THE WEB ESSAY: EXPLORING ARGUMENTS

GUEST SPEAKERS

One of the often touted characteristics of hypertext that prompts theorists to look for a new kind of writing to emerge is multivocality. In other words, the "author's" voice will be one voice among many, placed within a network of voices. Readers will encounter a multiplicity of voices in a hypertext and will add their own voices to that throng.

Theory precedes practice - at least in the hypertext essays I've read.

In Stuart Moulthrop's work "Shadow of an Informand: An Experiment in Hypertext Rhetoric," for example, I mostly hear Moulthrop explaining the ideas of others. He quotes sparingly and rarely links outside his document. He does however, invite readers to respond to his essay and promises to "include a link to your document at any point you specify in the present text" (*).

Nancy Kaplan pledges allegience to multivocality in her essay "E-literacies: Politexts, Hypertexts, and Other Cultural Formations in the late Age of Print" and includes fairly extensive passages from some of the authors she discusses. One of these invited guests, Myron Tuman, points out, however, that Kaplan contextualizes his voice in a way that mutes it:

a comment or two on how my work is excerpted and comented upon in the process. While Kaplan promises to present excerpts from [his book] Word Perfect that "allow Professor Tuman to speak for himself," she finds herself twice unable to refrain from interrupting these excerpts with editorial asides (asides that could easily be linked to the text, where at least they would not be so intrusive).

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