Homer, Hypertext, and the Web of Myth

There is no way to study orality as an object independent from literacy. Orality is the creation of literacy, even when the two concepts are thought to be mutually exclusive: literacy then defines its imagined opposite, orality, by its own absence. But what is literacy? This question was not high on the agenda of the early theorists of orality, who were more interested in defining what orality was. Conceiving of the advent of literacy in historical contexts (such as archaic Greece in the 8th century B.C.E.) in terms of the writing practices known to themselves, these scholars were construing a historical reality (orality) as a function of their own ideology (literacy). Yet we have become aware since of what we have come to call our "logocentrism." And due to the work of scholars working on the more richly documented Middle Ages, and others, we have learned that "writing" is not an unquestioned constant applying to all times and places: in historical contexts such as the European Middle Ages or archaic Greece, the writing and reading of texts have been very different from our own cultural routines; in fact, these activities and the conception underlying them, may have been quite "oral" (cf. Bakker 1997: 18-32). Such defamiliarization of writing must not stop with the study of writing in certain historical contexts. It encompasses us. We are ourselves in a historical context that forces us to rethink and redefine writing, our own. The growing importance of the internet and the emergence of hypertext present us with profound changes in our writing routines, which