According to Landow (1997), the intertextual system that is hypertext has the capability of accentuating intertextuality[1] in a way that page bound texts in a book cannot. Landow continued that according to Thaïs Morgan, intertextuality is "a structural analysis of texts in relation to the larger system of signifying practices or uses of signs in culture" and shifts awareness from the triad comprising author/work/tradition to another consisting of text/discourse/culture. In so doing "intertextuality replaces the evolutionary model of literary history with a structure or synchronic model of literature as a sign system. The most salient effect of this strategic change is to free the literary text from psychological, sociological, and historical determinisms, opening it up to an apparently infinite play of relationships."[2] Landow is comfortable with Morgan's description that a key proposition of hypertext intertextuality is the occurrence of the ability to create and identify interconnections.
Just as Kristeva recognized the importance of Mikhail Bakhtin's sense of the 'dialogical' nature of the novel, Landow (1997) invites the reader to take heed of Bakhtin's description of the dialogic, polyphonic multivocal novel if one is to imagine the experience of reading or writing within this new form of text. Which, according to Landow, Bakhtin claims "is constructed not as the whole of a single consciousness, absorbing other consciousnesses as objects into itself, but as a whole formed by the interaction of several consciousnesses, none of which entirely becomes an object for the other." And further that; "in the novel itself, nonparticipating 'third persons' are not represented in any way. There is no place for them, compositionally or in the larger meaning of the work."[3] For hypertextuality, Bakhtin's statements identify a significant attribute of this information medium. Rather than a despotic, univocal voice, hypertext extracts its content from the collective understanding of a fleeting focus; the lexia that is being read, and the narrative that is being formed from the reading path taken.
Hypertext provides a system that is constantly being re-centered as readers move through webs of networks of texts creating their own points of focus. These bodies of linked texts have no primary axis of organization, that is, the work has no centre and is experienced as an infinitely decenterable and recenterable structure. Single pages with more than one link can become transient centers that can be utilized as a point of reference for the reader to decide where to head next. Readers therefore, are not locked into any particular structure or hierarchy and are able to choose their own centers of investigation and experience (Landow 1997).
Landow (1997) acknowledges the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari when he says that anyone considering the investigation of hypertexts needs to examine their discussion of rhizomes, plateaus and nomadic thought. Deleuze and Guattari postulated that rhizomes connect any point to any other point and are constructed of plateaus which are always in the center. Landow compares hypertext with rhizomes when he declares that hypertext has "multiple entryways and exits" and that it "connects any point to any other point". Landow (1997) points out that this 'connecting' can often co-join totally differing types of information and tends to contravene our understanding of both discreet print texts and discrete genres and modes (Landow 1997).
The next page explains Landow's concepts of linking systems.
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[1] Intertexuality - a term coined by Julia Kristeva in an essay of 1966 to describe the necessary interdependence that any literary text has with a mass of others which preceded it. A literary text is not an isolated phenomenon, it is "constructed from a mosaic of quotations: any text is the absorption and transformation of another." In Kristeva, J. 1980, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, Columbia University Press, New York. back
[2] Thaïs Morgan as cited in Landow, G. 1997, Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology, The John Hopkins University Press, London, p35. back
[3] Mikhail Bakhtin as cited in Ibid., p 36. back
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References:
Kristeva, J. 1980, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, Columbia University Press, New York.
Landow, G. 1997, Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology, The John Hopkins University Press, London.