Hypertext and Reading Cognition
Alec McHoul and Phil Roe
School of Humanities, Murdoch University
Review
This article is very critical about the meanings derived from Roland Barthes' idea of 'readerly' and 'writerly' texts by writers such as Landow and McKnight. The article explains what Barthes meant by the two terms and what Barthes had concentrated on. Landow wants to make a complete separation between types of text such that the 'writerly' type is conflated with print (hence closure) and the 'readerly' type with hypertext (hence openness). However Barthes is more equivocal. He tropes on Nietzsche's idea of slave ethics in introducing the 'readerly' itself and marks the side of the slave who is dependent on the master. From the article, it has been pointed out that Landow seem to have misinterpreted Barthes' meaning and hence given self-contradictory views. The article also pointed out it is the author that set their intentions in place specifically to impart information to the readers. Even though Mcknight agrees that in many hypertext systems, the distinction between author and reader is blurred, he also tries to argue that hypertext documents are actually pre-planned by the author. The author has already decided which are the links to be included.
This article is useful for my essay as it has provided a lot of arguable points against hypertextual documents as a realization of the writerly text.
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