A week or so ago, I was searching for an online version of Alexander Pope's "The Rape of the Lock" for my Enlightenment Literature class (death to overpriced anthologies!), when I came across a hypertext version
(http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~sconstan) of the poem. While not a very extensively annotated version of the text, it provides in a form sort of like a wiki links to explanations of language in the text and allusions, as well as visual representations of some of the scenes in the poem.

I was reminded of Landow's idea that hypertext has been latent in literature for a long time owing to such things as allusions. Not only does this online edition of Pope's work utilize the capabilities of its medium to make annotation easier, but it also effectively makes Pope's poem a multimedia, visual experience. In a way, it literalizes the associations that the reader draws in the course of reading.

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.

I’ve been trying to think whether there’s some way to fulfill the enormous promise that Landow and Joyce think that hypertext possesses. The class seems to have come to some sort of consensus (although if there’s a silent majority otherwise, please speak up!) that Joyce promises a writerly text but doesn’t actually deliver on his promise. As marmalade vividly put it in her last post, in "Afternoon," readers end up being rats running around in Joyce's maze, rather than equal parties to the writing process, because Joyce “expands to fill the vacuum” created by the absence of traditional editors in this new literary medium.

This is what Landow says is possible with a hypertext, and it’s hard to disagree with him after trying to read one. But are hypertexts and multiple paths a good thing? Marmalade began a discussion on how hypertexts “decenter” the author, and I think this is a fascinating topic to pursue. As Landow says, hypertexts are “infinitely recenterable” (36) and create “truly active” readers because of their interaction with the text, but in what ways does a hypertext take away the readers’ ability to interpret on their own (through providing links to certain explanations, etc.)? And, flipping the coin, hypertexts also seem to give up some of the writers’ authority to the reader. It all seems like an odd mixing of losing and gaining control.

Was anyone else a little bothered by some of the discussion in Landow about the possible future irrelevance of books and other printed material as important? Perhaps it's that I love to read by the fire at the remote family cabin, that my mom's a librarian, or that I simply have an attachment to the status quo, but I feel almost morally opposed to reading without a book. I certainly am attached to the "tactility" Landow mentions. I was relieved at Landow's view of escaping the confinement of print: "This common project first requires that one first recognize the enormous power of the book, for only after we have made ourselves conscious of the ways it has formed and informed our lives can we seek to pry ourselves free of some of its limitations" (46-7).