Upon entering
class Tuesday with my schema in hand, I was confident in my understanding and
affirmations about hypertext, as according to Landow, Deleuze, and Guattari.
However, when presented with the question regarding “self-reflexive” work, how
it comes to be and how it might challenge theory, I was stumped. In fact, I was
not sure I knew what the term meant even in a literal sense. After brushing up
on Tuesday’s reading and attempting to synthesize Mitchell’s “Metapictures”, I
return to the question of self-reflexive work in relation to language and
literature.
Because,
according to Landow, a hypertext in its very nature provides a way for readers
and writers to decenter and re-center the focus of a text, it seems that is
perhaps its inherent self- reflexive goal. A hypertext “provides a rich meaning
to test” (Landow, 36) formal structuralist and poststructuralist theories. This
is so because of the way reading a hypertext employs readers to consciously or
subconsciously create connections to other texts while reading a single text.
But how is this self-reflexive? Hypertext
is reflective of the challenge that authors pose on typical rhetorical theory. Landow
goes on to say that another one of the goals of hypertext is to “free the
literary text from psychological, sociological, and historical determinisms,
opening it up to an apparently infinite play of relationships” (Landow, 35).
Traditional theorists might condemn this type of “open reading” because it
appears to neglect an author’s desired context or intention, and create the
liberty for readers to make their own personal connections.
This idea of the
interactive reader also poses questions about agency. Because hypertext invites
readers to connect and link and network what they are reading, their role
becomes particularly participatory. In verbatim, “as readers move through a web
or network of texts, they continually shift the center – and hence the focus or
organizing principle – of their investigation and experience” (Landow, 36). The
experience becomes their own, it becomes self-reflexive of their own
organization in reading, and this is a scary idea for theorists. Hypertext
gives readers authority and any sense of hierarchy vanishes.
The “system
[that] functions as an old-fashioned, traditional, and in many ways still
useful author-centered approach” (38) is challenged. A reader of hypertext
acquires the agency to formulate their own interpretations based on connections
they make to other texts. This very process of reading is self-reflexive!
In addition, in
“Metapictures” Mitchell presents an example of a drawing that he asserts is
self-reflexive.
While I am not positive that the picture can be considered a
hypertext, it can be approached as one. Mitchell acknowledges varying perspectives
from which we can view this drawing but ultimately believes we cannot detach
ourselves from “our world” (Mitchell, 41), the one that is represented in the
drawing. So, in this case, his idea of “textuality as an approach to reading
images” does not allow for separation of context and text in reading because
the image is undeniably self-reflexive, “a picture about itself” (Mitchell,
42). Textuality of an image, or the communicative property of it, is important
in analyzing the image because merely considering an image as a text fails to
cover all angles.
-Samantha Stamps
I want to talk about your use of the picture towards the bottom of your post, because that is what is fresh on my mind. At first, I thought to myself, why is she posting this? I didn’t understand how it had to deal with Mitchell’s “Metapictures”, but then again, I don’t think I have come to a full understanding about “Metapictures” myself. But are you saying that the image is self-reflective because it gives the reader the agency to interpret it how he/she pleases? Or are you saying that Mitchell thinks the image is self-reflective because it can be a hypertext? Regardless, I have my own thoughts about the image. I sat there and stared at it for a good few minutes, trying to figure out if the little stick figure man started in the middle and drew outward, or did he draw as he went, running up the hill with the houses, circling and circling, eventually trapping himself in a swirl of fine lines. Ok who am I kidding, the little stick figure man didn’t draw himself, an artist did! I feel really silly admitting that I actually pictured a little stick figure man running up the hill and swirling himself into a revolving cyclical pattern, but maybe that’s what the artist wanted me to think…maybe.
ReplyDeleteI think the fact that I conjured all of this up in my head really exemplifies how much agency I feel like I have over the image. You said, “The ‘system [that] functions as an old-fashioned, traditional, and in many ways still useful author-centered approach’ (38) is challenged. A reader of hypertext acquires the agency to formulate their own interpretations based on connections they make to other texts”, which I think is very intuitive and truthful of you to say. Hypertexts “permit one to make explicit…the linked materials that an educated reader perceives surrounding it” (35). Like you said in your blog post, and what I touched on in mine, hypertext is something that is interactive, laced with intricate pathways leading to different threads of text and visuals. I approached the same image and didn’t have the same experience twice. When I looked at it one way, I saw it doing something; when I looked at it another way, I saw it doing something else. By focusing on the reader’s experience rather than having the attention on the intent and control of the author, the text [or image] becomes self-reflective in this case, which is definitely something to make note of.
You bolded this statement: “Hypertext is reflective of the challenge that authors pose on typical rhetorical theory”. While I don’t quite understand it fully, to my understanding it means that hypertext has the ability to be reflective, or carefully thought out, because it’s a fundamentally intertextual system of pathways, much like the prison website we looked at in class. Hypertext is reflective if you allow it to be.
-Morgan Crawford