The rhetoric of links is a reasonably common theme in the humanities hypertext literature (
Burbules (1997),
Ingraham (2000),
Kolb (1996, 1997),
Liestøl (1994),
Moulthrop (1991, 1992),
Landow (1994),
Morgan (1999),
Trigg (1983)). It is apparent, however, that much of this criticism inevitably retains a strongly
literary intent - rhetoric is after all a linguistic category, and less surprisingly most who have written what the humanities would recognise as criticism come largely from the literary community.
It is reasonably easy to demonstrate very strong between link node hypertext and cinema. This suggests that while a traditional rhetorical approach may be useful, it is far from adequate to account for the varieties of
hypertext sequence, and indeed the
model of the cinema may provide more fertile theoretical grounds for articulating link typologies.
Metz, in his semiotic analysis of the cinema, has demonstrated the in relation to the paradigmatic, and
Bernstein's work in hypertext can be appropriated in terms of its relevance to syntagmatic series.
Such an understanding suggests that the role of rhetoric in relation to link typologies is not grounded in the individual relations established between a single link (or even a multiheaded link) between two nodes, but is in fact determined much more substantially by the context provided by an developed across several nodes, and more specfically several links. (A distinction needs to be recognised between the quantity of nodes versus the quantity of links simply because a small number of nodes can produce a significant number of autonomous segments by virtue of a high incidence of linking.)
This is also supported by the example of cinema, where it is clear that there is no significant meaning that adheres to the formal nature of a connection between two shots. Most of the meaning of the connection, of the edit in itself, is determined by the larger contexts provided by the content of the shots, and the narrative itself. In other words, there is no intrinsic 'meaning' to a dissolve, its particular meaning is always determined by the contexts of its particular instantiation (and these contexts are internal - provided by a set of diegetic markers, and external - what is ordinarily the stuff of fields like reader response theory, or even hermeneutics).
In addition, once the role of the syntagmatic series is recognised as a potentially richer notion of minimal narrative unit in hypertext, it becomes clear that the aspect of hypertext, at least in terms of linking practice, allows us to recast how
we consider link rhetoric and grammar.
What is extremely important in this claim, however, is not only the relevance of cinema to hypertext as a
narrative system, but equally the erosion of an artificial division between genres of discourse that strives to emphasis the distance between the . Ironically, though formal semiotics has been instrumental in identifying qualities that inherently distinguish the literary from the non-literary, this distinction is today largely ignored as the importance of
context and the reader is acknowledged.
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