A Small Study Guide
for “Critical Theory”
Summary
This chapter picks up in the 1960s and 1970s, sort of where we left of with the
history of little magazines, and traces out the ways hyptertext is shaping and challenging
modern notions of publishing. The chapter considers three theories important to
hypertext: reader-response, deconstruction, semiotics.
Review
Clarify the three theoretical approaches to hypertext:
1-Reader-Response—reminds us of the importance of a reader in creating
meaning for and within a text. How does hypertext make this process visible (see p.
173)?
2-Deconstruction—troubles concepts of truth, authority of author, stability of text.
Quote from text: “meaning is radically unstable” (p. 180)
Consider how this school of thought argues that a text is all about relationships
between readers and writers, individuals and communities, connections around us.
3-Semiotics –the study of signs and things those signs stand in for. For example,
the Statue of Liberty stands in for freedom and/or the United States. Semiotics teaches us
how to “read” images thanks to cultural associations, placement, etc. How is semiotics
important in online texts?
Readers - Define pre-new media author and reader. Now define computermediated author and reader. See pg. 168, 173
From text: handwritten notes of reader not often seen as important in the way the
original author’s words are (p. 181)
Hypertext – Hypertext offers chance for reader to be “in conversation” with
authors and with works.
Quote from text: “Electronic writings seems … to accept as strengths the very
qualities – the play of signs, intertextuality, the lack of closure – that the poststructuralists
posed as the ultimate limitations of literature and language.” (p. 183).
---Below are some quotes assembled as I read through the article/chapter, sometimes
asking questions, in order to hit the article’s major points. I suggest you read through
the article first and, reading through this guide afterward, use it to summarize for
yourself.
“Just as electronic writing can be interpreted as a radical departure from traditional
writing, the many poststructuralist and postmodern theories have also identified
themselves as radical departures from traditional ways of understanding literary texts.”
“Both the computer as a writing technology and the forms of electronic writing can be
allied to almost any theoretical position, including the most traditional.” (how? p 162)
“Prior to the advent of electronic writing, tradition assigned to good literature the
qualities of stability, monumentality and authority.”
“The values of stability, monumentality and authority are themselves not entirely stable,
they have always been interpreted in terms of the contemporary technology of
handwriting or printing.” (such as writing on papyrus and stone to parchment, then
printing…)
“The precision of printed technology has suited the view of the poem as a monument and
of the poet as an authority.” (how did new criticism develop from/respond to this? p 164)
“Our culture seems to have accepted and endorsed the transient, casual, and generally
unathoritative nature of Web sites.”
“This debate over the canon was really a debate over the purpose and nature of reading.”
(what exactly were the “camps”? p 166-67)
“Hypertext writers have shown how the electronic medium can accommodate a different
relationship between author and reader…in electronic hypertext two subjectivities, the
author’s and the reader’s, encounter one another on more nearly equal terms.”
What is adversarial reading? (p 168-69)
How does hypertext challenge mimesis as one of the goals of literary production? (p 169170)
“Hypertext also helps us to see how poststructuralism belonged to a moment in the late
age of print.”
“The task of literary criticism then was not to examine the text in isolation, but rather to
understand the text through its effect on the reader—a technique called reader-response
criticism…the work therefore has a dynamic nature, changing from reading to reading.”
“What the reader fashions is the text as a structure of sounds, images, or ideas in her own
mind. This figurative text was for Fish, Iser, and others the only text worth
studying…because one could not know the words on the printed page except by reading
them and calling forth such a mental structure.”
“Hypertext as the remediation of print has relied on the techniques that were pioneered in
the modernist literary revolt.”
What is “spatial form”? (p. 174-175)
“The electronic reader is encouraged to think of the text as a collection of interrelated
units floating in a space of at least two dimensions.”
How is the electronic space a third player in the activity between reader and writer (p
176-77)?
“Stressing connections rather than textual independence, hyperfiction authors and Web
designers are rewriting the possibilities of reference and allusion.”
“Intertextuality is more than the references within a text and allusions between texts that
are common in literature; it is the interrelation of all texts on the same topic, language or
culture.”
How does an electronic text especially manage some of the concerns of Deconstruction,
especially its concerns about the ambiguities of texts? (p 182-83)
“Landham claimed that electronic technology could help to break down the boundaries
between literature and the other arts.”
Define “transparent immediacy” and “hypermediacy.” (p 185-86)