Is More Criticism Inevitable? Just Breathe

Richard E. Higgason
Blue River Community College, Blue Springs, Missouri, USA
Email: rich.higgason@kcmetro.edu Web site: http://www.kcmetro.edu/blueriver/humanities/english/higgason
Key features: References; Author Details

All the nodes in this issue:

Editorial
Bibliography of Hypertext Criticism

Mez Breeze

Julianne Chatelain Richard E. Higgason Deena Larsen Bill Marsh Adrian Miles Jenny Weight

Perhaps, if we are patient, critical works will eventually appear. After all, T. S. Eliot (1922) wrote that "Criticism is as inevitable as breathing". He further explains that "we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel emotion about it". (p. 28) With this view of criticism, readers share what "passes in [their] minds" as they read. That is, criticism captures the thoughts of readers.

One would have to wonder, however, if "criticism is as inevitable as breathing" why do we see so little hypertext criticism being written? Perhaps hypertext is just too new a field to have generated critical readings. Perhaps they will eventually come. Yet, since we are at the fifteenth anniversary of afternoon [1], we need also to wonder if there isn't something else going on (of course, we could say that it has only been 15 years). Is it possible that there is something in the nature of these texts that dissuades traditional types of criticism?

Notes:

[1] I use afternoon here not to single it out as an example of an overlooked work. In fact, afternoon is probably one of the few works of literary hypertext to have received quite a bit of critical attention. I use it here because it is often tauted as "the granddaddy of hypertext" and thus could be seen as the starting spot for what Coover (1999) calls "the Golden Age of Hypertext".

References

Coover, R. (1999) "Literary Hypertext: The Passing of the Golden Age". Digital Arts and Culture, Atlanta, Georgia, 29 October
http://nickm.com/vox/golden_age.html

Eliot, T. S. (1922) "Tradition and the Individual Talent". Bartleby.com, 1996
http://www.bartleby.com/200/sw4.html