A New Face for Post-Modern Scholarship:
Announcing the Walker Percy Internet Project

--excerpted from The Southern Quarterly, Summer, 1995, (Vol. 33, No. 4, pp. 159-160).

In the past two or three years, the rapid development of the Internet as a mode for information exchange has ushered in a radical new era for human communication. Through its guiding principle of "consensual information anarchy," whole new genres and forms of literature have been born and are daily created as swiftly as the human imagination can weave them. Indeed, the speed with which the Internet has grown to its present size of some thirty-five-plus million users is almost as if an entire new continent (perhaps "world" would be a more fitting metaphor) has burst forth from the oceans. And, yes, the shock waves are now being felt even in the field of literary studies.

Used primarily for scientific purposes during its technologically-cryptic beginnings in the past decade, the worldwide network of computers known as the Internet soon spread from larger, universal human concerns to the other end of the spectrum as well. For once the technology became accessible to the general public, individuals themselves discovered whole new arenas of personal freedom and self-expression through the multiplicity of communication channels they, too, now had at their disposal. And as info-culture itself expanded by leaps and bounds, so did the field of literature and literary studies begin to take on new faces. For one, new forms of literary narrative emerged, as is found, for example, in many of the fiction "hypertexts" freely available on the Internet. Aside from the novel way by which these literary works find their way to publication, many are nothing short of being functionally "post-modern" in and of themselves because of the authority they give the reader in choosing what direction the narrative will go. And in the more extreme cases, he or she is even able to append his or her own ending! That is, at least temporarily, as the case may be. (1)

From another angle, though, outside of the interactive, fluid nature of the Internet's contents, perhaps its most defining characteristic as a process can be understood by referencing the new physics' concept of "non-locality" (used here somewhat broadly, but not wholly inappropriately). At the mere click of a button, the reader can vault from one corner of the world to the other in a matter of seconds, the massive network of computers seamlessly interweaving billions of packets of data in an ever-changing quantum-like stream of information, even as millions of other users simultaneously access the network's endless stores of information from countless other places around the planet. And out of it all comes, as already described, all manner of strange things as befits our own post-modern landscape.

Despite the Internet's distinctly post-modernistic qualities­in terms of form, content, and fluidity­it also creates in the spirit of its original scientific design, new opportunities for meaningful scholarly exchange in the humanities that are of an unprecedented, if not radically progressive, nature. The capacity to link disparately-scattered resources enables researchers to develop entire new platforms of information that integrate (however loosely in one virtual "place") an endless number of materials about a particular subject, or, in the case of literary studies, about a given literary figure--all with the added benefit of being able to use multiple levels of media. It is in this context, therefore, that this essay has the pleasure of announcing the formation of such a world-accessible resource on the novelist and philosopher Walker Percy.

As others have noted before, Percy was something of a "pioneer" himself in terms of his interest in the distinctive nature of human communication, so it seems appropriate that he be an early literary and philosophical presence on the Internet at a time when the humanities, as a larger field, is just beginning to appreciate the Internet as a research and communication tool. What follows below will present a description of the Walker Percy Internet Project, its scope and goals, and directions for how one may access the multimedia literary project. (2)

Endnotes

[Note--I couldn't make the below hyperlinks "real" in this essay's original publication format, but I sure can here!--HPM]

(1) Consider, for instance, Douglas Davis' project, "The World's First Collaborative Sentence," a ongoing multimedia "sentence" that allows its viewers to contribute anything they want (as long as it's not a period!) to what has now become an endless run-on succession of photos, video clips, and multilingual expressions of thought. Personal amendments can be made at the following Internet address: <http://math240.lehman.cuny.edu/art/> (Cf. Newsweek, April 17, 1995, Vol. CXXV, No. 16, p. 13.).

For more on "hypertext fiction," see Gareth Rees' hypertext article "Tree Fiction on the World Wide Web" at: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk:80/users/gdr11/tree-fiction.html>. Rees' article contains a bibliography to other hypertext fiction resources.

Likewise, for a general literature directory, see: <http://galaxy.einet.net/galaxy/Humanities/Literature.html>. (Rees' article can be found here, under the heading "Prose Fiction and Non Fiction.") For a more scholarly listing, see Louisiana State University's "Literature Webliography" at <http://www.lib.lsu.edu/hum/lit.html> .

(2) For a basic, readable introduction to the Internet, as well as information for going "on-line," see Adam C. Engst, "Making the Internet Connection," MacUser, May 1995: 66-73.


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