My first thoughts about hypertext were fairly simple. It’s a text that isn’t just words staying
static on a page; it’s somehow more than that.
My mind jumped almost immediately to the internet, and not only because
I was on the verge of being irrevocably distracted from the reading by a
website I had open on my laptop. I
started tracing the thought process, as I usually have to do, that led to this
connection. Hypertext had more than
likely made me think about hyperlinks, which are of course found on, you
guessed it, the internet. I feel like
this connection may be too obvious to really talk about in depth, but it seemed
to make sense to me given the examples in Landow’s essay. My understanding of hypertext is that certain
phrases can send a reader off on a tangent in a way, making references that put
them in a different setting or mindset, or make them think about another body
of work, research, mythology, things like that.
I wasn’t entirely sure about why Landow says that the idea of a rhizome
is an impossibility however. The
comparison between rhizomes and hypertext seemed to be apt, so maybe I missed
something.
3 comments:
I'm so hypervexed by all this etherweb stuff
Hypervexed by Hypertext: the L371 Story
I think this quote helps us in understanding what hypertextuality actually means. "Hypertext, in other words, provides an infinitely recenterable system whose provisional point of focus depends upon the reader, who becomes a truly active reader in yet another sense"(36). I find it interesting to think of a hypertext as one with a constantly shifting center. It's more than just an intertextual work with a multitude of associations. It's an intertextual work whose associations and relationships to the reader allow the center of the work to constantly shift.
In terms of your confusion about rhizome's and hypertext, it's important to note that he did not say that rhizomes were an impossibility. He said "many of their descriptions of the rhizome and rhizomatic thought appear impossible to fulfill in any information technology that uses words, images, or limits of any sort"(42). While drawing comparisons between rhizomes and hypertext, Landow considers when Deleuze and Guattari write that a rhizome "is composed not of units but of of dimensions, or rather directions in motion"(42). This means that the rhizome comparison is too abstract to directly correspond with hypertext.
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