Hypertext as Humanistic Practice: A Digital Humanities Reading of Michael Joyce’s Afternoon, a Story

Abstract

Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story—deliberately written with a lowercase “a”—first presented in 1987 and published by Eastgate Systems in 1990. It is widely regarded as a foundational work of electronic literature and one of the earliest examples of hypertext fiction. It is not merely a technological curiosity. The piece rearranges narrative form, authorship, and reading practices—often in ways that anticipate key concerns of the Digital Humanities (DH). Joyce's project asks readers to do something different: click, wander, and hesitate. The text refuses a single tidy line and instead rewards a specific restless attention. This essay returns to afternoon as a
humanistic digital artifact, highlighting how its hypertextual architecture lays bare reader agency, interpretive uncertainty, and the material presence of digital interfaces. Clicking through Lexias, the short modular nodes Joyce strings together, can break a train of thought the way a rumpled map sends your route off course. Drawing on poststructuralist theory and reader response criticism as well as DH approaches—especially Franco Moretti's distant-reading methods and Johanna Drucker's concept of graphesis—the study argues that afternoon models meaning making as participatory and multiple. By combining close reading with theoretical framing, the paper shows that Joyce's experiment embodies the ethical and interpretive commitments at the heart of digital humanities: attention to process, contingency, and the active work readers perform when they engage a text that resists closure.