Six Sex Scenes
1996 hypertext novella by Adrienne Eisen
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Six Sex Scenes is a hypertext novella created by Adrienne Eisen and published on the web in 1996.
Cover page of Six Sex Scenes. | |
| Author | Adrienne Eisen |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Hypertext fiction, Electronic literature |
Publication date | 1996 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Website | https://web.archive.org/web/20010603003944/http://www.altx.com/hyperx/sss/ |
Content and form
Six Sex Scenes is a first-person narrative told from the perspective of a young woman. It has been described as "the story of a young Jewish woman's dysfunctional love-life, with frequent flashbacks into her equally dysfunctional childhood".[1]
As an electronic literature piece, Six Sex Scenes consists of many lexias: individual webpages with a few paragraphs of the story. While some contemporaneous web hypertext fictions used in-text hyperlinks, Six Sex Scenes presented the links at the bottom of each screen. Each lexia has three or four links to other lexias,[2] allowing the reader to read the story in many different orders: "a menu of options at the end of each story-section. This menu is actually a contents-list for the story's next stage. If we clicked on a link that says ‘Bored’, we will find ourselves reading a section entitled ‘Bored’: so in a sense, although we may be unclear about the shape of the story as a whole, we are shown at the end of each section, in a relatively straightforward way, where we can go next".[1] This means that Eisen "allows us to read a section all the way through before reminding us that there are multiple choices to be made".[1]
Mark Bernstein (Eastgate Systems) writes that Six Sex Scenes uses counterpoint structure and avoids the cyclical structure common in many other hypertexts.[2] Adrian Miles described the episodes as "largely unmotivated in terms of realist or literal narrative conventions,"[3] although Bernstein noted that the counterpoint structure emphasised contrasts or links between childhood and adult experiences: "Greenheart’s hypertext habitually alternates time frames: a writing space describing a childhood scene tends to be linked to scenes of adult life, and adult scenes tend to be linked to stories of childhood."[2]