Rosenblatt on hypertext

I continue to be impressed by how earlier writers, in this case Louise Rosenblatt, help us to think about technologies that were not available at the time of their writing. In chapters 3 and 4 of Literature as Exploration (1995), Rosenblatt contributes to understanding hypertext.
I have already reviewed Rosenblatt's position that meaning results from an interplay between the text and the reader. In Chapter 3, “What the student brings to literature,” Rosenblatt establishes the reader’s own spontaneous response as the starting point for that interplay. This initial, spontaneous response must be based on that reader’s prior experience and knowledge. However, once readers understand reading as active not passive, they will also recognize that enlarging our existing reservoir of knowledge and experience enlarges our capacity to respond to a text (p. 101).

In chapter 4, “Broadening the framework”, Rosenblatt explains that this initial, spontaneous reader response will then create interest in associated topics like the author’s biography, literary techniques and forms, and historical background. Rosenblatt’s complaint is that schools too often begin with these background materials which are then dis-associated from the text rather than inspired by it (p. 117). Topics that might be associated with a text should not be chosen arbitrarily by someone other than the reader (e.g., a teacher). Instead, the text should generate interest in associated topics that are applicable to the reader’s own transaction with the text. Rosenblatt states,

The desire to understand a particular work will produce ever-widening circles of interest. Yet the focus of these concerns should continue to be the student’s own sense of the work and his desire to clarify and refine his perception of it” (p. 111).

This is not to suggest that others, including teachers, have no role to play in contributing to the student’s transaction with text. Rather it is to establish that others should act as facilitators who not only have their own (perhaps larger) store of experience and knowledge but who also understand the reader and the unfolding event sufficiently to offer up appropriate connections.

What then does all this have to do with understanding hypertext? A common question with hypertext is whether hyperlinks are enriching or distracting. In other words, does a hyperlink take the reader somehow deeper into the original text or does it simply take the reader away from the original? Indeed, does a hyperlink start a reader on a path that never returns to the original starting point? And, is the result a willy-nilly collection of unrelated bits and pieces rather than rays of information converging in some meaningful way in the reader’s understanding?

Of course, these questions are not limited to hypertext. A reader of any text can be inspired to leave the text and pursue a question or thought that may be related. What hypertext does, however, is to make so many paths so readily available. Unlike a traditional book, potential connections are not limited to what occurs to the reader, but are suggested by the writer (and perhaps by other commenting readers). These suggestions may come from any number of perspectives on the text. This hyper-suggestiveness increases the importance of what Rosenblatt has suggested: a focus on “the student’s own sense of the work and his desire to clarify and refine his perception of it.”

I think it is fair to ask, “Who is teaching hypertext?” Who is teaching when to jump and why? Certainly, students (and many teachers) know how to access a hyperlink and even how to create one, but manipulating is not using. We recognize the flood of information that hypertext and the Internet open up to us and to our students. The challenge seems to be how we utilize available technology and/or organize our own thinking to control that flood and create streams that flow not away from but toward our ways of thinking and feeling.