ccr 760: hypertext rhetorics

course description

My approach to this course starts with the difference between the following two statements about hypertext, both from Robert Coover:

Indeed, the very proliferation of books...is held to be a sign of its feverish moribundity, the last futile gasp of a once vital form before it finally passes away forever, dead as God....[T]rue freedom from the tyranny of the line is perceived as only really possible now with the advent of hypertext, written and read on the computer...(1992)

This was, in retrospect, what might be thought of as the golden age of literary hypertext, for with the emergence of the World Wide Web, something new is happening. For those who've only recently lost their footing and fallen into the flood of hypertext, literary or otherwise, it may be dismaying to learn that they are arriving after the golden age is already over...(2000)

It may be heartening (as opposed to dismaying) to learn that, while each of these statements is typical of the discussion at the time, Coover's is hardly the last word on hypertext. Nor is he even the last word on hypertext in his field, as we might conclude by the special issue of Poets and Writers on electronic writing that postdates his remarks.

Nietzsche writes that “I am afraid we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar,” a comment that we might bear in mind when we hear that the book is “dead as God.”. And declarations of a so-called “golden age” are remarkably easy to make, but difficult to prove. Neither passage, once we have allowed for hyperbole, tells us much about hypertext.

What they do tell us is that hypertext has been taken up (and in some cases, set aside) by the academy in significant ways. Ten years ago, pronouncements about hypertext were sufficiently buzzworthy to rate an appearance in the New York Times Book Review, which is where Coover's 1992 passage appears (“The End of Books”). In the year 2000, Coover sounds the death knell for hypertext in an online journal, Feed Magazine, whose aspirations to the mainstream have gone mostly unfulfilled (“Literary Hypertext: The Passing of the Golden Age”). It is perhaps unfair, but more accurate to say that the golden age of hypertext novelty has passed. It is no longer enough to trot out exaggerated claims and futurology, and pass them off as social commentary, much less scholarship. This does not mean that hypertext has become obsolete; rather, I would argue that we must begin to adopt a more nuanced attitude towards it.

Needless to say, this course will attempt to do just that. It is likely that our range of experience as a group will be broad, but my hope is that this will allow us to consider some of the fundamental questions regarding hypertext from a variety of angles. My goals for this course include:

• consideration of hypertext both as a concept and a medium, focusing particularly on its place within broader discursive, academic, and technological economies;
• careful interrogation of the claims made on hypertext's behalf, including its relationship to related issues in composition and rhetoric, such as literacy studies and writing pedagogy;
• concrete application of hypertext theory to the practices of reading and writing (both individual and collaborative);
• development of technological competence, both in terms of technical skills/knowledge and aesthetic expression (design) [more information on this in the technology section];
• completion of an academic or creative hypertext of publishable quality.