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Nonlinearity Today

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When one talks about nonlinear narratives, what is often understood today is a plot structure applied to books and films only. Yet decentered, disordered and dispersed nature of nonlinearity manifests itself in various ways nowadays thanks to technological developments, such as the internet. The World Wide Web, for example, is an information system where documents are interlinked by hypertexts, which in turn are interconnected with hyperlinks that lead to multiple paths and endpoints. A click in a search engine can be a basic example to understanding how hyperlinks work: keywords bring many results out of order. On the other hand, interactive books may simultaneously contain multiple endings and beginnings, leading to inspiration of nonlinear ‘gameplay’, allowing users to put together different pieces of a potentially puzzling storyline. The same approach is adopted by journalists and scholars. Sharon Daniel, a digital media professor and activist, launched a series of projects called ...
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A Short History of Oral Tradition

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For centuries, people have recounted stories through oral and written traditions to share experiences and knowledge. Myths, fables, legends, ballads, folktales are the first forms of oral tradition where people with limited technical resources conveyed their messages, all while entertaining and informing an audience. Unlike written works, oral traditions require a narrator to tell a story in different places and times, therefore inevitably in different orders each time. The authentic content here is unsteady as most of the works don't refer to its source. If a story spreads by word of mouth, through many versions over time it undoubtedly spreads imperfectly. Derivative myths are an organic process where there is seemingly no such thing as an absolute story. 1 The subjective rendering of the narrative alternates variations and experimental storytelling methods too. Joan Jonas, They Come to Us without a Word, 2015. From Homer's epic poetry to Icelandic sagas, almost every cultur...
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A Short History of Nonlinearity in Literature

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Nonlinearity is a narrative technique in which the story is out of order, deconstructed, or rearranged in time and space. Although the nonlinear narrative is often associated with film plots, fundamentally ancient epics are the source of it. I Ching (Book of Changes)  by Fu Hsi is recognized as the oldest nonlinear text and the first source of symbol of Yin and Yang dated to BC 2000. I Ching  also might be the driving force to hypertexts- the newest nonlinear form- as it’s made up of sixty-four symbols which are the binary combination of six whole or broken 'changing' lines. Visualizing I-Ching,  © Peiyuan Tang; Han-wei Shen   By applying in medias res (into the middle of things) technique, which employs flashbacks, other stories in parallel, and dream immersions in narratives, some of the tales of Arabian Nights use nonlinearity inspired by Indian epic fables (Mahabharata and Panchatantra) circa 5th-century eastern tradition comes first in nonlinear literature. In...
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On the way to Nonlinear Literature: Space

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Space and time are the parameters of life that humans have ever discovered; intended to measure; organized their thinking harmoniously. There have been theories that space is not only a dimension but also a tool to remember, perceive, and visualize knowledge as in the method of loci or theatre of memory, which both are technics to spatialize activities and thoughts. These methods often reflect themselves in nonlinear narrations to teleport a personage from one place to another. While the method of loci is a crucial element in Sherlock Holmes books, for example, to allocate characters in overlapping stories, Nolan's film Interstellar combines the theatre of memory with quantum theory to locate and administer all human concepts, everything which exists in the whole world.1 A piece of music:  Voyager's Golden Record- Dark was the Night- Blind Willie Johnson “animals are divided into (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, ...
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On the way to Nonlinear Literature: Order

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According to the Cambridge Dictionary order means; the way in which people or things are arranged , either in relation to one another or according to a particular characteristic . 1 Chronologic, taxonomic, or numeric are only a few techniques of order that assist us in organizing our thoughts, hence our life. Leibniz suggests that one can understand the order of the universe by looking at the working principles of a machine system. Seemingly Leibniz's approach is tangible yet also outdated when it comes to today's phenomenon like the internet or algorithms. Through Leibniz's studies, Lazare Carnot proposes the scientific term entropy, which later on recognized as the second law of thermodynamics, refers to changes in the status quo of a system and produces randomness or disorder(chaos). Atlas: Order of Memory, Gerard Richter Since the order requires categorization, it inevitably engenders a hierarchy of some sort. Atlas: Order of Memory of Gerard Richter, for example, ...
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On the way to Nonlinearity in Literature: Time

Derived from Proustian structuralism, Gerard Genette's discourses on how nonlinearity appears in literature imply three keywords: time, order, and narration. He explains in Proust's model that events take place both in a particular order and a definable number of times; quite the reverse of the nonlinear approach that uses layered and dispersed timelines. In order to understand the deconstruction of the chronological order of events, one should first grasp the concept of time. The chronology is based on time consisting of time past, time present, and time future. ''The future does not yet exist. The past no longer exists, and the present takes no time at all.  What then is time?' ' 1 St.Augustine, Confession on Time Exhibition, The way of Seeing,  John Berger, Arter, 2017 From Einstein's theory of relativity, which demonstrates that the perception of time depends on where one stands, to Aristotle's postulate, which relates movement and time to determine ...
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My New Definition of Nonlinearity and Literature

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After my research, I was confused with the different aspects and approaches to nonlinearity, since the results were ramifying towards many fields such as philosophy, screen narration, and learning methodology. Wordflex mobile application by Oxford According to the Cambridge Dictionary, the definition of nonlinear; used to describe a process, series of events etc. in which one thing does not clearly or directly follow from another. Therefore, I infer that it's related to the chronological or hierarchical order. I first focus on the perception of time and how we order and disorder things. What constitutes the past, present and future? Where to begin and where to end?  As a non-hierarchical concept, I associate it with a rhizome, which epitomizes multiplicities. Derived from the botanical rhizome, in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari propose ''a mode of knowledge and a model for society'' that opposes this tree-like conception. While the arborescent archetype r...
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