Edward M. Jennings

Department of English
State University of New York at Albany
<emj69@albnyvms>

 

Landow, George P. Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Literary Theory and Technology. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992.

 

[1] This is a review of George P. Landow’s book about a phenomenon almost as outlandish in a paper-based culture as scripture must appear to be when it arrives in societies without records. Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Literary Theory and Technology is part of a series called “Parallax: Re-visions of Culture and Society.” Steven G. Nichols, Gerald Prince, and Wendy Steiner are the series editors. I think it is a marvelous book, and this essay is meant to prod you into reading it from cover to cover.

 

Hypertext could be the keystone volume in a graduate curriculum where the rhetorics of networking and screen display are scrutinized right beside those of oral and scribal modes, of scroll and codex technologies. But at least four audiences may still be hostile to it: Curmudgeons who don’t know which upsets them more, critical theory or technology; closet word-processors for whom the concept “programming” still smacks of mind control; theorists for whom Barthes and Derrida and Lyotard are old wallpaper against which background some significant struggles are (at last) taking place; and technophiles ashamed of their access to tools that others cannot afford.

 

The book itself is not a menace, but the technologies it celebrates–or the still unexplored opportunities offered by the hypertext technology–threaten assumptions so deeply held that most people will deny that they can be challenged. After all, these words mean what they mean, don’t they?

 

Text.
Author.
Story.
Knowledge.

 

Landow himself issues no directly apocalyptic challenges. No foam around his mouth. His presentation is measured, experiential, lucid, moderate and sensible. He merely points out that the concept “hypertext” lets us test some concepts associated with critical theory, and gracefully shows how the technology is contributing to reconfigurations of text, author, narrative and (literary) education.

 

As an advocate for the technology Landow describes so clearly, my goal in this review is to tell you enough about it so that you will feel compelled at least to read Hypertext, even if you don’t rush out and invest all at once in the electronic paraphernalia you would need to become acculturated. I will try to describe the phenomenon, and then try to suggest how hypertext demands that we re-place those four self-evident terms. As I perceive it, the technology undermines fundamental assumptions about authority and control of time.

 

Just what is this “thing,” this “concept,” this technology that has acquired the label “hypertext”? Landow does a good job of explaining it, as do Bolter and Moulthrop and Slatin (emphasizing “Storyspace”), but it’s like trying to describe digital recording to Oscar Wilde or trying to help a fish understand “breathing.” Even readers of PMC need help, I suspect, in spite of their acquaintance with at least two other transforming technologies, word-processing and networking. Not everyone has easy access to the relatively expensive Macintosh platform where most of the writer-artist hypertext software performs.

 

Please note: We are not discussing the ballyhooed “multimedia” here, nor the pseudo-hypertext built in to the “Help Menus” of commercial software applications. My own experience (limited) is with Eastgate Systems’ “Storyspace” (and a few hours with Ntergade’s “Black Magic,” and a few minutes with Knowledge Garden’s “Knowledge Pro”). George Landow, in sharp contrast, has designed and experienced entire “docuverses” in the “Intermedia” environment developed and installed at Brown University. He has practiced what he preaches, that is. What’s more, he and Paul Delany have already edited Hypermedia and Literary Studies (MIT, 1991), 17 essays whose cluster of perspectives supplements and qualifies the authoritative focus of his 1992 monotext being reviewed here.

 

Once more, then: What “is” hypertext?

 

It can be imagined as an endless electronic nesting of “footnotes,” each one enriching all the others, none of them secondary even though one had to be encountered first. You can place them whenever you want, in whichever typeface (or “tone”) you choose, and with whatever coloration you prefer.

 

Another image is of a book’s index accompanied by a pointer that would let readers wander from one reference to another without having to keep their index finger between index pages. The sequence of assimilation–associative or whimsical or undeviatingly purposeful–rests in the digits of the reader.

 

A third image starts with pictures, not books. Imagine a handful of cubes connected by straws, a cluster that almost resembles those models of molecules that illustrate articles in National Geographic. These cubes are “lexias or blocks of text” (Landow 52). The straws are electronic links. Hypertext is nothing more than electronically connected chunks of text.

 

Expand the imaginary handful into a roomful. Consider that those little cubes are not word containers, but receptacles holding whole sentences, paragraphs, scenes, speeches–or photographs, diagrams, songs, symphonies, videotapes of vaudeville acts with barking dogs…. Consider also that those straws, now enlarged to tunnel size, can arch from one corner of the room to another without going through all the neighboring cubes along the way. The designer lays out the linkages. Instead of a neat model molecule, all primary colors and straight lines, we have a web, a Gibsonian Matrix, an elecTRONic habitat.

 

As “readers” of this space, we who have entered the habitat’s first chamber take our seats and watch the message-performance composed for us. Finished, we take a hint from the options posted on the wall and stroll– together or separately, next door or to the far reaches– stopping off anywhen that looks promising.

 

The crux of hypertext is where those spatially distinct “cubes” intersect with temporally distinct sequences. Authors compose the cubes.lexias.performances and construct the tunnels.web.links. The audience, having entered the space at cube one, has to choose where to explore next, and has to endure the consequences of the risks implicated in that choosing.

 

So much for telling fish about breathing. Instead of holding a book, we look at a screen displaying a map of an Index. By now, two of those self-evident terms, “text” and “author,” no longer mean quite what they used to. Instead of being sentences and paragraphs and two-dimensional pages bound as a book or journal or newsletter, what we “read” is distinct, self-contained chunks of performance frozen in a three-dimensional “space.”

 

As it happens, two of Landow’s chapters are about reconfiguring the text and reconfiguring the author, so we have not strayed too far from his (two-dimensional) text. Another pair of his chapters has to do with narrative and education, so I will have a chance to show how hypertext technology can question “story” (the morality of narrative) and “knowledge” (construct versus instruct) later in this essay. Meanwhile, I trust that the convergence Landow writes about between computer technology and critical theory is beginning to sound plausible and interesting. His own Index (if displayed on your screen) would show about 75 citations for Barthes and Derrida. Foucault, Lyotard, Bakhtin, Miller and four others together match that number. Vannevar Bush leads the techies with 15 citations; Theodor H. Nelson (14) and Jay David Bolter (12) outpoint McLuhan, Ong, Joyce (Michael) and Moulthrop.

 

After a glance at Landow’s first chapter, about theory, then, I shall cycle through more modulations of writer-reader-text dislocation, stressing control of time and sequence, and press on to try to legitimize narrative disorder.

 

The first chapter, “Hypertext and Literary Theory,” is for me a clear, succinct and persuasive elaboration of the argument that hypertext actually concretizes a lot of what poststructuralism theorizes. Landow himself is not so insistent. His moderate claim: “What is perhaps most interesting about hypertext . . . is not that it may fulfill certain claims of structuralist and poststructuralist criticism but that it provides a rich means of testing them” (11). Some nexial terms in the early pages are inter-textuality, multi-vocality, de-centering and non-linearity. Central to the “convergence” argument is the quasi-equation of techie Nelson’s “text chunks” and critic Barthes’s lexia: “Hypertext . . . denotes blocks of text–what Barthes terms a lexia–and the electronic links that join them” (4).

 

Landow finishes this first chapter in the context of Alvin Kernan’s thesis that printing technology virtually created the concepts of “authorial property, authorial uniqueness, and physically isolated text.” The book, the artist, and even “intellectual property” are fragile, socially constructed phenomena. Landow predicts that hypertext will, in its turn, frame and historicize several such heretofore “self-evident” Truths about Art. Hypertext technology thus “has much in common with some major points of contemporary literary and semiological theory, particularly with Derrida’s emphasis on de-centering and Barthes’s conception of the readerly versus the writerly text” (33-4; see also Kernan, Printing Technology).

 

Even though Landow concentrates on ways that hypertext reconfigures text and author, the role of Reader is inseperable from both, and I shall emphasize the paradox of that role: The reader is no longer subjected totally to the authoritative will of a single mind, and the reader can be a collaborating writer within the hypertext space. BUT each new reader IS still under the previous reader-writer’s control, and NO reader can tamper with the lexias already in place.

 

There are two ways to unravel these apparent contradictions. The first involves a digression into the way two mutually exclusive words are being juxtaposed. Here is Landow on writer and reader:

 

Today when we consider reading and writing, we probably think of them as serial processes or as procedures carried out intermittently by the same person: first one reads, then one writes, and then one reads some more. Hypertext, which creates an active, even intrusive reader, carries this convergence of activities one step closer to completion; but, in so doing, it infringes upon the power of the writer, removing some of it and granting it to the reader. (71)

 

Notice how comfortably familiar this terminology is–power, writer, reader–even though juxtapositions of dominance-subservience relationships (“power”) and conventionally self-evident labels (“reader” and “writer”) are moderately disconcerting. We are accustomed to assuming that “the reader” cannot be the same individual as “the writer,” that the practices are mutually exclusive. When I write, that is, I am “by definition” not reading. As Landow’s account here indicates, it is difficult not to reproduce this distinction terminologically, even where its inadequacy as regards the hypertext becomes clear. To capture what really goes on in hypertextual pactice we will need to develop a new vocabulary capable of signifying such concepts as “wreading” and “wriding.” (And my “readers” should be warned that I have engaged in some terminological experimentation along these lines below, grotesque though the results may be.)

 

In any case, it would seem that the hypertext environment brings about a collapsing of the identities of composer and audience, a relinquishment of creative control, a triumph of the consumer. But it is necessary to back somewhat away from these implications and return to the image of a space full of chambers connected by tunnels. Within Landow’s Intermedia technology and my chamber-tunnel image, the “writer” carries out two tasks: preparing the separate lexias in their chambers and installing the first set of tunnels linking them. That design process is creative and authoritative in traditional ways. “Readers” needn’t be privileged to tamper with what the “writer” has installed. And the relationships among the lexias, the links, are–when imagined as existing in space–determined by the writer, and must be “followed” by the reader. Writer and reader are not identical. There is no aleatoric “audience participation,” no wresting of control from the performance artist.

 

In that case, how can it be said that the technology “infringes upon the power of the writer, removing some of it and granting it to the reader”? First, the person who enters the hypertext space may construct chambers and link them to those already there. Thus the “wreader” gambit. You can compose your objection to these sentences, or your qualification, or even your endorsement, and “file” it in the same size type–ah, where?–Think of the position as “right behind” this screen/plane, visible the way the labelled edge of a Mac window could be visible.

 

That privilege of reader-being-writer is more easily imagined, but may be less important, than the consequence of the other “transfer of power” effected by the technology. This involves the disintegration of the celebrated essence of literacy, “linearity.” I don’t mean to imply a mandate for chaos; the originator still can design a preferred sequence for the readers’ encounter with the lexias. And sentence-level linearity is not eroded (nor is frame-level pictorial syntax, nor a melody’s phrasing). But the reader-audience-explorer is no longer bound by sequences of paragraphs or chapters. At the granular level we usually call “organizational,” the writer loses what had been almost complete control over the reader.

 

Before hypertext, that is, author(ities) designed the one-and-only-one sequence of sensation-chunks to be imposed on and shared by all (subservient) readers. The order in which memories were layered, the sequence of admonitory qualifications and concluding caveats was determined by the single creative mind. A rebellious reader who flipped casually from back to front, or read the “last” chapter first, or started with the Index, was a social deviant. Now, however, “Flipping back and forth” is no longer defiant. It’s encouraged. The authority can no longer presume that everyone will have read “the same book,” and it won’t be easy for two readers to discuss their differently based interpretations of the same work. They might be similar, but congruence would be an unlikely accident. The author or wrider still influences, but no longer determines, the way the reader or wreader spends time.

 

For hypertext generally, then: The wreader can add to a hypertext docuverse, but (usually) cannot alter its existing lexia; the wrider maintains authority over the original lexias and links, but abdicates control over sequence and boundary. With that paradox and transformation outlined for the technology in general, we can turn to a slightly restricted arena, narrative. Hypertext affects storytelling.

 

If the relationship between wrider and wreader has been transformed, if no single individual is responsible for the whole text, and if that text is no longer a fixed, sacred record–what then are the implications for morality in a record-addicted, legalistic, guilt-needing culture? This might seem like an impertinent question, except that the following sentence is as provocative as any in Landow’s chapter called Reconfiguring Narrative: “Since some narratologists claim that morality ultimately depends upon the unity and coherence of a fixed linear text, one wonders if hypertext can convey morality in any significant form or if it is condemned to an essential triviality” (106). Landow’s answer is affirmative; hypertext storytelling can “convey morality,” and his argument here is consistent with his other positions. Using Michael Joyce’s hypertext Afternoon as his example, Landow maneuvers some responsibility onto the reader’s shoulders. As readers, he says, “our assistance in the storytelling or storymaking is not entirely or even particularly random . . . we do become reader-authors and help tell the tale we read.”

 

“Nonetheless,” he continues, “as J. Hillis Miller points out, we cannot help ourselves: we must create meaning as we read: ‘A story is readable because it can be organized as a causal chain . . . . A causal sequence is always an implicit narrative'” (115; Miller, Versions of Pygmalion).

 

One purpose of Landow’s argument here seems to be to rescue hypertext “stories” (and perhaps the medium itself) from “essential triviality.” But I don’t think the rescue operation is called for. The struggle is not between the trivial and the serious, or between absurdity and order, even though Miller (and Aristotle) implies that the absence of centralized, authorial control of time, and the concomitant absence of obvious causes and necessities, would leave hypertext vulnerable to the defamatory epithets “random” and “chaotic.” I see randomness and chaos making a comeback, however, and if morality’s principal basis really is sequence–consequence, post hoc ergo propter hoc, narrative–then I believe that conventional “morality,” thermodynamic morality, is in for a hard time.

 

My conviction is founded in the implications of fractals and chaos theory, which permit the simultaneous domination of events by absolute determinism and absolute uncertainty. I do not expect “causality” to fade away, any more than Newton or Einstein have, but we are questioning some default assumptions deeply rooted in our culture–see Miller’s casual but inevitable use of “because,” above, for instance. Consider also the questions implicit in a passage Kernan quotes from McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy:

 

The crucial literary concepts of a central plot and a single structure are extensions of the movement of type in precise lines, which generates "the notion of moving steadily along on single planes of narrative awareness . . . totally alien to the nature of language and consciousness." (Kernan 52)

 

As Landow himself says, hypertext technology lets us start testing questions and assumptions. In the case of story-telling, hypertext does not demand attention to a single Creative Authority who designs sequences of sensation and requires that audiences accept them in that order. This is why there is really no need, in spite of the consistency and symmetry of Landow’s nostalgic argument (that readers will construe their own causality, and narrative morality will remain essentially the same), to succumb to the argument’s temptations.

 

Almost half the book is devoted to ways hypertext affects realms outside its own texts. The last two chapters are about pedagogy and politics. Both of them start small and expand. One begins with students and concludes with hypertext’s effect on canonicity. The other starts out with “humanist technophobia” and ideology, and ends with a succinct survey of networks’ and hypertext’s unpacking of the mouldy concept of “intellectual property.” One sentence seems to me to be at the heart of both chapters: “Educational hypertext redefines the role of instructors by transferring some of their power and authority to students” (123). Implicit in this kind of transfer, as I have experienced it, is a modification of the concept “knowledge” away from a “thing” to be sought and found and guarded and delivered by coteries–by mysterious “hoods,” as in brotherhoods or priesthoods or doctoral hoods–away from monolithic thing-ness, that is, and toward a complex system of interpenetrating contributions. “Facts” don’t change much in such an environment, but some dogmatically self-evident conclusions are less likely to be called “facts.”

 

I have watched this happen in a simple, inexpensive networking environment, and have no trouble accepting Landow’s sweeping statement about the inestimably more challenging environment of hypermedia. To prevail in that environment, students have to become engaged with learning. They will have trouble if they try to get by with habits of remembering and mimicking. Landow says that hypertext provides “the perfect means of informing, assisting, and inspiring the unconventional student” (129), that the environment “frees learners from constraints of scheduling without destroying the structure and coherence of a course” (132), and asks instructors to “rethink examinations and other forms of evaluation” (134). We also have to make some adjustments in our beliefs about “knowledge.” Instead of being a commodity that professors have exposed, “knowledge” is revealed as a dynamic cluster of interacting perceptions being constructed and transformed by real people.

 

Pleasing as these abstract ramifications may sound, they are also disturbing. How many educators really want “active, independent-minded students who take more responsibility for their education and are not afraid to challenge and disagree” (163)? Landow assesses the prospect as “terrifying” for many, perhaps especially so in an atmosphere of “widespread humanist technophobia” (164).

 

Beyond the threat to professors’ assumptions about their power, deeply rooted in the proscenium classroom (Barker and Kemp), and registrars’ schedules and “credit hours,” Landow perceives hypertext as more than a teaching tool, a learning machine, an “educational program.” For him it is a medium, and its unprecedented massage (sic) is potentially multicentered and democratizing far beyond the campus. One already hears rumors about the ways some people in medium-sized organizations have adjusted their activity away from obeying and toward collaborating as “horizontal” networks encroach on “chain-of-command” hierarchies. That the change is still in the service of “productivity” seems to me a minor flaw, perhaps temporary, in a near-Odonian transformation of attitude.

 

A basic image for Landow, and for this review, has been transfer of power. The author’s authority is decreased and the reader’s power is increased by the same “amounts,” it would seem. Democracy gains to the extent that autocracy loses. The image implies scarcity, limitation, restriction. But “power” does not really exist as a fixed quantum, after all, to be shared only among the privileged and withheld from, kept secret from, the underclass. In certain contexts, power resembles information, in that sharing power does not leave the sharer with less of it. To the extent that information and power (and authority) overlap, hypertext’s ecology of abundance can be regarded as spreading all of them around, rather than either reducing or increasing any of them. To that extent, at least, hypertext technology resembles network technology: sharing, abundance, even the dreaded “overload” are its hallmarks, rather than the sort of de-centering that implies reduction or diminishment.

 

Although it takes some rigorous imagining to do so, I can even extrapolate the hypertext environment in the direction of broadly anti-propertarian attitudes. The propertarian, anti-collaborative concepts of artist and inventor, copyright and patent, publication and secrecy, are closely linked. But the impetus toward collaboration already evident in the Matrix or on the Net looks to be compounded by the experience of hypertext. IF the overlapping cultural schemas of a) deference to isolated genius, b) worship of mystery, and c) reverence for hierarchy continue to be eroded by a technology that virtually mandates collaboration, our great-grandchildren will share a radically refabricated culture in which concepts like intellectual property, trade secrets, and even searching for The Truth may have been significantly altered.

 

These declarations are mine, not Landow’s. He wisely stops short of such gee-whiz speculation. His boldness in discussing pedagogy alongside critical theory, and in discussing the political implications of an academic technology, are more significant for me than the specific directions we may make guesses about.

 

For it is this convergence of technology, pedagogy, scientific and literary theorizing, and the feedback processes of cultural evolution, that Landow’s volume heralds. Indeed, I wish he had brought his talent for drawing the most crucial particulars out of a complex framework to bear on the broader academic curriculum (and political agenda). It seems to me that the sooner we can integrate hypertext’s opportunities for exploration into our graduate training in all the artistic and critical disciplines, the greater the likelihood that some system of positive global cooperation will prevail over the temptations to self destruct.

 

There are other matters that I wish Landow had been able to address. On the technical side, they include the implications of the broader definition of “text” forthcoming when “cinema” and “sound” join “plain words” and “pictures” in the hypermedia “space.” On the theoretical side, they include the intriguing hypothesis that “Time”–as in the dis-integration of before-and-after relationships–is the concept that arches over all his reconfigurations. Pedagogically, they include the implications of the growing demand for computing resources, including trained people, that will issue from the humanistic disciplines as the technology’s value to all forms of textual-interpretive endeavor comes to be recognized. Politically, they include the ramifications of high cost and slow distribution of the technology (which brings us full circle, centrifugally, around the bullseye Landow has anatomized). But in a book so thoroughly admirable, these few lacunae are no more worrisome than the missing “the” on page 131.

 

There are skeptics about hypertext, particularly scholars concerned about its apparent promotion of bull-session anarchy and rigorless dissipation. Landow quotes doubts about “the erosion of the thinking subject” (Said, Beginnings) and “the disintegration of the centering voice of contemplative thought” (Heim, Electric Language). For Landow himself, however, whatever is lost at the center appears offset by benefits of collaboration. In discussing the relationships he experienced during an Intermedia project, for instance, he lambastes those who, still bathing themselves “in the afterglow of Romanticism, uncritically inflate Romantic notions of creativity and originality to the point of absurdity” (91). Quoting Bolter about the way “book technology itself created new conceptions of authorship and publication” (93), Landow celebrates the fact that “hypermedia linking automatically produces collaboration” (95).

 

There is also suspicion that anything to do with computers is essentially materialistic and centralized, and an associated suspicion that any “program” must be a “product” whose acceptance will implicate us in the machinations of the producers. One reviewer, objecting to Jay Bolter’s attitude toward computing technology (in Writing Space), links this threat (of a “decentering, associative technology being developed by and for the greater consolidation of post-industrial, multi-national, capitalistic institutions”) with “a neo-conservative position” and “Republican ideology” (Tuman, “Review,” 262-63). The paradox of “consolidated decentering” might be resolvable, but it will be hard for a while yet to fight the presumption that network technology and hypertext technology have the same effects on their users. I can testify that the impacts are very different, however, and I will insist that confusing the concept hypertext with whoever delivers and installs a particular version is like confusing the generic technology of the book with the sellers of paper and printing presses; hypertext is a generic technology, not a product. And Usenet (to shift to The Matrix of networks) is like an anarchists’ convention compared with commercial bulletin boards’ shopping malls.

 

A related objection, also directed at Bolter and Writing Space, has been to his “radical environmentalism,” which allows the “human mind to be shaped by whatever writing space it happens to be occupying” (Kaufer and Neuwirth, “Review,” 260). But while one must certainly beware of absolute technological determinism, it seems clear enough that the human mind is used differently, say, in paper-based cultures than in memory-dependent societies. If that translates into environmental “shaping,” then hypertext, in its disruption of such self-evident categories as “reader” and “writer,” would seem already to have begun to reshape us.

 

Hypertext is as radical a social technology as there has been since compound interest, and its subsequences won’t crystallize in a rationally predictable way. Who could have prophesied, for instance, that the internal-combustion engine and the quartz-crystal radio would play out as suburban decentralization and public television broadcasting? I am willing to predict that the nature of record-keeping is going to change now that we can tape events in “real-time” as well as write down summaries from memory. Since we live in a record-grounded culture, that is, changes in recording technology will have effects as profound as they are gradual–over the next century or two. Hypertext, a recording medium, will play some part in those tectonic changes, but it is far too early to predict its exact role or the precise changes. Isaac Asimov once made the point that most people can carry out a plausible straight-line extrapolation of (some) effects of change in a single variable. He grinned as he added that plotting the feedback effects where those extrapolations affect other variables is, shall we say, more difficult. Few “variables” affect the understructure of culture more subtly or seismically than its recording technology, and hypertext is an unprecedented, appealing, available recording technology. Its effects on what we call “writing” may turn out to be as momentous as those of photography on “drawing.”

 

I doubt that any member of the four hostile audiences I enumerated at the outset will now rush off to buy Landow’s Hypertext. But I hope that others who are more prepared to credit an emerging technology with the potential to radically reshape our institutional lives–right down to such assumed conceptual bedrock as text, author, story, knowledge, and reader–will give this admirable book the chance to convince them.

 

Works Cited

 

• Barker, T.B., and F.O. Kemp. “Network Theory: A Postmodern Pedagogy for the Writing Classroom.” In Carolyn Handa, ed., Computers and Community: Teaching Composition in the Twenty-First Century. Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinemann/Boynton-Cook, 1990.
• Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991.
• Delany, Paul, and George P. Landow, eds. Hypermedia and Literary Studies. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.
• Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace, 1984.
• Heim, Michael. Electric Language: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing. New Haven: Yale UP. 1987.
• Kaufer, David, and Chris Neuwirth. “Review” of Bolter, Writing Space. College Composition and Communication 43.2 (May 1992): 259-61.
• Kernan, Alvin. Printing Technology, Letters and Samuel Johnson. Princeton: Princeton UP 1987.
• Lanham, Richard A. “From Book to Screen: Four Recent Studies.” College English 54.2 (February 1992): 199-206. Review of Bolter, Writing Space; Hardison, Disappearing Through the Skylight: Culture and Technology in the Twentieth Century; Kernan, The Death of Literature; Ulmer, Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video.
• McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1962.
• Miller, J. Hillis. Versions of Pygmalion. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990.
• Moran, Charles. “Computers and English: What Do We Make of Each Other?” College English 54.2 (February 1992): 193-98. Review of Handa, ed., Computers and Community; Holdstein and Selfe, eds., Computers and Writing: Theory, Research, Practice.
• Moulthrop, Stuart. “Polymers, Paranoia, and the Rhetoric of Hypertext.” Writing on the Edge 2.2 (Spring 1991): 150-59.
• Said, Edward W. Beginnings: Intention and Method. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.
• Schwarz, Helen J. “Computer Perspectives: Mapping New Territories.” College English 54.2 (February 1992): 207-12. Review of Delany and Landow, eds., Hypermedia and Literary Studies; Hawisher and Selfe, eds., Critical Perspectives on Computers and Composition Instruction; Hawisher and Selfe, eds., Evolving Perspectives on Computers and Composition Studies: Questions for the 1990s.
• Slatin, John. “Reading Hypertext: Order and Coherence in a New Medium.” In Delany and Landow, eds., Hypermedia and Literary Studies.
• Storyspace, a hypertext writing environment. Cambridge: Eastgate Systems.
• Tuman, Myron. “Review” of Bolter, Writing Space. College Composition and Communication 43.2 (May 1992): 261-63.