The end of linear writing is indeed the end of the book, even if, even today, it is within the form of a book that new writings - literary or theoretical - allow themselves to be, for better or for worse, encased. It is less a question of confiding new writings to the envelope of a book than of finally reading what wrote itself between the lines of the volumes. That is why, beginning to write without the line, one begins also to reread past writing according to a different organization of space.
Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida.

The premise for the development of this hypertext project was rather simple. My aim was to present a small collection of often read and somewhat difficult literary texts in an environment that was both conducive to rigorous critical thought and comfortable for the reader. I also wanted this project to serve as an example of the capacity hypertext has as a critical and presentational tool in the humanities, most particularly in the field of literary theory. The texts themselves (Jacques Derrida's Le Facteur de la Verite, Jacques Lacan's Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter,'" and Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter") and the critical debate that has grown around them cry out to be presented in a non-hierarchical, hypertext format. The critical nature of Derrida's critique of Lacan's reading of "The Purloined Letter" lends itself perfectly to a hypertext presentation.

The nature of the text and concepts of textual centrality (or lack thereof) that are so important to Derrida's work are also important in the critical debates surrounding the uses of hypertext. As Jay David Bolter notes in his essay "Authors and Readers in an Age of Electronic Texts": "a broad area of agreement has emerged that hypertext seems in a curious way to embody poststructural literary theory. Hypertext is the operational realization of major theoretical work of the past two decades"(10, my emphasis). Indeed, Derrida is one of the critical theorists (along with Roland Barthes) most cited by hypertext advocates in the theoretical discussions that have recently formed around the roles of hypertext and the changing nature of the written word. George P. Landow's book Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology , perhaps the most complete study of this subject so far, draws on Derrida extensively to explore ideas such as the de-centering of the text and the breaking down of structural hierarchies.

As well as showing the possibilities hypertext has for the presentation of texts such as Le Facteur de la Verite and Lacan's "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter,'" I was hopeful that the nature of the hypertext project itself would begin to act on and inform the critical debate it was created to present. The very notions of debt and responsibility Derrida addresses in Le Facteur de la Verite are intrinsically linked to the changes hypertext is capable of bringing about in the written word. Landow, citing Derrida's Dissemination, comments that:

Working within the world of print, Derrida presciently argues, using Platonic texts as an example, that "the textual chain we must set back in place is thus no longer simply 'internal' to Plato's lexicon. But in going beyond the bounds of that lexicon, we are less interested in breaking through certain limits, with or without cause, than in putting in doubt the right to posit such limits in the first place. In a word, we do not believe that there exists, in all rigor, a Platonic text, closed upon itself, complete with its inside and outside"(130). . . . Hypertext thus creates an open, open-bordered text, a text that cannot shut out other texts and therefore embodies the Derridean text . . . (60)

The nature of this project has had a profound influence on its development. A seemingly obvious comment to be sure, but one that bears closer thought given the project in question. As Stuart Moulthrop notes in his essay, "In the Zones: Hypertext and the Politics of Interpretation:" "hypertext offers not simply to streamline our access to writing, but to transform the way we produce and organize bodies of text"(my emphasis). This being the case, I find myself in a unique and interesting relationship with my source texts. I have been aware from the beginning that my decisions (where and what to link, for example) have the capacity to influence profoundly the user's experience of the individual texts the project contains. Unlike the printed word on a page, hypertext presents the reader and the editor with a brand new set of questions on subjects that are often taken for granted with printed texts.

One of the most central of these questions is that of the relationship between the "central" text (more on this in a moment) and "auxiliary" texts, which are subordinated in the printed book. As Moulthrop suggests:

In printed works notes and bibliography give writings outside the current text a presence on the page, but that presence is metaphoric. Hypertext abolishes this metaphor: the other writings actually become present when the reader activates a link. Hypertext thus offers to revise our notions of definitive discourse. It seems to move us in the direction of Roland Barthes' "writerly" text, defined as "that social space that leaves no language safe or untouched, that allows no enunciative subject to hold the position of judge, teacher, analyst, confessor, or decoder"("From Work to Text" 81).

Hypertext linking situates the present text at the center of the textual universe, thus creating a new kind of hierarchy, in which the power of the center dominates that of the infinite periphery. But because in hypertext that center is always a transient, de-centerable virtual center -- one created, in other words, only by one's act of reading that particular text -- it never tyrannizes other aspects of the network in the way a printed text does. (66)

Hypertext has the capacity to have the same effect on reading the word processor had on writing some ten or fifteen years ago. With the rise of the Internet, most specifically the World Wide Web, the dissemination of materials in an electronic format has become a reality that has unlimited possibilities for the future of academics. As Landow notes, computer based digital technologies are beginning to effect the humanities in a fashion similar to the effect the computer has already had on the sciences:

The speed with which one can move between passages and points in sets of texts changes both the way we read and the way we write, just as the high-speed number-crunching computing changed various scientific fields by making possible investigations that before had required too much time or risk. (61)

The creation of hypertext documents frees both the reader and the writer from the confines of the book-bound text. The normal linear fashion of reading is replaced by a non-linear, dynamic reading style that enables individual readers to approach and interpret a text from various and unique directions. While the ramifications of these claims are not as profound as many hypertext advocates would like us to believe, they will become increasingly important in the coming years as increased technological advances impacting the humanities serve as a catalyst to the development of electronic texts. Perhaps the most important aspect of hypertext for the literary scholar is the shift it brings about in the nature of the text as a literary tool, as Jerome McGann states in his essay, "The Rationale of HyperText": "what is crucial in all these events from the scholars point of view: we no longer have to use books to analyze and study other books or texts. That simple fact carries immense, even catastrophic, significance." Removed from the constraints of pages one to one hundred, hypertext documents allow the reader to explore the work from many perspectives without resorting to a large pile of outside sources. Landow is also aware of the fact that the changes hypertext makes in our reading patterns, even on the simplest level, have the capacity to have exponentially large effects:

. . . linking permits the reader to move with equal facility between points within a text and those outside it. Once one can move with equal facility between, say, the opening section of Paradise Lost and a passage in Book 12 thousands of lines "away," and between that opening section and a particular anterior French text or modern scholarly comment, then, in an important sense, the discreteness of texts, which print culture creates, has radically changed and possibly disappeared. One may argue that, in fact, all that the hypertext linking of such texts does is embody the way one actually experiences texts in the act of reading; but if so, the act of reading has in some way gotten much closer to the electronic embodiment of text and in so doing has begun to change its nature. (62)

Relationships and connections can be established and developed in arbitrary and stochastic patterns.
This kind of organizational form resembles our oldest extant hypertextual structure, the library, which is also an archive (or in many cases an archive of archives). As with the internet and hypertext, a library is organized for indefinite expansion. Its logical organization (e.g. The LC system) can be accommodated to any kind of physical environment, and it is neutral with respect to user demands and navigation. Moreover, the library is logically "complete" no matter how many volumes it contains -- no matter how many are lost or added.

The decentering of the text is one of the most interesting and exciting aspects of the hypertext document. As McGann notes:

Editors and textual theorists interested in computerized texts appear to differ on a significant point: whether or not HyperEditing requires (even if it be at some deep and invisible level) a central "text" for organizing the hypertext of documents. My judgment is that it doesn't. . . . The Internet, which is an archive of archives, was originally designed precisely as a decentered, nonhierarchical structure. . . . The modern theory of hypertext flows directly from this way of imagining a noncentralized structure of complex relationships. With hypertext, as with the Net, the separate parts of the ensemble (nodes on the Net, files in a hypertext) are independently structured units.

Unlike a book, which must present the texts in a specific order, the hypertext site allows the texts to compete for position independently of either my editorial decisions or the intentions of the editors of the original hard copies. It is this decentering that McGann feels is (if you will excuse the word) central to the differences between hard copy and electronic texts:

The ordering of the hypertext materials is, by default, arbitrary and discrete. If the archive contains any more centralized or hierarchical structures, these have to be (arbitrarily) introduced. Furthermore, if they are introduced, the extent of their authority over the user has to be (arbitrarily) defined as well.
The problem here returns us once again to the fundamental issue of the relation of (hard copy) text to (electronic) hypertext. The decentralized forms of hypertext archives clearly possess logical structure. That structure is designed to facilitate navigation through the archived materials irrespective of the purposes of the navigation. When the hypertext is used to manage study of and navigation through complex bodies of (hard copy) documentary materials . . . a special kind of "decentralism" appears.

The exigencies of the book form forced editorial scholars to develop fixed points of relation -- the "definitive text," "copy text," "ideal text," "Ur text," "standard text," and so forth -- in order to conduct a book-bound navigation (by coded forms) through large bodies of documentary materials. Such fixed points no longer have to govern the ordering of the documents. As with the nodes on the Internet, every documentary moment in the hypertext is absolute with respect to the archive as a whole, or with respect to any subarchive that may have been (arbitrarily) defined within the archive. In this sense, computerized environments have established the new "Rationale of HyperText."

From the perspective of the creator of a hypertext site, the most obvious controlling change relates to the completion of a hypertext project. Given the dynamic nature of the computer environment and the vast capacity for change and continuous development in the hypertext environment, a site is, in many ways, never truly finished. Indeed, as Landow notes, Derrida (in "Living On: Borderlines") has already (and once again) beaten the hypertext theorists to this point:

Hypertext thus blurs the end boundaries of the metatext, and conventional notions of completion and a finished product do not apply to hypertext. . . . As Derrida recognizes, a form of textuality that goes beyond print "forces us to extend . . . The dominant notion of a 'text,'" so that it "is henceforth no longer a finished corpus of writing, some content enclosed in a book or its margins but a differential network, a fabric of traces referring endlessly to something other than itself, to other differential traces." (59, my emphasis)

The very notion of an absolute text is brought into question by the unfinished nature of the text in relation to both itself and the texts that surround it. If Derrida is right, the World Wide Web is a collection of hypertexts that are both incomplete and have no meaning outside of their relationships to other incomplete texts. What the World Wide Web gives us then is a sprawling array of links that link to nothing but other links. Equally, if, as McGann goes on to suggest (quoted below), hypertexts should always be created not in the present but in relationship to future software and hardware possibilities, then each hypertext is not only an unfinished trace that has no meaning outside of its reference to other traces, but it is also constantly striving for a future perfection that will never be reached. In this fashion, every hypertext is a referential trace to a future state that will never be realized.

This project, for example, has an almost infinite capacity for continued development. In one sense, time is all that constrains me from developing this site to its fullest potential. Not only am I able to add to the theoretical and navigational content of the site, I am also able to continue developing the project as more analytical material is added to the already cacophonous discussion of these texts. Unlike a published book, which must wait for new editions on a more temporal scale, this site can develop continually at a relatively cheap price. In essence, there is no mold to be broken and recast each time a change needs to be made to a hypertext site. Thus, a hypertext document has an almost organic nature, due to its ability to change on demand and incorporate new information and technology as it becomes available. McGann suggests that hypertext projects should always be designed beyond the capacity of existing technologies for just this reason:

The range of options also indicates that HyperEditing should be seen as a nested series of operational possibilities (and Problems). In my own view, for example, a fully networked hypermedia archive would be an optimal goal. Because such an archive of archives is not yet a practical achievement, however, one must make present design decisions in a future perfect tense. What that means in practice is the following: (1) that the HyperEditing design for a specific project be imagined in terms of the largest and most ambitious goals of the project (rather than in terms of immediate hardware or software options); and (2) that the design be structured in the most modular and flexible way, so that inevitable and fast-breaking changes in hardware and software will have a minimal effect on the work as it is being built.

As recently as five years ago, the World Wide Web and its exponentially developing communication technologies were all but absent from academic discourse on the electronic word. Projects of the type I am undertaking have only become realistically viable in the last two or three years for all but the most advanced educational institutes. The sheer rise in popularity of internet connections and on-line access over the last two years clearly indicates the expanding opportunities projects of this nature have to broaden and develop in new and interesting ways all areas of scholastic endeavor.

All is not perfect in the world of on-line publications, however. As with any new technology, standards must be set and productive working environments must be marked out. Most especially, the development of electronic texts raises some interesting and possibly difficult questions with regards to copyright issues. Closely linked to the questions raised previously of authorial and editorial responsibility and ownership, these questions are elucidated nicely by Richard A. Lanham in The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts:

Electronic information seems to resist ownership. To make sure that it does flow freely in the world of literary study, we will have to create a new marketplace based on a new concept of intellectual property and copyright protection, and make sure that the constitutional guarantees of free speech made good in the print world prevail here too. (20)

Let's assume that an enterprising young scholar undertakes to construct a hypertext edition of a famous novel with a vexed textual history. . . .Who "wrote" such a "text"? Who gets the royalties? Clearly it is original in its conception and realization. Is it then a copyrightable "expression," to use the law's terminology, or only an unprotected "idea"? Are all its textual uses "fair"? If it is a "textbook," in my department at least it cannot be awarded a merit badge, but isn't it "criticism" as well? And "literary history"? Therefore badgeworthy? And aren't some major theoretical issues raised by such a "text"? (20-21)

It is the responsibility of the academic world to both accept and integrate the many educational benefits of hypertext while being aware that it is not, despite the polemic nature of many early cries of hypertext advocacy, a complete departure from printed forms of the written word. As Espen J. Aarseth notes in his essay "Nonlinearity and Literary Theory:" "hypertext, for all its packaging and theories, is an amazingly simple concept. It is merely a direct connection from one position in a text to another"(67). It is not what hypertext is that makes it so revolutionary, but what it allows the author, editor, or reader to do. In his essay "Topographical Writing: Hypertext and the Electronic Writing Space," Jay David Bolter similarly comments on the simplicity of the concept of hypertext and the intricate nature of its results:

A hypertext consists of topics and their connections, where again the topics may be paragraphs, sentences, individual words, or indeed digitized graphics. A hypertext is like a printed book that the author has attacked with a pair of scissors and cut into convenient verbal sizes. Electronic hypertext does not simply dissolve into a disordered bundle of slips, as the printed book must, for the author also defines a scheme of electronic connections to indicate relationships among the slips. In fashioning a hypertext, a writer might begin with a passage of continuous prose and then add notes or glosses on important words in the passage. The glosses themselves could contain glosses, leading the reader to further texts. A hypertext network can extend indefinitely, as a printed text cannot. (111)

The basic implications of electronic technology may be inevitable but what we make of them certainly is not. We are free to think about, and plan for, literary creation and literary study in ways more agile, capacious, and hopeful than any generation has possessed since literature began to figure in human life. And we must do so, we must learn to think systemically. Technology is sending the same message being broadcast by society's demands upon us and by our own thinking: We must take into our disciplinary domain the world of general literacy upon which literature depends, a world whose existence up to now we have simply assumed. If the prejudices of print and craft-guild muff our play, we shall have only ourselves to blame. Literary scholars have traditionally resisted and resented technological change. . . . But if we put aside our traditional resentments and fears, then we must decide what our "music" is and how to make it in the new ways. (26)