Evolution

 

 

 


Zero

 

 

 

 

 

No Dead Author

 


RJ decided, for example, that Eliot's The Waste Land was "a kind of hypertext, in that voices change, move from place to place," while D. suggested that "The switching of voices and characters drastically in The Names almost represented a click on a word in Patchwork Girl. You had no idea who was talking in The Names and in Patchwork Girl you didn't know where the word was going to take you."

As D. had wearily hated The Names throughout our entire discussion of the book, this insight represented a major concession (until that point stubbornly withheld) that DeLillo's book might offer the possibility of any meaning to the reader.

Other readers revaluated the reading process in its entirety. C wrote, "Therefore, the author, either of linear text or hypertext, really never has full authority in these situations. In both forms of writing the text is already created, but it is up to the reader to choose that text and read it." R argued that, "It is possible to write a hypertext where the power belongs wholly to the author, just as it is possible to write a text where the power to create lies mostly with the reader.

While discussing the content of the book, two readers mentioned how Jackson's rewriting of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein gifted voice to the voiceless and shifted the power of narration from the creator to the created. In many ways they might have been describing their own experiences as they gained critical voice in relation to literary texts, as authority shifted from the author (creator) to the reader (created).

Choose