Mark C. Amodio, in Writing the Oral Tradition: Oral Poetics and Literate Culture in Medieval England(Notre Dame, IN: UND Press, 2004), writes (with footnote):
The reader in a literate society plays an important, active role in “writing” the “text” he or she reads* and thus plays a role in creating the “text” in just the way listening audiences in oral cultures are co-creators of the text they receive aurally, but the text produced within literate culture has an attendant physicality, and hence fixity, that oral texts lack. (8)
*A hypertext novel, and hypertext in general, can be seen as a logical extension of the subjective perspective in that readers must literally navigate their way through a “text” that has no fixed or absolutely determined path. In this way, hypertext authors are rather like modern versions of traditional poets in that they create texts with fluid narrative paths that are not easily (if at all) traceable. See further Foley, How to Read, 219-25. On hypertext’s relation to orality, see Joyce, “No One Tells You This.”
I’ll need to follow up on the references he makes, but reading this raised several reactionary thoughts. This is the first time Amodio, who doesn’t seem to be very much into electronic literature, mentions hypertext in the book (which is, by the way, a nice read so far). His treatment of e-lit as something with “no fixed or absolutely determined path” seems to imply an absence of any path at all, which of course isn’t true: hypertext authors often steer the reader in a particular direction by carefully choosing link placement. Plus, it’s certainly possible to have one or more series of single-path nodes within an otherwise link-rich text.
Another debatable implicit opinion in the above the quotation marks surrounding the word text either. What, is it not text? Kind of text? In a book dedicated to orality and literacy I’d expect a more careful consideration of the word. But perhaps he explains this further into the book.
Finally, the co-creation bit. I’ve compared for years reading interlinked bits of related stories in RolandHT with listening to an oral performance of a piece about Roland, composed by a poet on the spot using archetypes from received cultural memory. But Amodio extends the process of reception to a co-creation. Tempting, in that it (again implicitly) empowers the reader and elevates the interpretive process; but how is this co-creation distinct from forming any memory at all?
FMI, Amodio’s two footnote references are:
Foley, John Miles. How to Read an Oral Poem. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002.
Joyce, Michael. “No One Tells You This: Secondary Orality and Hypertextuality.” Oral Tradition 17 (2002): 325-45.
