The Space Between

Some Practical Problems

So hypertext dissociates the text and author at the same time it makes the reader acutely more aware of the author’s spectral presence in the text. At no time, though, can the reader forget that he is reading the hypertext; the medium’s interactive characteristics require an awareness of the hypertext as a hypertext. Some prefix this kind of self-consciousness while reading with meta-, as in metanarrative. In this case, the best term for this kind of reading might be meta-reading. At any rate, critics in the 1990s believes that one benefit of meta-reading was that the reading experience became more democratic and less hegemonic, but there are some who think that hypertext introduces serious problems instead, especially for pedagogy.

In “Reconstructing the Deconstructed—Hypertext and Literary Education,” Astrid Ensslin writes that hypertext theory is seen as the “most appropriate concretization of postmodern literary theory” (311). To teach with hypertexts, professors must realize that they are teaching what has already been deconstructed over the past four decades. Instead of rely on methods and texts that have been systematically dismantled to see how their parts work, students must be allowed to “reconstruct” the old “knowledge structures” to serve as foundations for new knowledge (313). Ensslin believes that newer, more complex thoughts must be built on a solid foundation, and that foundation has been broken by deconstruction. “The repercussions of deconstructivism on teaching and learning,” he writes, “cannot but be called disastrous” (313). He asserts that students can neither be taught nor motivated in an environment where learning is influenced by a theory that depicts “any conventional approach as immanently absurd and ephemeral” (313).

Ensslin sees the answer in the “empowered reader,” who does not antagonize the author but rather cooperates with the author to fill the “semantic blanks” in a text (314). These blanks appear when students in the classroom are asked to learn things they had no way of knowing existed. In other words, students cannot “be expected to want to learn anything the existence or learnabilty of which they are not aware of” (322). The teacher, who Ensslin relates to the author function in this essay, must collaborate with student readers. Rather than killing off the author, Ensslin’s approach lets the author live on as a guide and facilitator, serving as a “counselor, mediator and source of knowledge” (322).

Ensslin’s ideas preserve the author’s role, but they do so at the cost of adding another layer of mediation between the reader and the text. Applied to hypertexts, though, the need for a facilitator is valid. Many hypertexts purposely distort or hide their structures in an effort to seduce the reader. It is a curious position for the reader, like being trapped in a maze with porous walls. The reader can never become “lost” in a hypertext in the traditional sense because no point in the maze is any more important than any other. Tangents do not matter. But the reader can become “lost” because of poor design. This can lead to a sense of disorientation because there is no primary path to fall back on. A guide or facilitator here could help the reader more easily navigate the hypertext, hopefully with minimal contamination of the reading experience.

The metaphor of the maze is hard to grasp because print possesses few analogues, mostly encyclopedias and dictionaries—which are the most hypertextual print texts because they have features that are analogous to hyperlinks and have no set reading order. Paul Edwards points out that scholars sometimes use a book’s table of contents or index to skim the work, and readers often leaf through encyclopedia articles. But these he calls peripheral kinds of reading that are highly circumstantial. They only appear in a few, specialized instances. Hypertext, on the other hand, “makes such a style of reading central, automates its techniques, and creates new ones” (Edwards 236), validating each reader’s “private authority” (264).