The title of Michael Joyce’s essay—“Nonce upon Some Times: Rereading Hypertext Fiction”—is misleading. Probably intentionally so. Because as much as it’s about reading and rereading, it also consistently reads like a handout a professor might give to his hypertext fiction workshop. And that’s probably Joyce’s point: “reading in hypertext means to re-create the writers experience of rereading in the process of composing printed works” (139). Earlier in this essay, Joyce explains his perception of the writer’s rereading/revision experience: “That is, writers imagine readers reading as they read when they reread and rewrite” (134).

In one of those “how the hell did I stumble on this page with this search string??” moments that happen so frequently with google, I was directed to the online course overview for one of the University of Iowa’s advanced fiction writing workshops.

tophat1’s Technology and the Future post got me thinking (as did the fact that I was tophat1’s discussion partner, which is why this is a blog post and not a comment)... One of Ong's basic points is that writing is a technology. So it is subject to the same good-or-bad evaluations that might be made about our newer, shinier, electronic technology. Accordingly, there is a fair amount of heady stuff written by important people (Ong mentions Plato, Rousseau and Derrida, among others) about whether writing is a good technology or a bad one. Writing gets credit from Ong, at the very least, for having "transformed human consciousness" (77).