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Zealots foolishly proclaim that the book is dead, and utopians
and dystopians croon and keen over the futures their fantasies
allow them. My own view is that we can expect no simple changes,
that changes will bring both costs and benefits, loss and gain,
and that those of us fortunate enough to live in such exciting
times will be put on our mettle to find ways to adapt technologies
to our lives and our lives to technologies.
~ James J. O'Donnell ~
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The truth seems to be that the novel, as we know it, is changing, has
changed, and will forever remain changed. Gone are the days of holding
the story in your hands while you slip into the reality created for you
by the author and his characters. Perhaps this prediction is a bit
pessimistic, but the inevitable decline of the importance of the printed
version of a work can be read in the suppositions of modern literary
theorists. Barthes calls for the death of the author, Coover predicts the
end of books, and Landow, among others, is espousing the replacement of
the authority of the author by the reader. The hypertext novel,
foreshadowed by the nonlinear works of Calvino, Robbe-Grillet, and Borges,
is on the frontier of development. Due to the change, the reader is faced
with the potential of losing his passive role as one who absorbs literature
into one who must maneuver his way through a spider web of possibilities;
even then, he may never find the dénouement that has characterized carefully
crafted stories for centuries. Frustration may very well be the outcome of
such an encounter. The writers, theorists, and proponents of change have
used the reader as a pawn in the development of how they see hyper textual
literature evolving; however, with a few exceptions, progress of the new
literary form has been the inventor's focus, while the reader has been
part of the theory in name only. The time has come to ask the
question:
can the advantages of hypertext and hyperlinked work outweigh the loss
of readership that may occur?
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