Lacunas, mapas e percepção: o que os leitores de hipertextos (não) fazem

Abstract

The emphasis on linear sequences of beginning, middle and end in print narratives motivates the reader to recover, in his reading practice, a single, coherent and totalizing narrative governed by relations of cause and effect, thus stressing continuities and ignoring or minimizing the significance of discontinuities. In hypertextual narratives, on the other hand, alternative and sometimes conflicting narrative sequences are privileged. Experiments conducted with students (requiring student groups to compose a narrative from a short story fragmented in forty random pieces, without being allowed to read the original story; assigning them the task of comparing Borges’s “The Garden of forking paths” with Stuart Moulthrop’s electronic translation of the same story) suggest that hypertextual narratives tend to open the way to the reading practice of an “outside oriented” reader, predisposed to develop new reading habits, as opposed to the “inside oriented” reader who tends to remain dependent on reading practices defined by the constraints of print narratives.