Untitled - witz cultural

279RECONFIGURINCLITERARYEDUCATIONcient means of accustoming students to making connections among materialsthey encounter. A major component of critical thinking consists in thehabit of seeking the way various causes impinge upon a single phenomenonor event and then evaluating their relative importance, and well-designedhypertext encourages this habit.Hypertext also offers a means for a novice reader to learn the habit ofmultisequential reading necessary for both student anthologies and scholarlyapparatuses. Hypertext, which has been defined as text designed to be readnonsequentially or in a nonlinear mode, efficiently models the kind of textcharacteristic of scholarly and scientific writing. These forms of writing requirereaders to leave the main text and venture out to consider footnotes,evidence of statistics and other authorities, and the like. Our experience atBrown University in the late 1980s suggests that using hypertext teaches studentsto read in this advanced manner. This effect on reading, which firstappears in students' better use ofanthologies and standard textbooks, exemplifiesthe way that hypeftext and appropriate materials together can quicklyget students up to speed.In addition, a corpus of hypertext documents intrinsically joins materialsstudents encounter in separate parts ofa single course and in other coursesand disciplines. Hypertext, in other words, provides a means of integratingthe subject materials of a single course with other courses. Students, particularlynovice students, continually encounter problems created by necessaryacademic specialization and separation of single disciplines into individualcourses. In the course ofarguing for the historic contextualization ofliteraryworks, Brook Thomas describes this all too famiTiar problem:The notion of a piece of literature as an organic, autonomous whole that combats thefragmentation of the modern world can easily lead to teaching practices that contributeto the fragmentation our students experience in their lives; a fragmentationconfirmed in their educational experience. At the same time sophomores take a generalstudies literature course, they might also take economics, biology, math, andaccounting. There is nothing, not even the literature course, that connects the differentknowledge they gain from these different courses . . . Furthermore, becauseachwork students read in a literature course is an organic whole that stands on its own,there is really no reason why they should relate one work to another in the samecourse. As they read one work, then another, then another, each separate and unique,each reading can too easily contribute to their sense ofeducation as a set offragmented,unrelated experiences in which wholeness and unity are to be found only intem porary, self-enclosed moments. (229)