The hoary query of whether hypertext had 'killed' the author stimulated incisive and lyrical writing. More than half the students answered this question on the final exam. For some, it offered a chance to meditate on the book of the future, the hypertext novel. For others, it offered a chance to work through their first encounters (positive and negative) with sustained technology-enriched learning in the humanities. For others, it seemed to offer an easy option, requiring less precise knowledge of specific texts.

The question thus attracted all grade levels in the class, from those struggling to hold onto their Cs to those whose sophisticated thought and elegant writing pulled As on almost every assignment. From the responses developed a snapshot of the class encounter with the new medium, an encounter which centered around the question of where power lay in the relationship between author and reader.

Almost everyone had confessed, at some point in the semester, a feeling of helplessness in the face of a particular author's work. Students cast themselves as victims of Lowell's or DeLillo's 'games,' for example. Although Patchwork Girl's structure 'jumped' much more than DeLillo's in The Names, collaged more diverse fragments than Muriel Rukeyser's work, and possessed a veritable chorus of first-person narrators who ranged from 'human' voices to those of errant body parts, students started to cast themselves as participants in, not victims of, the 'game.'

This might have been due to a gradual learning process over the semester, but the writing indicates that the experience of this particular hyper text either actualized and made visible learning that had occurred but of which the students were not wholly conscious, or triggered that jump in perception itself.

Many initially shared D's rueful vision of the malevolent author of Patchwork Girl. "When I'm frustrated, I imagine Shelley Jackson sitting back laughing because I'm totally lost and nowhere near a conclusion. You have all the control over where to go, but she has control over how much you understand it." This 'rat in a trap' mentality had dominated the first week's discussion.

By the exam. three weeks later students, whatever their grade level, had started to pick apart the tri-partite relation between author, reader and text. They returned again and again to the question of power, a more sophisticated discussion of the feelings of "not understanding," of being powerless in the face of (class-defined) 'difficult' texts, such as DeLillo's The Names, or The Waste Land, that had run through class journals.