Poststructuralism and Computer Hypertext: Tra...

Poststructuralism and Computer Hypertext: Tracing the parallels and the points 0f convergence

Author Name : Jashanpreet Kaur

Hypertext,“an information technology consisting of separate block of texts” (Landow 3), represents many notions of recent literary and critical theory. The originators of hypertext, i.e. Theodor Nelson and Andries van Dam  share with poststructuralist theorists similar ideas about the structure and workings of text, and, in particular, the network as the coordinating principle behind the dissemination of meaning through texts.Reversal of roles can be observed in poststructuralist Derrida’s Glas or Of Grammatology which portrays him as a digitized, hypertextualtheorist and computer hypertext theorist Theodor Nelson’s work Literary Machines, presenting him as a deconstructionist.The very idea of hypertextuality seems to have gained formaround the same time post-structuralism developed. Both seem to have sprouted of dissatisfaction with the printed book and the hierarchical patterns. In the works of poststructuralists like Derrida and Barthes, hypertext reconceives traditional, long- held assumptions about the author, the readers and the text. George P. Landow in Hypertext and Critical Theoryconfirms that hypertext and recent literary and critical theory hold many points of similarities. In fact, it was the pioneering work ofLandowthat stipulated that the poststructuralist notions of text propounded by Kristeva in Word, Dialogue, and Novel (85); Derrida in Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences (355); Barthes in S/Z (5); and Bakhtin in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (50)could now bechecked and perceived in one of the computer writing practices known as hypertext. Landow further observescertain corresponding elements between computer hypertext and literary theory, the principle being that critical theory displays the potential to theorize hypertext and hypertext exhibits the tendency to embody and thereby test different aspects of theory, particularly those concerning textuality, narrative and the roles or functions of reader and writer. Using hypertext, digital textuality and the Internet, students of critical and literary theory now have a laboratory where they can test its ideas. This experience of reading on hypertext elucidates many significant ideas of critical theory. Jay David Bolter, while explaining how hypertextualityembodies poststructuralist concepts of open text asserts, “what is unnatural in print becomes natural in the electronic medium and will soon no longer be saying at all, because it can be shown”(Writing Space 143). Post-structuralism and computer hypertext have seemed to have developed a congruous relationship where poststructuralist notionshave been appropriated as a structure to understand hypertext and its theoretical formation, and the theory of computer hypertext in turn, has shed new light and broadened our understanding of post structuralism. Landow, thus building on the ideas of poststructuralist theorists states :