CRITICAL READING AND CREATIVE WRITING - Nice Work

I’ve chosen option 1-C and I’ve used the Hypertextopia tool to do the assignment.  I’ve chosen David Lodge’s Nice Work because it contains plenty of instances of intertextuality and allusions (e.g. to trends in literary criticism). When reading it for the first time it triggered many associations. My intention was to show some of the associations (and research) I performed during the reading process. I divided the original paragraph into three main parts (they have a title) and I added a fragment with the explanation of the new theories at University because they needed a longer text. Then I used three types of links with different colours: blue for expansion (additional information connected to a specific word or phrase), green for the explanation of a specific word and red for personal associations. For example, there is a green link that connects Marxism with a definition of Marxist criticism. In the case of more personal associations (red links), they are pictures, ideas, or phrases I had heard or read before that came into my mind when reading certain words. To conclude, I used a Wordle cloud as the picture of the story.

As regards Hypertextopia, I found it really interesting to work with and very useful for educational purposes (the possibility of a collaborative writing is great!).  This tool allows you to experiment with language and meaning in a new way that is meaningful to students in this high tech society. It took me a short time to learn how to use it as it is quite simple. However, I spent a considerable time trying to discover how to delete a link (I couldn´t find a good tutorial). I’ve also found the “shards” a bit limited as they can only be connected to fragments and cannot be connected to other shards. On the whole, experimenting with Hypertextopia was an enriching experience and I had a great time using it.

This is the link to the story, I couldn´t find an embed code.
http://www.hypertextopia.com/library/stories/2038