Digital Novel – afternoon, a story. Brill. doi:10.1163/9789004483576_023. ISBN 978-90-04-48357-6. S2CID 240430425.
9. Ensslin, Astrid (2022). Pre-web Digital Publishing and the Lore of Electronic Literature. Cambridge University Press.
10. Grigar, Dene (2018). "afternoon, a story - Editions At-A-Glance" (PDF).
11. Pisarski, Mariusz (2015). "From Storyspace to Browsers. Translating afternoon, a story into Polish". Translating E-Literature/Traduire la littérature numérique.
12. Joyce, Michael (2011). Popołudnie, pewna historia. Radosław Nowakowski, Mariusz Pisarski, Korporacja Ha!art. Kraków: Korporacja Ha!art. ISBN 978-83-62574-33-9. OCLC 1126635018.
13. Tremblay-Gaudette, Gabriel (2021), Desjardins, Renée; Larsonneur, Claire; Lacour, Philippe (eds.), "You Can't Go Home Again: Moving afternoon Forward Through Translation", When Translation Goes Digital, Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 69–87, doi:10.1007/978-3-030-51761-8_4, ISBN 978-3-030-51760-1, S2CID 230585046, retrieved 2022-10-25

External links

• Eastgate
• afternoon
• Scan of the case and content of the hypertext creation "afternoon, a story" from 1992
• Full scan of the italian edition (published together with "ra-dio" by Lorenzo Miglioli) and dump of the included floppy media for both windows 3.1 and macintosh system 6.x/7.x