452 Journal ofAdvanced Composition

Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and tlu! History of Writing, Jay David
Bolter (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1991,258 pages).

Reviewed by Douglas Hesse, Illinois State University

Let me say at the outset that Writing Space is a provocative and important
book that ought to be read widely by rhetorical theorists, historians, and
philosophers of literacy and language. Computers and hypertext are but
occasions for Bolter's ambitiously exploring what writing was, is, and will
become. However, he has seriously underrepresented some theoretical
issues. The book serves, then, as an accessible locus for those who would
challenge as well as those who would celebrate the promise of electronic
writing.
Bolter'S central claim is that following five centuries of domination the
book is moving into the "margins ofliterate culture." Print no longer defines
the "organization and presentation of knowledge" or even the nature of
knowledge itself. Electronic texts, shaped by readers as writers, will continue
to replace single-voiced and unified print texts. The computer, like all
technologies, defines a particular "physical and visual" field. Its writing
space transforms writing to something fluid, not fIXed.
While this gist may seem familiar to many readers, Bolter writes a
complex and provocative history and argument. He explains the changing
technologies of writing, from papyrus roll to codex to printed book to
electronic text, analyzing their implications, discussing exemplary texts and
ideas from ancient times through pre- and postmodern. Particularlyengag-
ing are his discussions of the shifting aspirations of dictionaries, encyclope-
dias, and libraries. He introduces the idea of hypertext in a fashion friendly
to novice readers but without putting off "experts." The teleology of this
historical sweep tends to be that of a hero narrative, with the computer as
Odysseus. For example, Bolter notes that "it is sometimes uncanny how well
the post-modern theorists seem to be anticipating electronic writing" and
that "the computer takes us beyond deconstruction" to "a land promised (or
threatened) by post-modern theory," that of pure signs. The hero narrative
creates some extreme assertions-for example, that electronic writing is
writing beyond criticism because "it incorporates criticism into itself."
Three claims offer the book's greatest promise and problem. First,
electronic writing replaces the hierarchy of order and entailment with a
multiplicity of orders, all equal, all simultaneously existing and not existing,
controlled by the reader but also by the writer who programs links between
"topics" or episodes. Hypertext fully realizes the "topographic" possibilities
of writing-that is, of topics as places. Organized into clearly demarcated
segments of discourse, Writing Space itself has something of a topographic
quality. More extremely, books like Finnegan 's Wake exhaust print topogra-
 Reviews 453

phy to a point that only computers can transcend, as Bolter illustrates with
Michael Joyce's hyperfiction, "Afternoon."
Second, Bolter explains how hypertext exposes and exploits the arbi-
trary, semiotic nature of all writing. C.S. Pierce looms explicitly. When
readers can follow multiple paths through the writing space, "no path ... need
be stigmatized as marginal." Authority is dispersed, and Bolter celebrates
the liberatory consequences. But I will worry, shortly, about the ethical.
Third, Bolter manipulates an elaborate tautology of writing as thinking
as mind. Electronic writing puts a further twist on Ong's analysis of orality
and literacy. At times Bolter comes reductively close in his discussion of
artificial intelligence to a narrow cognitivist metaphor in which the mind is
like a computer, "a network of atomic symbols and pointers." And at times
his equation of mind with writing, however amiable it may be to those in
composition studies, greases slippery entailments, especially since Bolter
insists on a broad definition of writing, one, for example, in which computer-
controlled robots write with mechanical arms and wheels. Still, this is a
compelling discussion, and, as in the rest of the book, Bolter is direct and
aphoristically assertive.
But, as in the rest of the book, the aphorisms sometimes collapse.
Consider the claim that "all electronic texts are self-sufficient, in the sense
that each element refers only to other elements in the network." Isn't exactly
the same true of all print texts, too, whether one reads "the network" as a text
among texts or as the whole semiotic system? By slighting reader-response
theories of the status of texts and by presenting reading as mere diachronic
succession, Bolter can neatly cast print as something imposed on and
received by the reader, while electronic texts are cast as participatorily
created. Doing so, however, overstates the difference between the media.
A modest but dramatic example of my own reading illustrates these
issues. I read the book in dutiful linear fashion, first page to last, writing
marginal notes. On page 97 I underlined the sentence "The encyclopedic
vision has always been that the great book should contain all symbolic
knowledge," and in the margin I wrote "Borges, Library of Babel." Then, an
hour and 40 pages later, I encountered this sentence: "Jorge Luis Borges'
most famous short piece is perhaps the 'Library of Babel' from his Ficciones."
Now, the linear form of the book did not constrain me from invoking Borges
"early." In my reading I "jumped ahead," as it were, in hypertextual fashion,
defying the prescription of the words on the page. Or, rather, my text of
Writing Space, constructed through print, included the "Library of Babel" on
page 97. My marginal note on 138 is "MacBride Hall, mid 1970s," recalling
a reading that Borges gave at The University of Iowa when I was an under-
graduate. (It was rather a speaking or recital, since his blindness precluded
reading in the conventional sense.) I cite my experience to point out that
reading is complexly synchronic as well as diachronic, layered as well as
successive; in postmodern rather than structuralist terms, reading is an
454 Journal ofAdvanced Composition

imbricative act-in print as well as in electronic texts. Bolter correctly

analyzes the different status of "marginalia" in electronic and print texts, and
the media obviously cue their status differently. But these cues are substan-
tially those of convention and not immanent in the media themselves.
The dominant metaphor for reading in Writing Space is that of choosing
paths, the reader having actively to decide where, literally, to go next-with
''where'' always defined as another place in the electronic text. This meta-
phor elides the aspects of reading as something done in the place one is or of
reading as movement to "places" beyond the text at hand, to ideas, experi-
ences, memories, Iowa City. If Writing Space portrays reading as path-
choosing, it presents writing as mainly the arrangement of topics and epi-
sodes. And yes, this is crucially so, at levels all the way from the alphabetic
to the encyclopedic. But composing has other dimensions. It is a radically
different activity for a hypertext's author to compose episodes than to write
links between them-or for a reader to select those links. While Bolter
frequently cites the reader's ability to add to a hypertext, he never develops
this idea thoroughly. The main act of reading/writing a hypertext remains
assembling/choosing paths, not planting beds in this complex garden.
At times the distinction between print and hypertext is most fragile. One
striking example: He notes that "the computer can even be programmed to
rearrange its structure overnight.... In collecting a library of printed books,
we can be sure that our texts will be the same in the morning as they were the
night before. For an electronic library, we have no such assurance." This is
an apples-and-oranges example, for it posits a computer programmed to
change and a library destined to be static-and then it finds the library
wanting. But what if I asked a friend to add to, subtract from, or rearrange
the volumes in my library each night? Or if an agent did not program the
computer?
The complexities of agency and hypertextual reading/writing are neatly
dramatized by Writing Space: A Hypertext, published separately from the book
and available on Macintosh diskette via an order-card. In some small sense,
the hypertext is a version of the book; at least it seems to contain in summary
fashion on various "cards" all the book's topics. But also among its 451
"places" are explanations, illustrations, and comments, several of them witty
and trenchant. It's fun to browse the stack. My own experience resembled
conventional reading much less than playing Super Mario Brothers; Bolter
himself invites the analogy by describing the text as an interactive game with
a "center" that we're challenged to find. I scanned cards rapidly for clickable
icons or bold-faced text, pursuing the "center," reading scarcely a word.
Having found it, I'm tempted to give you directions,like the "secrets" articles
in the Nintendo magazines my son wishes I would buy. (I'll say only that the
path I took led through Wittgenstein.) If I could call my action "reading" or
''writing'' at all, so might I call hitting buttons on the television remote
control.
 Reviews 455

Bolter keenly recognizes the danger that electronic writing might be-
come mere channel-switching, the reader a viewer of perceptual form rather
than a participant of symbolic interaction. He discusses the limitations of
virtual reality and the televisioning of culture. But even these cautions skirt
a larger ethical issue. I mean neither the ethics of access nor the spreading
technical industrial complex. To his credit, Bolter addresses both. Rather,
I ponder the prospects of social change in a hypertextual world where
hierarchical knowledge has ceded to "digital rhetoric," where one cannot
argue from principles since principles are but signs among other signs. Of
course, the concern transcends this book. Even as a confirmed anti-
foundationalist, Iwonderwhereanyofus might stand among the hype rtextual
play of signs to promote "justice."
I cannot optimistically embrace "an extremely powerful leveling force
... at work in our society." Even less am I consoled that

our whole society is taking on the provisional character of a hypertext: it is rewriting itself
for each individual member. We could say that hypertext has become the social ideal.
... The message is that a child (as an ontological individual) should be free to choosewhat
he or she wishes to do in life. That freedom of choice includes everything: profession,
family, religion, sexual preference, and above alJ the ability to change any of the options
(in effect to rewrite one's life story) at almost any time. Admittedly, for many Americans
this ultimate freedom is not available. But the idea remains, and it is the ideal of a
network culture. (233)

Desire cannot sweep away Bolter's "admittedly." I'm not convinced that
electronic writing will be a better agent for good than print, and I worry that
it may even, perversely, excuse the status quo, If this writing space cannot
defend ''what is" as "what should be" then neither can it contest ''what should
not be." But perhaps mine is an impoverished imagination, slavishly bound
to print literacy, a fly in the fly bottle unable to grasp a fully realized
hypertextual writing space. I do know that I've been able to represent only
a fraction of the ideas in this rich book. I expect that future debates of the
technologies of writing and mind will pass productively through Jay David
Bolter's topography.

Something Old, Something New: College Writing Teachersand Classroom Change,

Wendy Bishop (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1990, 166 pages).

Reviewed by Michael Strickland, University of Georgia

Patrick Hartwell, in his Foreword, explains that this book is "for the most
part, 'mere narrative.' But this narrative rings true, as we say of good fiction,
and Wendy's observations have the texture offelt life," When I first read this
introduction as someone involved in my own ethnographic study, and as a