Gurus--

I really agree with Susan here:

"This is the view of hypertext I'm most sympathetic toward. "Hypertextual" elements existed before and extend beyond the web (books with cross-references, the allusions in poetry, etc.). However, the web has made us more aware of the inherent hypertextuality of all texts, and even the interactions between texts and larger contexts beyond them."

What initially intrigued me about hypertext and synch/asynch electronic texts (and I realize this is by no means an original observation, I think this same light went on in thousands of heads at probably the exact same moment) was how perfectly they literalized the critical theory I was reading as a grad student. Hypertext is certainly something literal, material, of course. But almost more valuable for me is that it makes explicit a certain heuristic or textual strategy that one can apply to text (both production and consumption) more generally.

Take Barthes in S/Z, this notion of what he calls the "plural" text, where "the networks are many and they interact . . . this text is a galaxy of signifiers . .it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances" (5). That made perfect sense to me when I read it, lo those many years ago. It still does. So hypertext was this sort of, "well, of course" moment for me. I try to demonstrate that way of reading to my first-year bw students, this notion that the text is a moving field of vectors.

Geoff