Between lines and knots

transitions of narrative discourse from print to hypertext

Abstract

The article addresses the transformations of narrative discourse in its trajectory from print to the digital environment, with emphasis on the constitution of hypertextual narrative. It is grounded in the understanding that the Western narrative tradition, strongly anchored in the Aristotelian matrix, structured around beginning, middle, and end, consolidated linear models for organizing time, space, and action, influencing literature, journalism, and other media forms. In light of the reflections of authors such as Aristóteles, Walter Benjamin, Umberto Eco, and Lev Manovich, the study discusses how these structural foundations are challenged by digital technologies and by the logic of hypertext. The research, bibliographical in nature and descriptive in character, initially systematizes the elements of classical narrative, temporal linearity, the authority of the narrator, and the distinction between narrative and information, and subsequently examines the reconfigurations promoted by hypertextuality and hypermedia. Drawing on theorists such as Liestøl, Lévy, Landow, Santaella, Fiorin, and Maingueneau, the study demonstrates that digital narrative breaks with rigid sequentiality and begins to operate through interconnected blocks (“nodes”) articulated by links that establish multiple reading paths. The study further shows that enunciative categories such as embrayage and débrayage assume centrality in the organization of hypertextual discourse, alongside multivocality and non-linear navigation. The reader no longer occupies a passive position but becomes an agent of narrative progression, defining possible trajectories within a reticular structure. In this context, narrative approaches the logic of the database, in which multiple sequences coexist as potentialities, with linearity representing only one among several possible choices. It was also observed that hypertextual narrative does not eliminate the foundations of tradition, but rather reconfigures them within a decentralized, multimodal, and interactive environment. The production and reception of discourse thus require new cognitive competencies and new reading regimes, marked by fragmentation, simultaneity, and the articulation of different languages. Contemporary narrative, therefore, shifts from the stability of the line to the complexity of the network, establishing a more fluid, collaborative, and multivocal discursive paradigm.