Herodotean Hypertexts:
David Chamberlain, Princeton University davecham@Princeton.EDU

Herodotus was the first western prose author--the first author, that is, to produce a work that exploits the literary potential of the written prose form ­ and the invention of history occurs simultaneously with the invention of connected prose literature in the second half of the fifth century B.C.E. What prose really meant to a writer of Herodotusą generation, however, is hard to say, since the Greeks tended to define the form as the negative or absence of poetry (with its associated rules of form). I want to generate a more positive outline of prose form; one which does justice to the radical break with poetic pattern implied by Herodotusą choice, but also one which allows for an appreciation of this new form of expression on its own terms.

A new literature finding its own form today can provide us with a powerful comparandum. Electronic literature, a kind of written expression freed from the formal constraints of the physical page, and from the various forms of distribution (media) associated with the page, is just beginning to be recognised as a valid and interesting literary form. It suffers, however, from the same lack of positive definition as Herodotusą invention: too often it is characterised in negative terms ("non-linear", for instance) that do justice neither to the sophistication of the new form, nor for that matter to the material complexity of the old (books, after all, have various kinds of non-linearity built into them). Few readers who spend a substantial amount of time with the more imaginative and ambitious examples of this new form fail to recognise it as something genuinely novel; and yet it remains difficult to characterise that novelty in authentic, positive terms.

Electronic literature, then, provides a useful model for thinking about Herodotusą formal innovation; and Herodotus can return the favor. The Histories are an important model of formal innovation against a background of media-specific convention, and Herodotus gives us a glimpse of a pre-Platonic world of written expression that the experimenters in electronic form are busily reinventing.

I suggest the following foci for articulating this comparison:

* Use of a new medium

* Reading for pattern rather than presence

* The role of the reader and the voice of the writer

* An example of anti-hierarchical form: "Hippokleides Doesnąt Care"

* The principle of accretive form

* Experiment and the text in process (dynamic text)