Browse Books

Reviewer: Heather Brown

Potential readers of this book should look carefully at the full title. Landow is a professor of English and art history. He provides a detailed comparison between the ideas of hypertext and some of the major points of contemporary literary theory. As a computer scientist, I found the descriptions of the ideas and possibilities of hypertext to be clear and competent, while the comparisons with literary theory were interesting but often shrouded in obscure (to me) terminology. Perhaps this is inevitable in a book that covers two cultures, but I was left with the impression that this text was designed to introduce hypertext to literary scholars rather than vice versa. I suspect this is why the enthusiastic reviews of the first edition [1] given on the back cover are all from literary rather than computing publications. The book contains eight main chapters. Chapter 1 covers the history of hypertext, introduces different forms of linking, and traces some parallel developments in books and literary theory. Chapter 2 relates the critical theories of several writers, including Barthes and Derrida, to developments in hypertext. It was interesting to compare the vocabulary of hypertext with the ideas of rhizomes, plateaus, and nomadic thought (to nam e a few examples) from critical theory. The next five chapters—“Reconfiguring the Text,” “Reconfiguring the Author,” “Reconfiguring Writing,” “Reconfiguring Narrative,” and “Reconfiguring Literary Education”—look at the new possibilities brought about in these areas by hypertext and show how these possibilities both change and reflect ideas in critical theory. Several examples of systems and applications are given. The previous editions examples concentrated on the Intermedia system; this edition also covers Web-based hypertext, Microcosm, Storyspace, and others. The final chapter, “The Politics of Hypertext,” discusses who controls this new form of writing, looks at questions of pornography and gambling on the Internet, and covers problems of access and copyright. This is followed by a brief “Open-Ended Conclusion,” a set of footnotes, a 22-page bibliography, and an index. The first paragraph of the “Open-Ended Conclusion” provides a good summary of what the book is all about: As my readers will no doubt have observed, this book is simultaneously an enthusiastic hard sell, a prophecy, a grim warning, and a report from the front. Above all, it is an invitation to make connections. Take it, then, as a plea to link up very different areas of endeavor—contemporary critical and literary theory and late-twentieth-century state-of-the-art computing—that supposedly have little in common. Contemporary theory can illuminate the design and implementation of hypertext, and hypertext in turn offers theory an empirical laboratory, a means of practice, refinement, and extension, a space, in other words, in which to test imaginings.