Hypertext Scholarship

In her consideration of the impact that computer technology will have upon editorial practice and literary study, Julia Flanders (NASSR) remarks that:

Editorial theory must increasingly take account of the practical and theoretical effects of the electronic medium upon scholarship; the computer can no longer be regarded as a tool which assists us in doing what we already do, but must be understood as a medium in the true sense: an integral part of our systems of communication, with the potential for profound influence on our habits of thought and work.

Technology is not simply in the employ of literary scholarship. Rather, it must inform the practice of editorial theory on a primary procedural level, re-conceiving how we present a literary work, and, in turn, how we criticise and interpret this re-conceived work.

Ronald Tetreault (NASSR) offers a cogent instance of how--as Flanders phrases it--an electronic medium becomes "an integral part of our systems of communication":

Wordsworth in hypertext may be the most effective way yet to represent Wordsworth in development. This medium re-inscribes textual instability as a series of moments in a lengthy creative process, for by adding motion to comparative view, hypertext allows us to represent change.

Tetreault has Lyrical Ballads in mind here.(An equally compelling example is Wordsworth's The Prelude--of which numerous print editions present the poem's textual instability in a variety of arrangements.)(1) That hypertext allows for a qualitatively and quantitatively different demonstration of "development"--of the poet revising and the poem in a state of revising--than the print medium does is a point clearly illustrated by Jack Lynch (NASSR and MLA). The Pennsylvania electronic edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, as Lynch reports, includes two collated copies (1818 and 1831), a complete copy of Paradise Lost (among an array of other literary and historical works) as well as a 150000-word corpus of critical commentary). Demonstrating a literary work or a poet in development, it seems, includes more than text--more than the title Frankenstein suggests in and of itself. "What is remarkable about hypertext," Lynch asks, "is the way in which text slides into context" (MLA). Thus the presentation of the "development" of Frankenstein in hypertext form includes surrounding materials that help to contextualise, say, the origins and sources of the novel. In the case of Lyrical Ballads, a electronic variorum of the 1798, 1800, 1802 and 1805 editions is presented. The ability to represent textual development requires a re-thinking of the editing process. As Tetreault comments:

digital hypertext editions can spark a renewal of interest in editing and textual scholarship, analytical and descriptive bibliography, and even assist in the realignment of literary studies from the theory and practice of critical interpretation to the new cultural history's focus on the literary marketplace and the material representation of 'literature'.

Similarly, Steven Jones (NASSR) remarks:

We realize that some of the fundamental theoretical questions of traditional textual criticism, questions of copy-text, manuscripts, recension, eclectic versus 'diplomatic' versus 'genetic' editions, authors' intentions, publication and reception histories, printing practices, are rendered more complicated (and, sometimes, some would argue, rendered moot) in the case of a growing digital archive.

If hypertext changes how an "edition" of a literary work is developed, it requires philosophical changes to the bibliographical and textual procedures preliminary to editing. A hypertext edition that includes all of the extant witnesses of a literary work makes the process of evaluating the most feasible copy-text(s) an obsolete exercise--a process of evaluation required by the print medium because of material and structural constraints as much as economic. All of the extant versions of a literary work can be included, as well as, for example, scanned images of the original editions. Thus, as Lynch remarks, "context is more than text." A hypertext treatment of a literary work readily takes hypermedia form, including moving and still images, as well as sound. While the panellists of "The Canon and the Web" and "Electronic Texts and Textuality" explore at length how hypertext is changing the way an edition is constructed, they do not (almost certainly because of the constraints of the 20-minute conference paper format) delve into how hypertext affects criticism and interpretation.

It is here that my discussion in this hypertext article comes to rest. How is criticism changed when it takes hypertext form? How, to rephrase Landow's assertion, in the face of hypertext does the critic and theorist of literature "write in hypertext"?

I would suggest that an answer to this question is useful pursued in considering how the structure of hypertext lends itself to particular forms of literary criticism. Textual criticism, for example. Hypertext, as it is often noted, allows for the presentation of variation--the "versioning" of multiple versions of a literary work. But, as Peter Robinson asks in "Is There a Text in These Variants?": "If all the texts differ, where is the text?"(2) That is to say, if all of the witnesses differ, which one is "the" literary work? Is a poem the sum of all (or most) of its versions? or a single textus receptus that editors have historically passed on to generations of readers? (In the case of "Christabel," the last edition of Coleridge's lifetime in the 1834 Poetical Works is without question more frequently anthologized than any other version of the poem.) To present all of the variants of a literary work presupposes, of course, that they are worth presenting--that, they are critically useful (shaping the historical transmission and interpretation of a work). Just as hypertext furnishes a dramatic editorial environment in which to present a polyvocal literary work, it also affords in the constellated arrangement of its nodes and links an apposite narrative form in which to detail the transmission of the palimpsestic "Christabel" from 1800 to 1816.(3) A hypertext history of the transmission of "Christabel" reveals the poem as palimpsestic, comprised of written and oral tissues, rendering in the very structure of its nodes and links, a germane mode for a narrative of the poem's transmission.

Notes

1. The editions of The Prelude I have in mind include Jonathan Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams and Stephen Gill, eds. The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850: authoritative texts, context and reception, recent critical essays (New York: Norton, 1979); Jonathan Wordsworth, ed. The prelude: the four texts (1798, 1799, 1805, 1850) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995); Jonathan Wordsworth The two-part prelude (1799) (London: Syrens, 1995); Mark L. Reed, ed. The thirteen-book Prelude (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); W.J.B. Owen, ed. The fourteen-book Prelude (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); and, Duncan Wu, ed The five-book Prelude (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997). (back)
2. The Literary Text in the Digital Age, ed. Richard J. Finneran (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996) 100. (back)
3. I should add that my study of the transmission of "Christabel" does not include a genetic or variorum hypertext edition of the poem. It does, however, contain a full version of the 1816 printed edition, as well as multiple versions of several passages from the poem. My reasons for not including such an edition of the poem are two-fold. First, Jack Stillinger presents an impressive print edition of the poem in his Coleridge & Textual Instability: The Multiple Versions of the Major Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); see 189-215. Secondly, a hypertext edition of the poem at this date would be at best provisional--evincing the very "textual instability" Stillinger writes of--in light of the pending appearance of a new collection of Coleridge's poems from Princeton University Press. The Jim Mays-edited collection will include material that Stillinger does not. See Mays, "Christabel as Example: S(ubt)ex(t) as (Con)text." Imprints and Revisions 8 (1995): 129-42; "Editing Coleridge in the Historicized Present." Text 8 (1995): 217-37; "Reflections on Having Edited Coleridge's Poetry." Romantic Revisions, eds. Robert Brinkley and Keith Hanley. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) 136-153; and, "Waiting for Coleridge." Wordsworth Circle 27 (1996): 57-60. (back)