Magazine

SPECIAL FOCUS: IMAGINATION AND HYPERTEXT

Going Into the Woods

by Christine Boese

A Stephen Sondheim musical, Into the Woods, enjoyed a successful run in England and on Broadway in the early 1990s by mixing together well-worn fairy tales around a unifying theme. Each story sent its main characters into an unknown forest on a quest. The musical touched a chord in Western audiences weaned on a romanticized symbol of the woods as an unknown, uncharted place of adventure and danger.

And why not? Fiction writers as diverse as Stephen King (It) and Margaret Atwood (Cat's Eye) have played with an idea of The Woods as it looms large in our imaginations. Outside of urban areas, many neighborhoods of children over the years have grown up with a woods of sorts to explore.

That's nice, but what does it have to do with hyperfiction and multimedia, you ask?

Or maybe you don't ask, because you think you can follow me in these woods. Be careful. If you take this route there really isn't much of a path.

A word about journeys and destinations...

Christine Boese (boesec@rpi.ed) is an itinerant poet, photographer, multimedia developer, and student in the PhD program in Communication and Rhetoric at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institue in Troy, New York.

Copyright © 1996 by Christine Boese. All Rights Reserved.