Also, in assigning Goody and Saussure, I intend to prepare students to read images and other media textually and to understand how meaning can be made. We read the introductory notes to McQuade and McQuade's "Observing the Ordinary" and learn that most of us do not observe ordinary objects and events with fresh eyes, but if we learn to do so, we hone our abilities to draw inferences, make sense of our environment, and understand ourselves better. The editors write: "If we practice examining commonplace objects with attention to both careful observation and an awareness of what makes every individual's perspective unique, we can begin to characterize more precisely for ourselves and others who we are and what we're like" (p. 5). The three texts we have read thus far should indicate that the ethnocentric dichotomies that have characterized the way in which we view the world can be reconsidered, where we might accept other possible alternatives or leave room for other identities generally ignored in society.

Last, we think through hypertext by reading Bolter's "The Computer as a New Writing Space." [I should note here I realized then that offering only one perspective (Bolter's) was limiting, to say the least, so I added other texts from Victor Vitanza's Cyberreader in later semesters.] Although he focuses on seemingly pragmatic uses of hypertext--for example, directories, catalogues, how-to-manuals, text organized into "paths that make operational sense to author and reader"--we are necessarily concerned with hypertextuality as a different mode of writing or communication. While we are certainly not interested in examining hypertextuality and post-literacy to a large extent, we gather simply an understanding that what makes hypertext so appealing is its interconnectivity, its malleability. Bolter orients and prepares students to think of the electronic writing space as malleable, interactive, and unstable. He writes:

Electronic text is the first text in which the elements of meaning, of structure, and of visual display are fundamentally unstable. Unlike the printing press of the medieval codex, the computer does not require that any aspect of writing can be determined in advance for the whole life of a text. (p. 285)

Bolter tells us that the hypertext network, a network of interconnected writings, has the potential to make the computer "a revolution in writing." He writes: "A text as a network has no univocal sense; it is a multiplicity without the imposition of a principle of domination" (p. 280). In discussing the term "topic," he refers to the Greek term topos to suggest that topics exist in a writing space that is not "only a visual surface but also a data structure in the computer." Bolter posits that we write topically, with or without a computer, but the computer "changes the nature of writing simply by giving visual expression to our acts of conceiving and manipulating topics" (p. 271). He suggests later that the computer's writing space can "represent any relationships that can be defined as the interplay" of topics.

While I address in "The Pedagogy of Whatever" more adequately the reasons why I choose to use hypertext as opposed to print for these assignments, I would like to note here that I believe that writing in the traditional sense can be just as powerful and subversive an act of resistance as hypertext, but I also think that hypertextual writing provides other opportunities for students to think about language and identity at a time when our identities are constantly being renegotiated through our quotidian uses of rapidly developing technologies of communication, such as e-mail, chatrooms, and the cellular phone, to name but a few. I also believe that there exists a certain force behind hypertextual appropriations or manifestations of the mystory, a performative force.