So to a certain extent Landow is to be forgiven for his obvious overstatements, exaggerations, and simplifications--he is after all trying to justify a new endeavor, a new technology, and a field to study it. It makes some sense then that given his background in literary theory he would draw on that knowledge to bolster his conception of an emerging field. It would only make sense after all to draw on some current theories/epistomologies in other fields to justify the existence of a new one. Again, there are parallels to be found with Composition's emergence.

That said, Landow's work is of course open to critique from many angles. As someone interested in literary theory and its applications, I am very dissapointed in Landow's lax use of theories and selectivity in quotation and interpretation. Also, many of the distinctions that he attempts to make between books (as traditionally conceived) and hypertexts (in the various ways he describes them) are simply not true, and he uses incompatible ideas/theories to justify what claims he makes.

It should also be noted that in several instances he goes about discussing electronic hypertexts as if they in fact preceded books and reading. He mentions, for instance, that it is possible to argue that the hypertextual linking of texts is only the embodiment of what is actually experienced in the act of reading, "but if so, the act of reading has in some way gotten much closer to the electronic embodiment of text and in so doing has begun to change its nature" (82). Though it is obvious, I think, that electronic mediums have had effects on the experience of reading, it is just as obvious that said mediums have come about in part as an embodiment of what reading already was (though I do not mean to imply a stable notion of reading). The causal structure in which hypertext changes reading without being changed by it is a fallacious one in this postmodern age, expecially given the selction of postructural theorists Landow has chosen to employ. [jjb]