The class as a whole repeated this pattern. Other students winning Cs. and low Bs. (and who often participated only reluctantly in public discussion of our texts) speculated, challenged and directed more. First, I think, they sensed that the radical newness of the literary hypertext had leveled the playing field of knowledge and experience for perhaps the first time in the entire semester. No experts existed in our classroom, especially as I had also explained that our class represented my first teaching of a literary hypertext.

Second, the fluidity of the text demanded multiple alternative readings, and watered down the bases for criticism of a particular interpretation. Readers found the positing of hypotheses less threatening, while at the same time had to provide more, and more specific, textual and interpretative evidence to challenge another's theory. While students reached fewer definitive conclusions, they did thus discuss the text more thoroughly and more adventurously, showing particular strength in their interpretation of the relationship between content and form, and the unpicking of that uneasy triad of author, text and reader.

Finally, when I had previously taught students the scripting of their own non-fiction hypertexts, the increase in constructive participation by less sophisticated readers and writers had been paralleled by a growing feeling of confusion and threat among students who had excelled in more traditional analytical and writing assignments.

Interestingly, that reversal, which I had expected, never occurred in the reading of literary hypertext. The more advanced students transferred intact their critical reading skills to the new style of text, thus suggesting that reading literary hypertext might provide an equalizing (without discriminating) doorway to college-level literary study.

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