For most people, reading is a sub-conscious process. We usually ascribe difficulty to vocabulary, syntax, and unfamiliarity with subject matter, and only rarely to the process of reading itself. We think about what we are reading rather than how reading happens.

And habitual readers often mourn the lack of sensory stimuli (the smell of ink on paper, the malleability of the paper page, the heft and texture of the book as object, its portability) in contemplating a future of hypertext. Those sensory stimuli, however, exist around the process of reading rather than within the process of reading. They envelop us a comforting (or alienating for the inexperienced or reluctant reader) reminder of a naturalized status quo.

The reading of hypertext breaks text down into a collection of tangible objects, existing in real time, and manipulated by both body and mind. The space for the sub-conscious, almost instantaneous cognitive leaps, imaginative projections, and retrospective analyses that create meaning from words exists visibly in the pause between the erasure of one text block by the next, in the air between the eye and the screen.

In replacing the unitary book object with a complex collection of fragmented text objects, hypertext physically locates the reader within the process of reading. Readers literally see in hypertext the psychological gaps that exist in all texts. Readers build meaning via experiment with direct action and its physical, temporal and intellectual consequences. (Turkle, 29-49) In retrospect, Patchwork Girl should have inaugurated, not concluded, our semester.

Hypertext's radical newness allowed students to leave behind their high school (or college) histories as 'good at literature' or 'bad with books and poetry.' Its openness as text, both physical and intellectual, invited (and if the invitation were declined, compelled) readerly intervention, creation and theory-making.

Instead of learning 'rules for reading' and applying them to different styles of text, students learned to see and experience the multiple associative constructs of meaning and search willingly for a vocabulary to analyze and describe them. In working with hypertext, the neophyte academic reader seemed to read critically and build theory from sensory (and perhaps sensual) practice. Text creates the reader before the reader creates the text.

In the future, hypertext will replace text as the first reading of the semester in any beginning literature classes I may teach. Michael Joyce calls hypertext, "a structure for something that does not yet exist." To that I would add "a structure for someone who does not yet exist," the thoughtful, accomplished critical college reader. My thanks to the articulate, stimulating, sometimes angry, sometimes excited, always trusting students of English 201 whose intrepid explorations taught me the richness of hypertext.