Digital Commons Network^™

Descent Into Chaos: Ways Of Reading St. Thecla, Betsy Phillips '96

Honors Projects

I find reading a hypertext akin to finding shapes in a cloud. One minute, the cloud clearly looks like two people in a row boat, then the wind blows and the cloud becomes a dinosaur. In a hypertext, just when an incipient shape presents itself in the text, then one clicks the mouse, and that meaning can completely change. In fact, unlike a cloudy sky, in which the context of the clouds, the sky, remains the same, the whole context of the text can change. Trying to analyze a particular hypertext, then, could be likened to trying to convince a …