Untitled - witz cultural

307RECONFIGURINGLITERARYEDUCATIONand HTML that students have created take the form of similar erperiments,for they use hypertefi to test the theories of Barthes, Derrida, and others.Borges often appears as the Vergilian guide to these electronic explorations.Karen Kim thus created a hypertext version of Borgesk "Grains of Sand" tothe individual lexias of which she linked analyses in the manner of Barthes'sS/2, and other students have taken similar approaches to works of Carroll,Lorca, Maupassant, and Proust. Derrida, Bakhtin, Baudrillard, Haraway, andtheorists not mentioned in the print version of Hypefiert also appear withinsuch laboratory-for-theory webs.Many student-created webs exemplify that new form of discourse proposedin Gregory Ulmerk Teletheory (where, however, he presents it in thecontext of video and film; he has since discovered hypertext and become amajor innovator using it, particularly in the form of the World Wide Web, toteach large classes at the University of Florida in writing and literature). Thisgenre, which Ulmer terms "mystory" combines autobiography, public historyand popular myth and culture. As Ulmer explains, his proposed newmode of writing "brings into relationship the three levels of sense-common,explanatory, and expert-operating in the circulation of culture from'low' to'high' and back againi' and thereby offers a means ofresearching the equivalencies among the discourses of science, popular culture,everyday life, and private experience. A mystory is alwayspecific to its composer,constituting a kind of personal periodic table of cognitive elements, representing oneindividual's intensive reserve. The best response to reading a mystory would be adesire to compose another one, for myself ... mystory assumes that one's thinkingbegins not from the generalized classifications ofsubject formation, but from thespecific experiences historically situated, and that one always thinks by means of andthrough these specifics, even ifthat thinking is directed against the institutions ofonel own formation. (vii-viii)Although Ulmer presented his Derridean notions of the new writing inTeletheory, a work subtitled Grammatology in the Age of Video, it turns out todescribe not so much-orat least not only-the kind of texruality one findsin the analogue media of film and video but that emanating from (or instantiatedby) digital word and digital image. As we have several times observed,hypertext, a border- and genre-crossing mode of writing, inevitablystitches togetherlexias written"in" differentmodes, tones, genres, and so on.Ulmerian mystory provides us with a first, possibly preliminary model ofhow to write hypermedia.One of the most interesting of such mystories is Taro lkal's Electronic Zen,