Landow's section on Hypertext and De- Centering in Chapter 1 of Hypertext (online version) utilizes Derridean theory to explain the new responsibilities of the reader in a hypertextual arena:
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. Hypertext, in other words, provides an infinitely re-centerable system whose provisional point of focus depends upon the reader, who becomes a truly active reader in yet another sense. One of the fundamental characteristics of hypertext is that it is composed of bodies of linked texts that have no... center. Although this absence of a center can create problems for the reader and the writer, it also means that anyone who uses hypertext makes his or her own interests the de facto organizing principle (or center) for the investigation at the moment. -- (Landow 11-12)The transference of the function of the center from the hypertext to the reader's own experience of reading is phenomenological - the consideration of the text, the actions and the reactions involved in the development of both the reader's response to the text and the reader's own consciousness. The shifting of power to the reader, though not absolute, marks an essential difference in an act that is traditionally governed by the author. While the mere shifting of center to the reader falls neatly under the concepts of Reader-Response the existence alone of a center may seem counter to Post Modern Literary Theory. As Calvino's Madame Marne states, "...I can't imagine a life all made up of minimal alternatives, carefully circumscribed, on which bets can be made: either this or that" -- (Calvino, 19). The minimal alternatives of either/or are expanded to include the possibilities of and/and/and. Rather than trying to decide between Reader Response and Post Modern Theory, hypertext allows for a convergence between the two. Jay David Bolter states in his Literature in the Electronic Writing Space:
Hypertext is a vindication of postmodern literary theory. For the past two decades, postmodern theorists from reader-response critics to deconstructionists have been talking about text in terms that are strikingly appropriate to hypertext in the computer. When Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish argue that the reader constitutes the text in the act of reading, they are describing hypertext. When the deconstructionists emphasize that a text is unlimited, that it expands to include its own interpretations--they are describing a hypertext, which grows with the addition of new links and elements. When Roland Barthes draws his famous distinction between the work and the text, he is giving a perfect characterization of the differences between writing in a printed book and writing by the computer. -- (Bolter, 24)