Anna Karenina Needs Hyperlinks

While reading and trying to understand Landow’s  “Hypertext and Critical Theory and Mitchell’s, “Metapictures” I couldn’t stop thinking about the literary theory, reader-response criticism from my discussion leading this week and how both Landow and Mitchell discuss how readers interact with particular texts and how that response could alter the text or how the text could alter the reader. Reader-response criticism is “the response of a reader to a text, esp. as arising from the effect of cultural context and other factors on the reader's experience of the text”(OED). It primarily focuses on “how reading affects readers and how readers respond” as well as “reading as an active process” which creates a “diversity of readers’ responses to literary works” (Bedford Glossary 425-429).

More specifically, how Landow explored hypertext in relation to “explicit” vs “implicit”, which I understood to be the difference between scholarly articles, academic books or textbooks that offer citations and a means to look up something that was clearly referenced and literature, poetry, and some forms of art which merely “allude” to other texts, histories, etc., with a reader’s prior knowledge or understanding of that particular allusion (Landow 35).  I found this to directly affect reader response criticism in how the readers engage with a particular text. If a student can read a text and pinpoint exactly what it means because it has a source or citation, they may not seek the same type of meaning or necessarily need to find a “deeper” understanding of a text. However, in various forms of literature, poetry, and art, a reader may not be able to control how much they understand of that particular text. Without a certain prior knowledge of Russia, a student could read Anna Karenina but entirely misinterpret or not even acknowledge jabs at Russian politics or art. Scholars devote their entire lives to understanding certain writers, novels, and artists – does this mean that the average student should aim to understand a text to the best of their abilities or should they use the various hyperlinks on Wikipedia to learn the most they can about Anna Karenina while they read along? Does this mean that implicit hypertexts may need explicit hypertexts to assist in understanding?

This leads into Mitchell and his question of whether or not pictures provide their own metalanguage (38). To better understand this concept he used various types of pictures to express how a viewer may interpret the image and how that may or may not differ from the artist, the purpose, or the meaning of the image. In reader response criticism, readers are supposed to engage with a text through their own cultural, community, or personal lens. They view an image based on what they have experienced, what they understand about the world, how they feel at that particular moment. For the image “Egyptian Life Art Class,” the artist Gombrich claimed that the cartoon “hints that they [the Egyptians] perceived nature in a different way” but Mitchell points out that “the Egyptian art students are not shown as ‘different’ at all, but behave just as modern, Western art students do in a traditional life-class“(44). This speaks to the fact that the purpose of a text may contradict how a student interprets a text or image and whether or not that is the fault of the artist or the fault of the viewer; but also, does it matter?