Between hypertext and experience: James Joyce and the potentiality of language

This work sets out to explore current hypertext criticism with the aim of establishing its place within narrative theory, in an integrative approach that moves beyond the structural and functional qualities of hypertext towards defining a particular concept of narrative, for which I have coined the term hyperglossia. This concept defines a connection between experience and narrative, which I subsequently apply to the analysis of Ulysses, in an attempt to offer a new perspective on Joyce's stream of consciousness technique as well as on the texture and nature of Joyce's language in general.; The first chapter starts from the premise that both orality and writing involve techniques of rhetoric, structuring and mnemonics. Instead of opposing them, I regard oral discourse and the book as technologies that enable different experiences of the word, particularly of storytelling and narrative. I establish working definitions of information, text and narrative, which enable me to build a path through the maze of hypertext criticism and to propose a view of hypertext as a totality of texts with infinite variation, endlessly revisable and enlargeable. Any actualization/reading of a (hyper)text therefore results in narrative, one of many narrative possibilities that records a particular encounter between (hyper)text and reader.; The second chapter contains the conceptual articulation of hyperglossia. Based on Bakhtin's heteroglossia and Benjamin's revision of the Kantian transcendental philosophy, hyperglossia aims at relating narrative to experience/ Erfahrung by addressing the possibility of translating intensity in a language severed from experience/Erlebnis. Benjamin elaborates his speculative concept of experience/Erfahrung through the method of immanent critique in order to create surfaces of reflection through which the past can be rendered meaningful for the present.; In the third chapter I interrogate the capacity of the stream of consciousness technique to represent consciousness and, in applying my concept of hyperglossia to James Joyce's Ulysses, I establish that the directness associated with the experience expressed via the stream is a linguistic effect.; The last chapter proposes the notion of the pre-text to account for intra- and inter-textual variation, as well as for the networking of texts envisaged by Th. Nelson's hypertext. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...