Drew Murphy's Profile

Plate margins that are coming together are called convergent
margins, while those that are splitting apart are called divergent.
A third type, transform-fault margins, are sliding against
each other, going in opposite directions (like those of the
San Andreas

"[s]torytelling and narrative lie at the heart of all successful communication. Crude, explicit, button-pushing interaction breaks the spell of engagement and makes it hard to present complex information that unfolds in careful sequence" (41). The real allure of hypertext, it may turn out, is not its alliance with the writerly text, but with The Book, with its possibilities, through fixed links and narrow path choices, of ever more ingenious ways of directing, controlling and surprising the reader. The Author may be dead, but his ghosts maybe even more eloquent.

To think of the world not as a Book but as a hypertext is to conceive of it as a heterogeneous, mutable, interactive and open-ended space where meaning is inscribed between signs, between nodes, and between readers, not enclosed between the limits of a front and back cover, or anchored to some conceptual spine called the author.

The Book of Nature, as another manifestation of The Book, reveals the enormous impact which the linear model of textual organization has had not only our values of what constitutes literature (its importance being especially evident in the emergence of the novel) but on the way in which we have imagined our world.

More abstractly, a book, with its front and back cover, its first page and last, is a model of our desire for completion, wholeness, and closure. The very physical organization of a book, with pages bound to a centre spine, invites us to proceed through a text in linear, pre-determined manner, moving first from left to right across the page, then from page to page and chapter to chapter. The Book thus upholds our mutual fascinations with etiology and teleology, with beginnings and endings.

The Book are thus conceived as passive receptors of the undiluted truth its author intended.

The frame constitutes the basic syntactic unit of the comic strip. Placed in a discrete sequence these frames form a grammatical block analogous to a conventional sentence (changing the sequence of frames changes the meaning of the total strip). However, unlike words, frames can interact in more complex syntactical forms: superimposition, interlocking and transmuting frames (where speech bubbles become the frame and vice versa, or where a group of frames form a window into a complete scene). (129)

What is at issue here is not simply the visual appearance of the book, but the importance of the artist retaining what Marx called the means of production. With the advent of the electronic text, the author once again becomes his or her own publisher and is able to use the very medium of the book as a vehicle of the artistic expression. Retaining control of every aspect of a text's production, from writing to packaging and distribution, the author of the electronic text regains the possibility of fulfilment Ruskin sensed in the Gothic imagination.