Is Hypertext Really Different from Print Text?
The claim I’m making that hypertext is more “constructed” and “intertextual” than the print text may seem too obvious to need expansion. But the deeper you go into reader response and postmodernist reading theory, the more you begin to wonder whether this is really so. In its more extreme forms, such as that propounded by Stanley Fish, reader-response theory suggests that any text can produce any meaning if a discourse community exists to legitimate that meaning. Whether you buy these theories fully, it is still obvious that readers don’t always read linearly from the beginning of the book to the end. They skip back and forth, reread passages, and walk over to the bookshelf for another book before they’ve finished the one in hand. And even if they don’t literally skip, the representation of text they create in their mind is always constructed from an amalgam of the words of the text and their own experiences, purposes and meanings. Louise Rosenblatt distinguishes between the reader, th
