This book follows Landow's landmark work, HYPERTEXT: THE CONVEREGENCE OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICAL THEORY AND TECHNOLOGY, 1992.
Landow leads off with a 50-page essay, "What's a Critic To Do?: Critical Theory in the Age of Hypertext."
This is followed by three groups of essays by a total of ten authors. The groups are titled NONLINEARITY, THE POLITICS OF HYPERTEXT, AND THE NEW WRITING.
The lead essay by Landow merits serious attention. In addition to the notes below, we discuss Landow's lead essay in a Table Talk.
It was our reading of this essay early in the life of THE PROGRAMME that led us to try to merge postmodern method (hypertext on line) with postmodern matter. If there were to be a patron saint of THE PROGRAMME, Landow would be one of the strongest candidates.
The first paragraph of Landow's essay encapsulates the whole convergence to which he points and we quote it for reference in its entirety:
"Hypertext, an information technology consisting of individual blocks of text, or lexias, and the electronic links that join them, has much in common with recent literary and critical theory. For example, like much recent work by poststructuralists, such as Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, hypertext reconceives conventional, long-held assumptions about authors and readers and the texts they write and read. Electronic linking, which provides one of the defining features of hypertext, also embodies Julia Kristeva's notions of intertextuality, Mikhail Bakhtin's emphasis upon multiivocality, Michel Foucault's conceptions of networks of power, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's ideas of rhizomatic, 'nomad thought.' The very idea of hypertextuality seems to have taken form at approximately the same time that poststructuralism developed, but their points of convergence have a closer relation than that of mere contingency, for both grow out of dissatisfaction with the related phenomena of the printed book and hierarchical thought. For this reason even thinkers like Helene Cixous, who seem resolutely opposed to technology, can call for ideas, such as *l'ecriture feminine*,that appear to find their instantiation in this new information technology." (p.1)
"Reading Leather-bound volumes in the bathtub; or, The Hypertext Reading Site." (pp.3-6) L. discusses the mechanics and practicalities of reading text on a screen instead of from a page in a hand-held book.
"Mode and Genre in Hypertextuality." (pp.6-14) L. divides the main modes as follows: (a) stand-alone systems vs. networked systems; (b) read-only hypertext vs. hypertext to which readers can add text, links, or both. He identifies the "crucial fact" about digitality--"that digitized text...can be manipulated simultaneously by many users." (9)
"Author-created Hypertext Modes." (pp 14-23) L. repeats the story of composing HYPERTEXT, his 1992 book, in hypertext (he uses his own example also in that book). It is an example of a stand-alone text. L. describes the "browsing" function in HyperCard 2.0; a window remains open while one browses through other lexias (files). He sites other similar products. Hypertextual electronic libraries are emerging, such as the famous Perseus Project on classical Greek culture. (22)
"Axial versus Network-structured Hypertext." (pp. 23-31) An axial work closely resembles a conventional book in electronic form. A network-structured work takes greater advantage of the linking power of hypertext; it is a "web" that permits multiple uses of single pieces of text. (23) This is particularly powerful when applied to reference works; L. sites the Micro Gallery at the National Gallery, London, as an example. (27) Another example: Fabio Bevilacqua's COULOMB AND ELECTROSTATICS, at the University of Pavia. The hypertext provides "a nonsequential and interactive access to information stored as text, graphics, sound, quantitative simulations, qualitative animations, and still and moving colour pictures." (29/30).
L. sums up the signficance of differing structures of hypertext: "Hypertext can take the form of stand-alone or networked systems and...they in turn can take the form of read-only, or broadcast, systems, of those that permit readers to create links and brief annotations, or of those that grant the reader full/ access as a writer." (30/31) And they have some elements of "hypermedia"--ie, graphic imagery.
"What's a Critic to Do?" (pp.32-41) L. quotes Derrida's THE POST CARD to point to the great impact of technology on culture: "...an entire epoch of so-called literature...cannot survive a certain technological regime of telecommuncations. Neither can philosophy or psychoanalysis. Or love letters." (32)
In a sweeping, brief paragraph, L. dismisses the negativism of major figures toward the losses that are brought about by hypertext. This is worth keeping for reference in THE PROGRAMME: "[Lyotard] falls into the fatal error of failing to see, as have Derrida, Goody, Kittler, McLuhan, and Ong, that language and writing are themselves powerful technologies....networked hypertext, which offeres liberation, idiosyncrasy, and even anarchy, obviates the kind of control feared by Lyotard and other culture prophets who confuse increasingly old-fashioned centralized mainframe computing with the new information technologies as a whole."(33)
L. identifies a major dilemma of literary criticism posed by hypertext: "Hypertext, which permits readers to choose their own paths through a set of possibilities, dissovles the fundamental fixity that provides the foundation of our critical theory and practice." (33)
Three challenges to scholars, critics, and theorists:
1. They have to stop considering the new technologies merely as new means that do not change works in their essence. (33)
2. "Hypertext readers, who choose their own paths, each read different texts and, in some cases, can never read all of the available text." (34)
3. Critics, therefore, can no longer claim mastery and authority over texts.(35)
What's a critic to do in the new hypertext world emerging? L. answers, "Write in hypertext itself." (36) "Hypertext theory...might have to be written in the electronic docuverse." (36)
Criticism in the hypertext mode, says L., will lead to sharing the medium's "characteristic multivocality, open-endedness, multilinear organization, greater inclusion of nontextual information, and fundamental reconfigurate of authorship, including ideas of authorial property, and of status relations in the text." (36) This new approach involves the ease of "boundary crossing" among texts (37), use of "found objects from outside the textual world" (37), and "writing with and along with texts by others." (38)
Networked electronic text makes it easier to understand poststructuralist ideas, which in print-based thought appear to be "opaque, bizarre, pretentious." (39) L. is useful here in showing how the theory of postmodernism adapts in practice to hypertext and we quote: "When Cixous, Barthes, Miller, and other theorists seek to deny a boundary or barrier between theoretical and literary texts, their claims strike many as outrageously pretentious attempts at self-aggrandizement....Nonetheless, like Barthes's and Foucault's remarks about the death of the author, Derrida's on textuality, Kristeva's on intertextuality, and so many others, this merging of creative and discursive modes simply *happens* in hypertext." (39)
Return to THE PROGRAMME contents page.