Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology by George P. Landow (review)

Book Reviews241 Kahn, the increasing tension between ideals of chastity and a new Puritan encouragement of sexual pleasure in marriage finds various expressions in the drama of the first decades of the period. Kahn sketches two dramatic strategies, one focusing on cuckoldry, another on tests of virginity, to explore the polarizing of wife (or virgin) as all soul, and whore as all body and all lust. The result of such polarizing is expressed in the plays by Middleton and Marston as a profound uneasiness and suspicion before the complex nature of women (250-57). Kahn marks the tendency of male writers to stress the need to control the sexuality of wives. Such uneasiness finds expression in the drama alongside the new tendency to idealize a sexually gratifying, affectionate, and companionable marriage. The tragic direction the portrayal of women in the drama ultimately takes is a reflection of the more general pessimism of the period. The anthology is a good one, variously interesting and including scholarship and criticism of marked quality. One wonders whether the excellent bibliographies might be buried in such a work, but that is merely a question of publishing strategy. More important is the opportunity provided to sample some of the best recent feminist essays on Shakespearean and Renaissance drama. BETTIE ANNE DOEBLER Arizona State University GEORGE P. LANDOW. Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. 242 p. George P. Landow is professor of English and art history at Brown University where he works with the Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship (IRIS) and supervises the development of Context32, a corpus of hypermedia documents used in teaching English courses. He writes a bold and enthusiastic prediction of the impact of hypertext on literature and pedagogy. Landow's stipulated definition for hypertext is blocks of text, lexia, linked in a computer environment so as to open non-sequential linkages for the user. The corpus can include non-verbal information, such as digitized pictures, sound recordings, and similar data. The non-sequential linkage can be internal to a text (for example skipping through a novel looking at all the contexts in which a particular name or image occurs) or external (leaping from a reference to "Victoria" in the text to an "external" biography of Queen Victoria, then to a history of the main social problems in her reign, then to an account of the economic conditions surrounding one such event) in a labyrinth of connecting information previously positioned in the hypermedia network. Landow predicts that such powerful information retrieval technology will eventually replace the printed book as the common vehicle for transfer of information and for reading generally. If hypertext replaces the printed book, Landow believes that a widespread 242Rocky Mountain Review change in the text itself, the author, the reader, narrative, literature, and education takes place. When a printed book, such as a Victorian novel, is entered into a hypermedia network, its boundaries blur. Where does the text begin and end? What is "inside" the text, what "outside"? The reader can access the text at any point, move the cursor marking his attention forward and backward in the string of symbols, mix visual with verbal symbols, introduce material which in a printed book is usually relegated to footnotes or to scholarly journals far distant from the printed text. The stability and permanence of the printed text becomes a fluid, constantly updated, virtual text. The reader can add material to the network, arguing against, rewriting, elaborating the initial text. The constructive reader becomes more obviously the collaborative partner of the author. Landow questions the post-Romantic view of the author as a sharply defined self, the individual source of creativity behind any artifact. Hypertext creates an environment which illustrates the collaborative nature of the author and his audience and the group action of many readers which supports the effort of a single author. Landow claims that such shifts in the essential nature of the text, author , and audience substantiate and fulfill theoretical suggestions of recent criticism. For example, Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology and Roland Barthes' SIZ are said to converge with hypertext when ideas ofcenter, margin , hierarchy, and linearity become...