• Jay David Bolter. "Seeing and Writing." Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1991. 63-81.

  • In this chapter, Bolter focuses on changes in typography that have appeared with the advent of electronic text. He discusses changes in the individual elements of pictoral, alphabetic and "mathematical" writing, and their appearance collectively. He believes that computer typography still looks nostalgically toward the print book, despite the computer screen's inability to represent the clarity of those fonts. The electronic page does not create a reading experience like that of the printed page; the reader, switching between different windows, must "shuttle back and forth between two modes of reading," often between images and text. The computer screen is more like a medieval parchment, in which text and image intertwined, than a book, in which they are separated. Along with the pictorial space and the phoenetic space, the reader of an electronic text reads numeric text, in the context of a spreadsheet, database or graph. Bolter remarks in conclusion that hypertext authors will need to learn not only how to work in these new dimensions, but to see their text as a temporal experience unfolding for the reader. (Kristin Bolton.)
    
    
  • The dominant discourse in contemporary critical theory promotes the demolition of authority (except for the authority of the dominant discourse in contemporary critical theory), and that's what this chapter is about. Bolter begins by surveying the development of print culture, and argues that the technology itself deceived its practitioners into believing that they might be able to create something stable and of lasting value. He lingers over Romanticism, the period most responsible for exalting literature and the author; he then moves on to the formation of the so-called canon, which he chides for suggesting that some works are more worthy than others. Blasting forward into the present day, Bolter predicts that hypertext will redeem the sins of the past: "It complicates our understanding of literature as either mimesis or expression, it denies the fixity of the text, and it questions the authority of the author." From reader-response criticism, Bolter plucks the notion that the reader plays an active role in constructing the text; spatial form, rather than linearity, provides his aesthetic; he runs hypertext through the mill of post-structuralism, and finds that there is nothing to grind--the stuff is already irreproachably de-centered. But there is a center to this chapter, and that center is Bolter's belief that authority must be demolished. Hypertext, in his view, is uniquely suited to this task because it is not writing but rather a never-ending process of re-writing, with no grounding in reality and no individual voice rising above the babble. If you're looking for a succinct guide to the new conventional wisdom about the marriage of hypertext and critical theory, you could hardly do better than this chapter. (Steve Schroer.)

Michael Hancher

Department of English, University of Minnesota

URL: http://umn.edu/home/mh/ebibkb5.html

Comments to: mh@umn.edu

Created 5 May 1995

Last revised 17 September 1996