english 651: writing hypertext
elizabeth
cooper's journal for english 651
9-23-98
This morning as I was thinking about our readings for tonight (Morgan on authority and Joyce on HT narrative), it occured to me that I ought to say more to students about why we have assigned the readings we have. Perhaps my thinking aloud about that will help you to ask more questions, wrestle more with the difficulties, in your own journal entries. In such fashion, we might establish a true dialogue in the class, something that Keller and I have encouraged but maybe not facilitated as much as we might.
Wendy Morgan's piece about novice readers and writers of literary hypertext is meant to give newcomers to hypertext in 651 a few ideas about what they might expect when they start reading "Afternoon," for example. I remember my own frustrations as a novice (and I'm not claiming I'm but a few years beyond novicehood now), looking for "the meaning" in the text, feeling quite inadequate as a reader--even feeling deprived of many of the delicious pleasures of reading. Although I was fascinated by the whole experience and stuck it out until I got more accustomed to new ways of reading, I was still discombobulated and grumpy. (I'm still trying to get accustomed, and I'm still often grumpy.) Probably the main reason I was able to stick it out was that I had a small community of others with whom to discuss, commiserate, and explore. Michael Keller and others in the Epiphany Project--who were all relative newcomers to hypertext (after all, it is relatively new)--provided me with enough support and direction and intellectual engagement to keep me going. That's what I am hoping our class in Writing Hypertext can do for you--get you started and keep you going, but I don't think that can happen unless you are actively attempting the assignments on the schedule. There will always be the frustrations and difficulties of working with the technology: the server is down, my FTP program won't interface with yours, the lab version of the software is different from mine at home, etc. Those kinds of difficulties are to be expected. But the main issue in my mind is this: the major way you learn with technology has to do with trying--with application. It is through the attempt that you come to know what you don't know and what you need to ask (or look up). Keller and I are trying to engage you in dialogue through responding to your postings, asking questions to push beyond the known into new territories, commenting on ways in which your responses can develop your thinking and that of the other students who read them, but we can't respond to work that isn't there. What's the problem? Why are some people slow to post assignments? What's going on? Please!!! Unless you write about what's going on in your journals, ask questions through email or face-to-face or on the phone, we can't know how to help. And that's almost as frustrating as my initial forays into reading literary hypertext.
And now more to the assignments for this week's class:
Wendy Morgan says, "The driving desire of these students was for significance: (the finding of a meaning which is "there" in the text), not signification (the making of meaning in the act of reading)." I think this may be the main difference between what Joyce is calling exploratory and constructive hypertexts. It may be the main difference in the major categories of hypertext I'm struggling to define.
Joyce says: "Hypertext, at least when it is seen as constructive rather than exploratory, is serial thought. Its 'mode of spatialization,' Deleuze and Guattari's terms is being for space, what I call the constructive, a form for what does not yet exist, rather than being in space, or the exploratory and colonizing." (Of Two Minds, 189) Further, Joyce points out that technical hypertexts are "thus far treated like centralized rather than distributed knowledge..., individuated meaning must be marginalized and inherent order privileged. Authority, because it is given, is ungained. Interaction remains a utility for the individual reader, i.e., annotation." (191) Further, "If a technical reading is marginal to its text, the text of a narrative is marginal to its reading. Technical communication is governed by the myth of emergent order, i.e., a belief that the structure of meaning emerges from the text. Hypertext narrative produces the present-tense contour of meaningful structures. Meaning in narrative is an orderly but continual replacement of meaningful structures throughout the text." (191)
Wendy Morgan points out that "novice hypertext readers and writers may desire to reinstitute the authority of a guiding author and the familiar structures of the known (print) genre of fictional narrative." My experience working with technical and professional writing has led me to understand that readers of technical hypertexts demand that meaning be readily accessible to them (the author should have provided that) at the point of need (which it is also the responsibility of the author to determine). So while literary hypertexts (narratives or otherwise) are constructed and meant to be played with and created anew with each reading by the reader--for pleasure, the technical (or exploratory) hypertext is much more utilitarian; it is meant to provide meaning which the reader needs, most often because he/she needs to use it for research or for getting some job done.