Multimedia
“When a text quotes and request [... ] you lose sigh of any line of demarcation between a text and what is outside it.” (Derrida, Living On, p. 81-82)
The purpose of footnotes and endnotes is to set the text in its best possible context. Those devices usually function by referring to other texts from which an idea or a direct citation came from. But to a certain degree that’s a limited device due to the fact that it only provides the bibliografical reference, leaving the reader diverse obstacles to face in order to get it. One of the promises of hypertext is to get rid of those obstacles by making all those references immediately available. That was the dream behind Ted Nelson’s Xanadu. Hypertext has the capacity of easily referring the reader to a text or to the specific part of it. It operates against the logic of “the civilization of the book” in which the text is considered as standing alone. This aspect of hypertext makes evident the fact that “there is nothing outside the text.” No wonder that when Richard Dienst referred to that Derridian phrase he said: “This rather too famous comment should now serve as a warning: there was never just a text, or just and image. These things are made possible by, and make possible, other texts” (Dienst, p. 132). That textual interrelation also was addressed by Foucault in “The Archeology of Knowledge”: “frontiers of a book are never clear-cut, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network... [a] network of references” (p. 23).
Hypertextuality make evident the whole system of relations and interconnections that runs through any text. It can aid the configuration of new literary theories or approaches which focus no in the interconnection of texts and discourses.
Other important characteristics of Hypertext are:
Hypertext and Post-Structuralism
The Author, the Reader and the Book