Several imaginative writers in the class had used metaphors and similes all semester to energize their analyses of our texts. In the final exams., however, it seemed as if the tantalizing enigma of the almost familiar (Patchwork Girl was a book of sorts, it had a story, it was difficult, like most of the material teachers assigned in literature classes) had launched a wave of image-making.

Examples ranged from the succinct "the maze of evolution" to the domestic. One student (JT) imagined the boundaries on freedom imposed by the hypertext author as if he were a goldfish in a bowl, able to see in 360 degrees but running up against, and thus becoming conscious of, 'invisible' limits. C. stretched back to childhood. "I like to compare it to an author giving you a coloring book; you read along but color it the way you want to. You use your own colors. It's still the author's story, but it has your own effect to it."

Another developed a sustained map image:-

Through her use of maps, texts and diagrams Shelley Jackson creates for her readers a blueprint to outline his or her journey…However, she has not given her readers any set way or direction in which to move, like a foreign road map twisting and turning the reader through a web of discovery. (L)

The dynamic quality of the image-making immediately struck me. These kinetic images plunge the reader into a process, a set of circumstances where the reader claims and uses agency (albeit to some degree circumscribed). L's map image suggests, too, that the limits (the lines of the blueprint) might themselves lead to 'discovery.' The contrast to D's description of his reading of DeLillo's The Names as 'dragging my tongue through a long and confusing chapter where I didn't understand anything' (a description with which, alas, at least half his colleagues would agree) is striking.

Both subject to the author's power and spurred into creativity by the freedom it paradoxically allowed, the students had worked out, by the end of the semester, that reading a text involved an author, a reader and a writer.