Is hypertext really an original form of textuality?
George Landow claims for hypertext an essential originality although he does note that its predecessors introduced some of its features. Still he announces hypertextuality as if it is a break with all other textual forms, a very difficult claim to believe: "Conventional notions of completion and a finished product do not apply to hypertext, whose essential novelty makes difficult defining and describing it in older terms, since they derive from another educational and information technology and have hidden assumptions inappropriate to hypertext."
Surely new terms are needed to precisely articulate a theory of hypertext, but most of the old vocabulary of textuality is still applicable. Landow is still caught on questions of technology, the reader, the author, origins and meaning. These are the same concerns raised throughout the history of textual studies and seem not to represent a big break at all, but a new application.
Unlike the first incunabula, the first hypertexts are not introducing a new form of textuality.
M.R. Allen
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