Category: 02) Disjoint Montage In “Blow Up”


The increasing popularity of electronic fiction has determined a renewed interest in pre-digital productions that, retrospectively, seem to anticipate many hypertextual features. “Blow Up,” although traditionally excluded from these pioneering works, presents some definite hypertextual qualities. “Blow Up” originally appeared as a short story by the Argentinean writer, Julio Cortázar, in 1963, but it reached worldwide appraisal in 1966 as a movie by the Italian director, Michelangelo Antonioni. In this chapter, Calvi compares both works under the light of a theory of hypertext. The argument is that, although neither of the two is considered in the hypertext literature as an example or as a predecessor of a real hypertextual narrative, both the short story and the movie present clear elements of a hypertextuality.

Calvi

Licia Calvi has an MA in philosophy, a master’s degree in artificial intelligence and cognitive science, and a PhD in romance languages. She is a senior lecturer at the University of Applied Sciences in Breda, Netherlands, where she teaches interactivity and interaction design. She is also a part-time senior researcher at the Centre for User Experience Research of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium. Her research fields of interest include human-computer interaction and digital media. She is currently interested in sociability, digital libraries, e-learning, and mobile applications. She is the author or co-author of numerous papers in international conference proceedings and journals.

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