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Booting Up the Bard
N. Katherine Hayles stands at the crossroads where
hypertext meets Hamlet
As N. Katherine Hayles delved deeper into the material for her
forthcoming book, Virtual Bodies: How We Became Posthuman (University of
Chicago Press), on the development of cybernetics from the post World War
II years to the present, she began to feel as if she had a tiger by the
tail. “Everywhere I looked, these enormous implications were opening up,”
explains the UCLA professor of English, who specializes in literary studies.
Hayles believes that the advent of modern information technology, in
terms of its impact on textual forms, is as significant as the inventions
of print and movable type. “Print revolutionized what it meant to create
an argument through text and influenced literary forms in all kinds of
ways,” says Hayles. “The movement of text from print into the computer
is comparable in scope.”
While many working outside English departments have focused on the practical
applications of the new medium, Hayles and others in her field are exploring
how a nascent textual practice is leading to new approaches to rhetoric,
argument and discursive and critical forms of writing -- as well as to
entirely new literary genres. By necessity, she says, her research in this
area, supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Stanford Humanities Center
Fellowship, is interwoven with her teaching and firsthand experience with
electronic texts. “As you begin to work extensively with these texts,”
Hayles says, “you begin to realize that something very significant is happening.”
To illustrate her point, Hayles offers the example of Shakespearean
studies over time. Shakespeare’s plays were originally presented to the
public as performance, but beginning in the 18th and 19th centuries, with
the widespread dissemination of the Bard’s works in print, increasing emphasis
was placed on Shakespeare’s plays as texts. “By the mid 20th century, unless
you were in a drama department, Shakespeare was more often taught as a
text than as a work for performance,” Hayles says. “Print facilitated that
revolution in the way Shakespeare was experienced.” Now, a second revolution
is afoot, with multimedia computers making it possible to reanimate the
text incorporating, for example, video clips of Shakespeare performances,
audio segments of certain passages being read and illustrations of historical
stagings and costumes.
If print lends itself to analyses based on word play, metaphor and the
like, and performance fosters visually focused interpretations, what of
the new “hypertexts”? While readers typically experience a print novel
as a linear sequence of pages, hypertext novels present an array of choices
to the reader. “There’s no preset narrative,” Hayles explains. “Hypertext
exists as a network of possibilities that are activated in a unique way
with each reading.” (Many of the texts go so far as to include secret screens
and trapdoors.) “In a very literal sense, each reading of a novel is different.”
The new form raises challenging pedagogical questions. For example,
how should writing be taught? Traditional composition techniques are predicated
on linear sequencing. In the electronic medium, concepts such as transitions,
paragraph breaks and overall flow become less important, while choices
concerning textual links, or how audio and visual texts are integrated,
play a crucial role in shaping the final product.
“Hypertext facilitates exploration of a multitude of options without
the need to come to a certain conclusion,” Hayles says. “This form of discursive
writing is very well suited to literary studies, which at their best open
up the interpretability of the text. I have never taught a class where
I haven’t learned something important from my students’ readings of a text.
With hypertext, that experience is enlarged.”
In their classroom approach to hypertext novels, Hayles and her students
begin by using collective interpretations to sketch a map that is more
inclusive than any one reader’s experience. The analysis that follows differs
from traditional literary discussions in that it tends to focus on the
logic behind the linking structure, which is integral to the meaning of
the text.
Hayles has also explored the new medium’s impact on how readers interface
with the texts in front of them. “For centuries, that interface has been
constant,” she notes. “In computer jargon, it’s narrow band — your eyes
run over print.” When print readers are engrossed in a book, Hayles points
out, they are hardly conscious that their eyes are going over a printed
page. “The richness of the sensory feedback pales in comparison with the
richness of the imagined world,” she says. “But with the computer, you
have a much more kinesthetic interface -- visual and spatial at the same
time.”
Hayles is teaching a graduate seminar on electronic textuality that
will look at the new medium from both critical and theoretical viewpoints.
Other insights into the new form’s impact may emerge from a Web based,
paperless version of a basic writing course Hayles is teaching, in which
students can communicate electronically as the verbal discussion proceeds.
But Hayles knows that, in addition to answering questions, engagement with
these courses will inevitably raise additional ones. As she learned when
she first began examining the ramifications of electronic textuality, the
new avenues for exploration are as ubiquitous as the trapdoors and submenus
of the hypertexts that are revolutionizing her field.
Recharging the Electronic Classroom...
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