PMC Logo

    Part I: Background: Linear Prosody[1]

    Dimensions of Inequality Among Syllables

  1. Prosody in the English language proceeds from the axiom that not all syllables are created equal; many effects in prosody derive from the time-plot of these inequalities along various dimensions. The most well known of these is the familiar stress-degree, but I will quickly review others.

    Pitch-Degrees

  2. The usual approach to pitch in prosody is to consider it a "curve": the intonation curve. However, there is a manner of recitation at work in many American communities, most notably in a style of reading in the black community, in which tight-knit patterns of time of various pitches are articulated, in much the same way that stress occurs in more traditional prosodies. This is a very rich prosody that deserves to be studied in its own right. A predominantly pitch-degree prosody will have very different characteristics than a predominantly stress-degree prosody. Pitch is a purely acoustical property, as opposed to stress, which is a linguistic property that is quite difficult to define acoustically. Thus a pitch-degree prosody is much closer to music (in the literal sense of the term); a pitch-degree prosody is freer to use an absolute musical sense of time, whereas a stress-degree prosody is more likely to be based on "linguistic time," which works differently (see footnote 8 below). Not all phonemes carry pitch; a pitch-degree prosody may thus change the sound structure balance for how phonemes relate to one another. Where both pitch degree and stress-degree prosodies occur simultaneously, incredibly subtle effects are possible.

    Vowel Position Degrees

  3. In explaining the meaning of the term "Tone Leading Vowels" as it pertained to the prosody of Ezra Pound, Robert Duncan explained the term as meaning two things: (1) Where a diphthong (a glide between one "pure vowel" and another) occurs, the leading pure vowel of the glide plays a special role. (2) A sound is reinforced when you hear it again, but can also be reinforced when you don't hear it again. A similar concept to this second point is the idea that vowels form clusters according to the position of the mouth when they are articulated; the tight-knit pattern in time that delineates which of these clusters is active can form a prosody, much like the stress-degree or pitch-degree prosody.

    Stress-Degrees: Classical Prosody

  4. The most familiar basis for metrics in English is the tight-knit pattern in time formed by stress-degrees. Stress has been extensively studied in linguistics (see for example Chomsky and Halle). Before introducing an alternate methodology for how metrical studies of contemporary poetry might be conducted, I will review briefly the traditional account of how the stress-degree metric is supposed to operate. This account has become a significant obstacle in pursuing prosody of contemporary poetry, so it would be well to understand it before considering a different approach. Classical prosody starts with an a priori inventory of templates of stress-degree patterns (e.g. iamb, trochee, anapest, etc.). "Scanning" is the process of matching these templates to the poem; where repeated instances of a single template match, end-to-end, the line or poem is said to "scan." It is important to note that the word "foot" is profoundly ambiguous in this process, having at least the following two meanings: (1) We speak of a foot as meaning one of the templates. In this usage, "foot" is an abstract concept which exists in advance of any particular poem. (2) We may refer to the actual syllables in a poem matched by a template as being a foot. In this usage, "foot" is a part of a living, breathing poem--and as such is a unit of rhythm intermediate between the syllable and the metric line. Much of the poetics that has been influential since the fifties and sixties has focused away from the a priori (Olson, Ginsberg) and many contemporary poets are uncomfortable with the idea of a template-based metrics. Most poets and many theorists have turned away from the study of metrics, rather than explore the second usage of "foot" in which the unit of metrics is not thought to exist prior to the poem, but is rather part of the poem itself, intermediate between the syllable and the metric line.

  5. Thus I turn now to consider this concept of an intermediate unit of meter, one that de-emphasizes the a priori and does not use any concept of template. To avoid confusion, I will abandon the use of the word "foot" and instead use the term "measure."

    Bonding Strength

  6. Another dimension of inequality among syllables (really of syllable boundaries) is "bonding strength": the degree of attraction of a syllable to the one ahead of it or behind it. Bonding strength may be defined as the extent to which an artificially injected pause at a particular syllable boundary seems natural or not when compared to the way the poet would typically recite the line. Syllable boundaries will differ in their degree of bonding strength; by collecting together into a single unit those syllables where the bonding strength is high, one obtains a "measure." It cannot be emphasized strongly enough that the assessment of where the measure boundaries are located must take place with respect to a particular recitation--presumably the poet's. A printed text of the poem on the page may not give sufficient information without a sound recording. In this methodology, scanning consists of identifying where the measure boundaries are, where the rhythmic line boundaries are (a rhythmic line is a cluster of measures connected by somewhat higher bonding strength, just as a measure is a cluster of syllables connected by the highest degree of bonding strength), and then attempting to discern whether there may (or may not) be any regularity to how measures are constructed. Thus rather than speaking of a poem as being "written in" a meter, meaning a conscious a priori choice of template, one examines the poem empirically to determine whether there simply happens to be some regularity to the way the measures are constructed.

    The "Standard Measure"

  7. This methodology need not be restricted to poetry: any recitation can be scanned. The statement is often made that English is iambic. Using the method sketched above to determine measure boundaries, we can reformulate the tendency of English toward the iambic, without exempting the many counterexamples. Measure boundaries in English prose tend to be constructed as follows: (1) a measure has only one major stress; (2) the measure tends to end on a major stress, but: (3) if there are unstressed syllables following the major stress out to the end of a major grammatical unit, those unstressed syllables will also be incorporated into the measure. Measures constructed in this way may be called "standard measures." Of course not all measure boundaries in poetry will be standard measure boundaries: Robert Creeley, for instance, is well known for having many non-standard measure boundaries in his poems. Interestingly, when Creeley's poems are actually scanned, the results show that while there may be non-standard measure boundaries at the end of the rhythmic line, many lines contain two measures, and in these lines the internal measure boundary is a standard one: the celebrated Creeley line-break really is a line-break and not a measure break. The non-standard measure boundaries are very easy to hear, but the internal standard measure boundaries are much more subtle. Of course if they were missing, we would certainly hear the result as a flat, lifelessly too regular, much less interesting rhythm. The structure of Creeley's lines may be described as an "offset structure": the sound structure of the line endings is clearly articulated, but the grammatical structure proceeds from the middle of one line to the middle of the next. The offset structure is an extremely venerable structure in prosody, going back at least to Anglo-Saxon times.

    Part II: Non-linear Prosody

    Bonding Strength is Spatial

  8. I have described bonding strength as the attraction of a syllable to the syllable ahead of it or behind it. Although prosody is normally interpreted as how the sound structure works in time, clearly the concept "adjacent" is a spatial concept; thus bonding strength may also be interpreted as a spatial concept, and as such can work in any topology, including a non-linear one. Where above I defined bonding strength as the tendency of a syllable boundary to resist injection of an artificial pause (a time concept), we could as easily have described it as the tendency of a syllable boundary to resist injection of space. It should be noted that in one dimension, space and time are nearly the same thing; however, in the more complex topologies of non-linear writing, as we shall see, space and time operate very differently.

    A Review of Hypertext Structure Terminology

  9. I have introduced a framework for structuring hypertext activity elsewhere and will review it only briefly here. By hypertext I mean a text that contains embedded interactive operations when considered from the reader's point of view: the text contains interactive devices that trigger activities. The most familiar of these is the hypertext link, but many other types are possible.[2] For instance, my work often contains devices called "simultaneities," in which groups of words are layered on top of one another; by moving the mouse among no-click hot spots, the different layers are revealed. Research hypertext software has been built based on both set models and relation models, and spatial hypertexts have been constructed using such concepts as piles and lists. In all of these cases, the hypertext is operated by performing activities; these activities consist of such actions as following a link, opening up a pile or simultaneity, etc. I have called these small-scale activities "acteme" (Rosenberg, "Structure"). In the node-link model of hypertext, the acteme of following a link may be described as "disjunctive," from the logical term disjunction, meaning "or." A disjunctive acteme presents a reader in a given position in the hypertext with a choice: she may follow link A or link B or link C. Other forms of acteme may be described as "conjunctive." A conjunctive acteme such as a simultaneity with layers A, B, and C consists of A and B and C.[3] A given hypertext can use both kinds of actemes together and a hypertext poem could even blur the distinction between them.

  10. In most cases, the text in a hypertext appears in units called "lexia," a term of analysis George Landow borrows from Roland Barthes to apply to hypertext. In a typical node-link hypertext, the lexia is the unit of text at either end of a link; often (though not inevitably) the lexia has an internal structure which is simply linear. As we will see, particularly in the context of poetry, the concept of lexia is extremely problematic.

  11. As the reader navigates a hypertext, activities will (hopefully) cohere together into units called "episodes." For a node-link hypertext, the episode will tend to be all or part of a path. It must be noted that not all activities will necessarily resolve into an episode. Some activities might be performed by accident, as when a reader pulls down a menu of link names and chooses the wrong one unintentionally. A reader may backtrack, having decided that performing an activity got nowhere. (Backtracking is complex; it may or may not revoke membership of an acteme in the episode.) Thus, episode is not the same thing as history. At a certain point the reader may not have constructed an episode at all, and might indeed be best described as foraging for an episode. The episode is an emergent concept; it emerges retroactively. Ideally, the structure of episodes emerges through the use of a "gathering interface." Unfortunately, available gathering interfaces are still quite primitive: they construct something more akin to the bookmarks of a web browser than a full picture of hypertext activity.

    Prosody Within the Lexia

  12. In many cases--perhaps most cases--the lexia is structured linearly. Under these conditions, within-lexia prosody includes traditional linear prosody. Not much need be said here; indeed one would be hard put to make the case that there is any difference between within-lexia prosody for a linearly structured lexia and the prosody of the printed page. However, there is no reason at all to suppose the lexia must be linear (on the linearity of lexia see Moulthrop; Rosenberg, "Navigating"). In this section I move to consider within-lexia prosody for a non-linearly structured lexia.

  13. Consider Figure 1, which shows a single screen from a simultaneity taken from one of my works (Rosenberg, Diffractions). This screen can be read in at least two different ways: (1) It can be read polylinearly so that the words with the same font are read as a linear skein, beginning with the word that is capitalized. (2) Alternatively, the graphically clustered fragments of these phrases can be read in snatches as the eye wanders about the surface of the screen picking up groups of words and associating them in whatever way seems to work. Even a simple polylinear reading poses difficult questions for the concept of lexia: is the lexia the entire screen, or one of the skeins? A computer-oriented view of the lexia would tend to regard the lexia as whatever is visible on the screen when there is no input to the computer, when the mouse is not moved, and no key is pressed. In this case the entire screen should count as one lexia. But what happens, in terms of prosody, as the eye moves from one phrase to another? Is this time which "doesn't count"--a kind of time out, in which there is no prosody?[4] If indeed the time between phrases doesn't count, we may describe the time units within the skeins as disengaged from one another. Or perhaps the prosody of the individual skein, together with the layout of the screen, helps determine when the next phrase begins, in which case the time between skeins definitely is part of the prosody.[5] A lexia with this type of polylinear structure is inherently ambiguous concerning the prosody of what happens between phrases. Still another possibility is simply to say the time relationship between phrases is in the reader's hands completely. Of course something will happen when the poet recites such a lexia: a choice will in fact be made. In this case, the poet may experience a contradiction between her desire to present the work in a context where oral experience is expected and her desire to leave open as many options as possible for the reader.

    14. Figure 1
    Figure 1.

  14. These issues become even more difficult if we use method 2 to read this screen. What is the prosodic relationship between these clusters of words, read by a kind of "visual wandering"? In this case linearity is so seriously fragmented that the reader may have an impression of the words disengaging from time altogether, such that prosody relationships become entirely spatial.

    Prosody Through the Episode

  15. There is no reason to assume that prosody should be confined within the lexia. In this section I explore issues of prosody within the episode as a whole that go beyond the boundaries of the lexia. "Text" occurs in many places in a hypertext besides the obvious text in the lexia. There is also text in the devices of the hypertext mechanism itself. For instance, many hypertext systems allow the user to bring up a menu of possible outgoing links. Such a menu is inarguably textual. But what role does such a menu play in prosody?[6] One approach is to consider the menu of link names as a text object in its own right. Hypertext poet Deena Larsen constructs poems from assembled link names. This approach, while interesting, simply reconstitutes the menu of link names as a different form of lexia, though one that has a complex structural relationship to the lexia from which it was popped up. Another approach is to consider a link name as a "prosody channel" connecting the text at either end of the link. It is typical in hypertext to assume that the reader will choose a link based on semantic or logical criteria, but in poetry there is no reason to assume prosody is any less valid as a means of choosing a link. To use the terminology we've been using throughout: bonding strength can operate through the link; bonding strength may even be the basis for choosing a link in the first place. It makes sense to speak of a "two-dimensional" prosody in assessing the relationship of prosody within the lexia to prosody through the link. Indeed, if the lexia is spatial, one may speak of a three-dimensional prosody. One point worth noting here is that the concept of bonding strength--the attraction of two text elements across a real or imagined boundary--sounds quite symmetrical, whereas most hypertext links are one-directional.[7] But the directionality of the hypertext link is not really different from the directionality of time in conventional prosody. It may be true that considering bonding strength through the link reverses the direction of attention compared to the direction of the link, but we do the same for the direction of time in assessing linear prosody.

  16. At its most conservative, a hypertext treats the lexia as a full-fledged document in its own right; the interactive devices, such as links, may be seen merely as devices for visiting traditional documents. A more radical approach treats the episode as a virtual document. In this approach the text's center of gravity, as it were, is no longer within the lexia, but in what emerges through the use of interactive devices. At its most extreme, meaning--and syntax--are more properly a function of the episode than the lexia (Rosenberg, "Structure"). What are the implications for prosody if the episode is treated as a virtual document? This is related to a second question: What is the structure of the episode? One answer to this second question is that the episode is structured linearly by time. If we accept this idea, then prosody within the episode seems little different from prosody within the lexia, except that the reader has chosen the interactions. In the disjunctive case the reader has chosen which route to follow in operating a given acteme, and in the conjunctive case the reader has chosen the order of visiting various elements. In both cases, the reader controls how much time she spends in any given place in the hypertext. The sense that many alternatives are possible at a given hinge point in the prosody may create the sense of that spot as a slot into which different continuations can be plugged; this very multiplicity may create a sense that some combination of some or all of the continuations is what in fact actually connects to the hinge point, which would subvert the concept of disjunctive hypertext.

  17. But is the episode necessarily linear? I have argued elsewhere that the structure of the episode is what we make of it given the gathering interface that is available (Rosenberg, "Structure"). Alas, in most commercially available hypertext software, there is either no gathering interface at all, or it is at best extremely primitive. A gathering interface is in effect a hypertext the reader constructs of gatherings from the hypertext being read. This interface may use spatial or conjunctive methods, even if the hypertext being read uses a pure node-link model. (For an example of a commercial gathering interface operating on the World Wide Web, see Bernstein.)

    How Does Time Run in a Non-linear Poem?

  18. Much of this paper has been concerned with a spatial approach to prosody. Yet one can hardly leave time out of the picture. The study of hypertextual time is still in its infancy. Lusebrink has produced a taxonomy of time types based on narration; Calvi and Walker present a hypertextual treatment of analepsis and prolepsis. These discussions, while useful, don't provide much insight for prosody. It is important to note at the outset that there are multiple concepts of time operating at once. At the most obvious level is what may be described as "usage-time," a temporality that functions like an unedited recording of what the reader actually does. In fact, such a concept of time can be misleading even in the case of very linear text. Many authors have studied "isochrony," the tendency of stressed syllables to form a regular musical beat. Even when stressed syllables do not fall according to a regular beat, the stresses themselves may so heavily influence our perception of time that our sense of time may be said to be based on linguistic features like stress rather than on the purely acoustical features that would be captured by a tape recorder. Thus the stresses become our measure of time, even when their acoustical correlates do not seem to be evenly spaced.[8] Do interactive devices become the measure of time in an interactive poem? As hypertext is extended further into the fine structure of language, this may happen. Does usage-time include all the unintentional paths taken, as when one accidentally releases the mouse, or over-shoots a scroll bar?

  19. A second concept of time is "gather-time": the time one spends constructing and reading the results in a gathering interface. As I have mentioned, most often the only gathering interface at hand is the reader's memory. Gather-time may start and stop: when a reader is foraging for an episode one may speak of gather-time as having stopped. This is no different really from the concept that the syllable-time of the poem is not running during the time it takes to find one's place in the poem on the page when momentarily interrupted. In a spatial gathering interface, is gather-time running while one changes the spatial relationship of gathered elements? Some type of time is running of course. As one manipulates gathered phrases on a screen one exists in a relationship to them that has temporal dimension. But how does that relationship map onto syllables? Is the time spent moving a phrase mapped onto all the syllables at once? Can usage-time work in this same way, given the right interface? Clearly it is possible to arrange words using graphical methods so that the eye associates all of the words together as a single object all at once, even though there may be an underlying linear structure. How does time work for such an object? There is an initial exposure time, which is arguably linear, but what about time spent contemplating the word object as a whole? What kind of time is that? Is it suspended time? Is it autonomous time, in which the word object becomes in effect an object with its own temporality, not necessarily reconcilable with the concept of time of other objects present, much in the way two people present in the same event may not be able precisely to reconcile their individual concepts of time? Perhaps time can seem to proceed like a kind of loop, where words, having been initially examined, are treated as though they keep on playing.

  20. Conjunctive structures bring their own set of questions to the issue of how time works. A conjunctive structure consists of all of its components resolved into a single whole. What is the time relationship among these components? It makes sense--at least metaphorically--to think of the usage-time for each component as being "equivalenced" with that of the other components. In the structures I call simultaneities, groups of words are placed in the same space, physically and logically--on top of one another. Usage history will clearly reveal the order in which the elements in the simultaneity were encountered (an order which is under some control by the user). These are different units of time; they aren't literally simultaneous, in the sense of simultaneous voices, but the term "simultaneity" is meant to convey the idea that these units of time are meant to be treated as equivalent. This concept of equivalenced time as experienced by a single user is admittedly an abstraction. Equivalenced time is a correlate of the concept of autonomous word objects--words endowed with behavior--which are so eminently possible with the use of software.

  21. At the opposite extreme from equivalenced time are units that are completely disengaged in time, units whose time relationship to one another is completely null. Juxtaposition--bringing together elements with no structural relation between them--may be thought of as the null structure, or "structural zero," and may be considered as the most elemental maneuver at the heart of abstraction (Rosenberg, "Openings"). Clearly juxtaposition has been an important element in all of the arts for many decades. What is the null structure in the dimension(s) of time? In a hypertext, separate episodes may be time-disengaged even though the usage-time for one episode may have a clear relationship to the usage-time of another. Consider two memories, each of an incident whose time and date one cannot place, and in fact whose relative time and date one cannot place. Does it really matter in which order the memories were recalled? The true time relationship of the memories is that they are unresolved with respect to time.

  22. In a hypertext, time itself may become spatialized. This may occur in any number of ways. In a multimedia piece, an interactive device may permit playing a sound or movie. Such an object will have its own timeline; it is common for interactive time-based media devices to represent this timeline on the screen as a control, that the user can directly manipulate. But there is not likely to be such a timeline for the hypertext as a whole; rather the timeline for the particular media object is--in its entirety--anchored at a particular location in the hypertext. One may speak of the entire timeline as being spatialized at a particular location. Even for text, where there is no formal player object, the entirety of the text object may be anchored at a specific location. There is an important point here: for linear text, travel through the text is accomplished by reading in a linear fashion--though to be sure there are many other ways of navigating in a printed text and most acts of reading involve a mixture of linear travel along the word stream, and directly accessing various parts of the text, whether through bookmarks, tables of contents, indices, footnotes, or the like. In a hypertext, even given a linear lexia, this linearity is not likely to be used for travel. Instead, the specific interactive devices are likely to be used for travel, leaving the lexia as an anchored spot which "doesn't go anywhere." Thus to the extent there is a linear lexia, it is an anchored linearity.

    Multiuser Time

  23. Throughout this whole discussion I have taken a perspective that would be called in computer jargon "single-user." We tend to view "a reading" as a single reader reading a work which has a single (even if collective) author. In the computer world, multiuser games are quite common and I feel certain that we will see an increasing number of multiuser literary works in the future. Multiuser time involves stretches of time that are not necessarily resolvable from one user to another. The events of prosody are typically passages over particular points in a poem--syllables or line breaks, etc. Where there are multiple readers in the same textual space at the same time, it may not be possible to construct any form of synchronization that would resolve the various users' interactions with the text over time. In this sense, the concept of disengaged time is not metaphorical, but a literal description of what takes place.[9]

  24. The questions that hypertext raises for prosody have only begun to be asked. As I've tried to show, much of our understanding of prosody has concerned the way sound events cluster when encountered in a linear sequence, and thus prosody will have to be re-thought in the context of hypertext. The central questions will include: how are we to understand prosody when clustering occurs in space instead of time? How do sound events relate across disengaged units of time? What happens to these time disengagements when the poet recites--and how indeed is a poet to perform a hypertext work?

    25. jr@amanue.com

    Talk Back

    COPYRIGHT (c) 2000 BY JIM ROSENBERG, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THIS TEXT MAY BE USED AND SHARED IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE FAIR-USE PROVISIONS OF U.S. COPYRIGHT LAW. ANY USE OF THIS TEXT ON OTHER TERMS, IN ANY MEDIUM, REQUIRES THE CONSENT OF THE AUTHOR AND THE PUBLISHER, THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS.

    THIS ARTICLE AND OTHER CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE ARE AVAILABLE FREE OF CHARGE UNTIL RELEASE OF THE NEXT ISSUE. A TEXT-ONLY ARCHIVE OF THE JOURNAL IS ALSO AVAILABLE FREE OF CHARGE. FOR FULL HYPERTEXT ACCESS TO BACK ISSUES, SEARCH UTILITIES, AND OTHER VALUABLE FEATURES, YOU OR YOUR INSTITUTION MAY SUBSCRIBE TO PROJECT MUSE, THE ON-LINE JOURNALS PROJECT OF THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS.

    Notes

    1. This section is a revised version of the first part of my "Notes Toward a Non-Linear Prosody of Space" (1995). A version of this paper was presented at the Assembling Alternatives conference at the University of New Hampshire in September, 1996. My thanks to Romana Huk for that opportunity.

    2. The advent of the World Wide Web has benefited hypertext immeasurably, by vastly increasing exposure of hypertext to a truly mass audience; however it is regrettable that the limited forms of hypertext activity currently available in HTML limit understanding of the variety of hypertext activities that are possible. Some of these limitations can be overcome by extensive use of richer Web languages such as JavaScript and Java.

    3. At its most extreme, hypertext structure may be used to represent the structure of syntax itself. In this case one clearly has conjunctive structure: a sentence consists of all of its parts; e.g. if we describe a sentence as consisting of a noun phrase and a verb phrase, the noun and verb phrases are hardly alternatives.

    4. Gerard Manley Hopkins defined an outrider as a syllable that "doesn't count" in the prosody. I must confess to not understanding the idea of a syllable that doesn't count. The idea of an emptiness that doesn't count is easier to understand, but that, too, seems problematic.

    5. In "A Note on the Methods Used in Composing the 22 Light Poems," Jackson Mac Low instructs: "The empty spaces in 'Asymmetries' are notations for silences lasting at least as long as it would take the reader to say the words printed directly above or below them." A similar approach might leave a silence between units equal to the length of the last measure encountered, or the last rhythmic line. A directive "leave whatever silence between units seems natural" might tend to resolve to one of these possibilities.

    6. A more troublesome issue is text imposed by the computer system itself, such as the words visible on a menu bar. Is such text like the invisible stage hands of the Japanese theater--there but you don't see it? And what about text visible from another window? Should this be treated the way John Cage treated ambient sound?

    7. Ted Nelson, who coined the term "hypertext," has consistently advocated that all links should be bidirectional.

    8. On a similar note, permit a personal anecdote. In the early seventies I made several pieces on magnetic tape using simultaneous overlays of my own voice. For one of these pieces I realized I could control these overlays very precisely by building up each fragment through making a tape loop of what was already laid down, making a tape loop of the voice to be added, then by controlling the offset of these tape loops I could get the desired effect. In one case the composition scheme called for a simultaneous attack (to use the electronic music term) of all of the voices. On one pass round the loop I felt I had nailed it exactly. But for some reason I decided to analyze the result at slow speed. Doing this it became clear that the attacks--in acoustical terms--were not simultaneous at all. What did line up simultaneously were the stressed syllables in each voice. I heard the attacks as being simultaneous--retroactive from the vantage point of having heard the stressed syllables. Linguistically the words sounded like they all started at the same time, even though acoustically this was not the case.

    9. It is known that the brain is a massively parallel system. A simple act of seeing involves substantial processing by each retina, even before the signals reach the brain. Is it possible that even for a single reader, the "single-user" model may not be correct? Is the brain itself perhaps "multiuser"? This is the question posed by Daniel Dennett who devised a theory of consciousness based on the concept of a parallel "gang of demons." In technical computer usage, a "daemon" is an asynchronous process--typically invisible to the user--that performs a particular type of work periodically or on request in the background. In most multiuser systems there is typically a daemon for delivering electronic mail. Another type of daemon responds to requests to view World Wide Web pages, and so on. Dennett suggests that there are centers in the brain that act as "time disengaged actors" even for a single mind. Whether or not this model of brain function prevails, hypertext is already beginning to render tangible this concept of multiple temporalities of reading and thinking.

    Works Cited

    Bernstein, Mark. Web Squirrel. Computer Software. Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems, 1996.

    Calvi, Licia. "'Lector in Rebus': The Role of the Reader and the Characteristics of Hyperreading." Hypertext '99. New York: ACM, 1999.

    Chomsky, Noam, and Morris Halle. The Sound Pattern of English. New York: Harper and Row, 1968.

    Dennett, Daniel C. Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1991.

    Duncan, Robert. Personal conversation. 1973.

    Ginsberg, Allen. Improvised Poetics. San Francisco: Anonym, 1971.

    Landow, G. P. Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992.

    Larsen, Deena. Samplers. Computer Software. Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems, 1996.

    Lusebrink, Marjorie C. "The Moment in Hypertext: A Brief Lexicon of Time." Hypertext '98. New York: ACM, 1998.

    Mac Low, Jackson. 22 Light Poems. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1968.

    Moulthrop, Stuart. "Shadow of the Informand: A Rhetorical Experiment in Hypertext." Perforations 3. Atlanta, GA: Public Domain, 1992.

    Nelson, Theodore H. Literary Machines. Swarthmore, PA: T.H. Nelson, 1981.

    Olson, Charles. "Projective Verse." Human Universe and Other Essays. New York: Grove Press, 1967.

    Rosenberg, Jim. "Navigating Nowhere / Hypertext Infrawhere." SIGLINK Newsletter 3.3 (December 1994). <http://www.well.com/user/jer/NNHI.html>.

    ---. "Notes Toward a Non-linear Prosody of Space." ht_lit Mailing List. 26 March 1995. <http://www.well.com/user/jer/nonlin_prosody.html>.

    ---. "The Structure of Hypertext Activity." Hypertext '96. New York: ACM, 1996. <http://www.cs.unc.edu/~barman/HT96/P17/SHA_out.html>.

    ---. Diffractions through: Thirst weep ransack (frailty) veer tide elegy. Computer Software. Watertown MA: Eastgate Systems, 1996.

    ---. "Openings: The Connection Direct." Poetics Journal 10 (June 1998). <http://www.well.com/user/jer/openings.html>. Also published as liner notes included in Intergrams. Computer Software. Watertown MA: Eastgate Systems, 1993.

    Walker, Jill. "Piecing together and tearing apart: finding the story in afternoon." Hypertext '99. New York: ACM, 1999.

LINKS: Non-Graphical Users See Top of Page