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.)
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Text: Selective Annotated Bibliography.
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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