The list of the features of hypertext that supports the postmodernist approach is an impressive one. It is headed by Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva’s notion of intertextuality, the practice of integrating a variety of foreign discourses within a text through such mechanisms as quotation, commentary, parody, allusion, imitation, ironic transformation, rewrites, and decontextualizing recontextualizing operations. Whether intertextuality is regarded as a specific aesthetic program or as the basic condition of literary signification, it is hard to deny that the electronic linking that constitutes the basic mechanism of hypertext is an ideal device for the implementation of intertextual relations. Any two texts can be linked, and by clicking on a link the reader is instantly transported into an intertext. By facilitating the creation of polyvocal structures that integrate different perspectives without forcing the reader to choose between them, hypertext is uniquely suited to express the aesthetic and political ideals of an intellectual community that has elevated the preservation of diversity into one of its fundamental values. (p: 7)
The device also favors a typically postmodern approach to writing closely related to what has been described by Lévi-Strauss as bricolage. In this mode of composition, as Turkle describes it (Life on the Screen, 50–73), the writer does not adopt a “top-down” method, starting with a given idea and breaking it down into constituents, but proceeds “bottom-up” by fitting together reasonably autonomous fragments, the verbal equivalent of objets trouvés, into an artifact whose shape and meaning(s) emerge through the linking process. The result is a patchwork, a collage of disparate elements, what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have called a “machinic assemblage” (A Thousand Plateaus, 332–35). As Silvio Gaggi has shown, this broken-up structure, as well as the dynamic reconfiguration of the text with every new reading, proposes a metaphor for the postmodern conception of the subject as a site of multiple, conflicting, and unstable identities. (p: 7)
The device also favors a typically postmodern approach to writing closely related to what has been described by Lévi-Strauss as bricolage. In this mode of composition, as Turkle describes it (Life on the Screen, 50–73), the writer does not adopt a “top-down” method, starting with a given idea and breaking it down into constituents, but proceeds “bottom-up” by fitting together reasonably autonomous fragments, the verbal equivalent of objets trouvés, into an artifact whose shape and meaning(s) emerge through the linking process. The result is a patchwork, a collage of disparate elements, what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have called a “machinic assemblage” (A Thousand Plateaus, 332–35). As Silvio Gaggi has shown, this broken-up structure, as well as the dynamic reconfiguration of the text with every new reading, proposes a metaphor for the postmodern conception of the subject as a site of multiple, conflicting, and unstable identities. (p: 7)
