In Hypertext, Landow draws on the critical thinking of Roland Barthes in S/Z to describe the multi-linear field of hypertext:

"In this ideal text," says Barthes, "the networks are many and interact, without any one of them being able to surpass the rest; this text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can reach, they are indeterminable . . . ; the systems of meaning can take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language." (3)

Not surprisingly, nowhere is this hypertext shift in our literary paradigm more apparent than in our current models of teaching students to write.