| The hypertext medium has transformed the manner in which a reader/viewer approaches literature. The interactivity of a text, and the rapport between reader and writer is a well argued concept that predates hypertext by decades. The Toronto Research Group has referred to the book as a meaning generating machine that is activated by the reader. Reading is therefore an interactive experience, an exchange between the reader and the device providing them with ideas, words, and emotions to experience. With digital, hypertext, and flash possibilities available through the Internet, the reading experience has achieved a heightened sense of interactivity when mediated through a computer instead of a book. Roland Barthes observes in S/Z that the ideal text is a writerly text, one in which the goal is to make the reader a producer, rather than consumer of the text (4). With multiple links and paths for a reader to follow, hypertext has created a new way of achieving this interactivity. Also, in Death of the Author Barthes writes "the reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed; ... a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination (148). Barthes foregrounds the notion of the inscription of a text onto the reader, and of the reciprocity between text and reader. In attempting to disrupt the text, Feminist scholars call for the inscription of the feminine and of the female body onto the text: "Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics" (Cixous, 12). Hypertext literature offers in a broader sense an opportunity to inscribe Otherness onto a text, through it's non-linear form, and especially in the reader/writer dynamic in which a new entity is created: the wreader. |