Globalization and Everyday “Narratives”: Toward a Poetics of Hypertextuality

Using Raymond William's notion of televisual “flow” and Anne Friedberg's phrase “mobilized ‘virtual' gaze” as points of departure, this paper investigates the non-linear and anti- progressive tendency in everyday “narratives” (such as chatroom conversations, blog networking, and video gaming) in the context of globalization. Such hypertextual narratives do not follow a traditional trajectory of expositions and resolutions, but enact a more fluid, fragmentary, and non-linear consideration for the intermittent and contingent network of human relationship. Instead, everyday narratives' focus on incidental occurrences (in lieu of main transformational actions) renders these narratives fundamentally episodic and unfocused. The lack of narrative determinacy and closure, a condition of hypertextuality, represents “an affirmation irreducible to unity” (Blanchot). Furthermore, the process of globalization facilitates and modifies Benjamin's distracted subject positioning in these highly interactive narratives, in which fuzzy and incidental inter-subject communications become conditioned by the ever-shifting dynamics of the local vs. the global.

 Bio: Ming Hung Alex Tu is currently an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Tamkang University . His research interests include multi-media narratives, media and popular culture theories, and hypertextuality in everyday culture.