In Spring 1994 Johns Hopkins University Press, which published the original version of this book, issued an extended electronic version. The chief reason for creating Hypertext in Hypertext was to test the ideas I had advanced about the ways this new electronic information technology affects our notions of textuality, reading, writing, and authorship. Since Hypertext claims that writing in this medium demands new ways of writing and inevitably produces an am plified, extended text, adapting the book to hypertext requires not only that one add hypertextual features, such as linking sections of the book and reconfiguring the endnotes, but also that one include materials, such as reviews, student comments, or longer sections of primary materials than one could include in a print version. Hypertext in Hypertext therefore contains not only the original text but also more than fifty student interventions, all the reviews the book received by the time we went into production, portions of works by Jacques Derrida and Gregory Ulmer, parodies of literary theory, and a selection of the entries in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Since my publisher wanted to produce an electronic version that would work in both Macintosh and Windows operating environments, we did not use Storyspace, "the poor man's Intermedia," since Eastgate had not yet released its Windows version. We therefore employed a very different system -- Electronic Book Technologies, Inc.'s DynaText. Paul Kahn, then director of IRIS and now president of Dynamic Diagrams, and I created Hypertext in Hypertext to be read as both an electronic book and also as a true hypertext. DynaText, a powerful, elegant electronic document system, uses the structure of a printed text (chapters, sections, and headings) to generate an electronic book with a dynamic table of contents that has an essentially linear structure. Using my overviews, Kahn, however, also created a DynaText version with a true network structure. Thus, one can read Hypertext in Hypertext from the DynaText table of contents and experience it as a powerful electronic book, or one can read it from the "Critical Theory" or "Hypertext" overviews and experience it as networked assemblage of lexias.


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Contents Hypertext Overview Critical Theory Overview