Aside B

The traditional novel, which Hegel called "the epic of the middle-class world" &endash; is perceived by its would-be executioners as the virulent carrier of the patriarchal, colonial, canonical, proprietary, hierarchical and authoritarian values of a past that is no longer with us. Much of the novel's power is embedded in the line, that compulsory author directed movement from the beginning of a sentence to its period, from the top of the page to the bottom, from the first page to the last. Of course, through print's long history there have been countless strategies to counter the line's power É true freedom from the tyranny of the line is perceived as only really possible now at last with the advent of hypertext É where the line in fact does not exist unless one invents and implants it in the text."17

Against this backdrop, computer hypertext can liberate by destroying the individual work, the single author, by empowering the reader to reorganize and tell his own story, and by allowing for collaboration on a project.