Introduction: Landow, Chs. 1

This introduction to our initial readings is a good deal more "linear" than I'd like; the weak link in my game is, in fact, the link. But I've been content here to start on familiar ground (mine -- theory) and simply try to organize and summarize the key arguments in our initial readings, as well as to sketch out a few of my own responses. I have taken the liberty of devoting some space to the secondary (online) readings. On a number of counts I think they're as interesting as Landow's early chapters, and they often provide a practical or pedagogical counterpoint to his more theoretical work. -- Don Challenger
The readings under discussion:

George P. Landow, Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology
Nancy Kaplan, "E-literacies: Politexts, Hypertexts, and Other Cultural Formations in the Late Age of Print"
Maureen Fitzpatrick, "Losing Control: Writers, Readers, and Hypertext"
Mindy McAdams and Stephanie Berger, "Hypertext"

Landow's task and focus
The first four chapters of Hypertext 2.0 are a comprehensive overview of the Web, hypertext and what they might mean for critical theory, for reading and writing practices -- and, more speculatively, for social and political structures. Like earlier generations of theorists (Eric Havelock, Walter J. Ong, and Marshall McLuhan), Landow argues that changes in discourse technology produce changes in the way knowledge and power are allocated and understood. But while his precursors focused on transformations that were either historically framed or popularly recognized and embraced -- Havelock and Ong dissected the move from orality to print, McLuhan the move from print to visual media -- Landow takes on a cultural shift that manages to be both ubiquitous and ill-defined.
Landow attempts to cover an enormous amount of ground in these chapters:

The rudiments of computer technology and usage;
An introduction to hypertext, including a history of hypertext speculations and programs beginning with Vannevar Bush's writings on the memex;
An overview of postmodern theory and its relation to textuality and subjectivity;
A brief history of manuscript (chirographic) writing and print;
An analysis of the implications of hypertext and hypermedia for scholarship and academic writing;
A consideration of the rhetorical and organizational challenges imposed by hypertext on writers and writing teachers;
Speculations on what a hypertextual environment might reveal about our notions of subjectivity or selfhood.
Such an ambitious interdisciplinary approach creates a host of problems, especially when coupled with a topic in which cycles of obsolescence and renewal can be measured in months. I found the frustration level very high in the first couple of chapters, as Landow seemed to insist that every thread of his argument be established on the most elementary level. Computer use? Here's a lesson in how a cursor works. Postmodernism? Here's a superficial and misleading gloss on how Derrida "advocates" writing over speaking (34). Yet in Chapters 3 and 4, much of the groundwork done, the book began to cohere.
One of the ironies at work here is that Hypertext 2.0 would probably have worked much better as hypertext.

Key arguments and methods

Landow's primary intention in these early chapters is to establish a series of parallels between the emergence of hypertext and the body of literary and cultural theory we generally refer to as "postmodern." His argument is that such theorists as Barthes, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, Bakhtin, Foucault, Rorty, and Baudrillard -- although he has a number of catty things to say about the latter -- anticipated, or in more recent cases elucidated, the advantages of a hypertextual environment over the constraining, "linear" environment and reader consciousness constructed and sanctioned by print conventions. In various ways, these theorists all argue for a decentered, multivocal, "readerly," even unstable text. Their tendency to anticipate the nomenclature of hypertext -- "link," "network," "web," "node," etc. -- is further evidence that hypertext fulfills their vision of a textuality that subverts the hierarchies and power relations of print culture.

Landow takes pains to establish that print and its conventions, like hypertext and its attendant apparatus, are a technology. He notes that one point of resistance to computer literacy, especially among scholars, is the myth that we existed in some nontechnological, "pastoral" realm of print text until roused by the incursions of the digital beast. We have, he says, "naturalized the book" (68) -- convinced ourselves that the patterns of reading, thinking, and communicating it encourages are universally human rather than contingent results of specific historical and technological circumstances.

Landow also understands the convergence of writer and reader in the collaborative enterprise of constructing meaning as the most recent step in a historical process that once positioned writer and reader as exclusive categories. He notes in Chapter 4 that until fairly recently (certainly well into the 19th century), many people were functional readers but were utterly unable to write. Pedagogical practices since the Industrial Revolution have narrowed the gap; the collaborative nature of hypertext closes it, at least as an ideal. I actually wish Landow had lingered longer here, because rigorously historicizing the processes he describes would often lend support to his case. (An excellent historical overview of literacies and the reader-writer complexities they reflect can be found in Miles Myers's Changing Our Minds: Negotiating English and Literacy.)

Finally, Landow occasionally turns to practical pedagogy, not only to illustrate a point but also to show the ways in which theory might be usefully applied to and reflected in the classroom or the "real" writing-reading exchange. Some of this smacks of "how we do it at Brown" attitude, but usually -- especially in shorter snippets -- it's illuminating. The brief recollection of collaborative writing on page 104 is a case in point.

So here's my question
At this early point in the text, I'm certainly willing to defer major criticism, but I do see something on the horizon that bothers me. A lot of what Landow claims for hypertext seems to me to be true of much print literature and discourse as well. Print can be unstable, polyvalent, multivocal, self-referential, "readerly." Certainly legions of writers since Joyce, if not Walter Benjamin before him, have made these very capabilities of print part of their project, and some scholars would argue that that decentering tradition goes back more than two millennia to the sources of sophistic rhetoric itself. (By the same token, I've stumbled across quite a lot of hypertext that manages, despite its resources, to be highly manipulative, inflexibly sequenced, and exclusionary.)
Perhaps the trouble lies in a schematic that places "print" and "electronic discourse" in opposition and thus creates a series of binary pairs that end up being overly reductive. Print is inevitably, in such a schematic, "linear" and "hierarchical." Landow himself expresses some discomfort with such divisions on occasion -- he even gives hypertext status to Tennyson's In Memoriam (51-56) -- but he's also willing to fall back on simplistic categories when they serve his purpose. Fortunately, a couple of the online readings address this issue and its implications from different perspectives.

Some context for Landow from the online readings

Nancy Kaplan, in "E-literacies: Politexts, Hypertexts, and Other Cultural Formations in the Late Age of Print," provides a counterpoint to Landow's sunny optimism about the enabling features of hypertext by arguing that electronic texts are, like all previous forms and manifestations of the text, "sites of struggle among competing interests and ideological forces." Electronic literacy is not inherently liberating or democratic, Kaplan argues; rather, it is potentially subject to the same repressions and controls exercised by "elites" in other cultural domains and discourses.

Maureen Fitzpatrick, in "Losing Control: Writers, Readers, and Hypertext," offers a third distinct set of perspectives. She writes as community college teacher working well outside the typical liberal arts curriculum; as she wryly describes her Writing for Interactive Media class, "the 'genres' assigned to students ... were defined by Best Buy rather than rhetorical or computer consensus." That's a welcome respite from the relentless academic bias of Landow, whose pet metaphor for intertextual possibility is the scholarly footnote.
Fitzpatrick's theoretical grounding is also revealing. She reads reading, writing and textuality not through poststructural theory (as Landow does) or a Marxist/Foucauldian critique of power (as Kaplan does), but through cognition studies. This may explain why the cluster of terms and images she employs to illuminate the construction of textual meaning are so -- well, genial. While for Kaplan this process is always about struggle, dispute, agon, repression and resistance, for Fitzpatrick it is a process of implicature -- cooperating, involving, making a place for others, literally enfolding collaborators within a textual space. (I do wish Fitzpatrick had enfolded a proofreader or two into the textual space of "Losing Control.")
Finally, Fitzpatrick addresses two issues on which I found Landow lacking, at least in the initial chapters of Hypertext 2.0. First, as I noted earlier, Landow claims many reading practices as "hypertextual" that I would argue emerged from and are encouraged (or at least permitted) by print technology. Fitzpatrick circumvents the historical issue althogether by suggesting, after Paul Ricoeur, that we redefine text "not as an object at all, but as the act of viewing it." A radical paraphrase to suit my purposes: A "readerly" text is that which is created by a demanding and skeptical reader, in any era.
Perhaps this merely reverses the polarity of a faulty circuit, but it does offer a spark of illumination: Even the most hierarchical of texts -- a shopping list, a set of directions -- becomes "readerly" when subjected to a sufficiently Derridean and deconstructionist critique. Conversely, sometimes we want an authoritative, hierarchical text. If someone yells "Fire!" in a crowded theater, we don't subject the "author" to an interrogation about kindling points.
In short, it seems to me at this early point that the distinction Barthes and Landow make between "readerly" and "writerly" texts is more emblematic than real; I suspect that all texts are both, in varying degrees, and that while some texts may be more resistant than others to readerly intervention, the difference has as much to do with reading conventions as with properties of the text itself.
In that regard, Fitzpatrick is less concerned with the metaphysics of relinquishing authorial control than with the practical aspects of what is involved. The sharing of authority over the text is not -- or at least not yet -- an abdication so much as it is a redefining of the writer's task. "The nonlinearity possible in hypertext," she writes, "is, relatively speaking, a highly structured sort of chaos." Hence, rather than forge a particular narrative order or expository organization from that chaos, the writer must instead establish a "grammar" and/or a "rhetoric" by which the reader might choreograph the text.

The issue of authorial control is also taken up by Mindy McAdams and Stephanie Berger in "Hypertext." They argue that while readers have a stronger sense of agency in a hypertext environment, writers in fact relinquish little or nothing. While some of the McAdams/Berger article is journalism-specific (the chronic navel-gazing over "objectivity" has largely been abandoned outside news institutions), most of it provides a practical template for thinking about composing in hypertext.
"Procedural authorship," for instance, outlines the process of constructing components (Landow's "lexias"), conceiving the range of possible relationships among them, creating clear and productive links that reflect those possibilities, and finally allowing for "additive construction" that may eventually link the piece to larger textual networks. While such procedural authorship enables the reader to choose an individual path through the linked lexias, the range of possibilities remains in the hands of the author. The number of narrative options may grow exponentially, but those options are never random.
Some of this seems simplistic and overly prescriptive, but it may be a pretty good starter kit for novices actually writing in hypertext, as opposed to theorizing about it. There's also the germ of an important idea here: We need not think of textual negotiations between writer and reader as "turf" where one loses ground when the other gains it. To relinquish writerly "control" of the text is not to relinquish influence.