The Author De-Centered

“As readers move through a web or network of texts, they continually shift the centre -- and hence the focus or organizing principle -- of their investigation and experience. Hypertext, in other words, provides an infinitely re-centreable system whose provisional point of focus depends upon the reader, who becomes a truly active reader in yet another sense. One of the fundamental characteristics of hypertext is that it is composed of bodies of linked texts that have no centre. Although this absence of a centre can create problems for the reader and the writer, it also means that anyone who uses hypertext makes his or her own interests the de facto organizing principle (or centre) for the investigation at the moment.” -- (Landow 11-12)

The transference of the function of the centre from the hypertext to the reader's own experience of reading is phenomenological - the consideration of the text, the actions and the reactions involved in the development of both the reader's response to the text and the reader's own consciousness. The shifting of power to the reader, though not absolute, marks an essential difference in an act that is traditionally governed by the author. While the mere shifting of centre to the reader falls neatly under the concepts of Reader-Response the existence alone of a centre may seem counter to Post Modern Literary Theory. As Calvino's Madame Marne states, "...I can't imagine a life all made up of minimal alternatives, carefully circumscribed, on which bets can be made: either this or that". The minimal alternatives of either/or are expanded to include the possibilities of and/and/and. Rather than trying to decide between Reader Response and Post Modern Theory, hypertext allows for a convergence between the two.