Indeed, Shelley Jacksonâs Patchwork Girl offers the patient reader, if there are any left in the world, just such an experience of losing oneself to a text, for as one plunges deeper and deeper into oneâs own personal exploration of the relations here of creator to created and of body to text, one never fails to be rewarded and so is drawn ever deeper, until clicking the mouse is as unconscious an act as turning a page, and much less constraining, more compelling.

Not that many did read these works as carefully or as thoroughly as they deserved, but that is true of the reading of books as well. We have always insisted that good printbound texts need good engaged readers to fulfill their concealed potential. Now, in hypertext, that readerly role was made manifest and foregrounded. The author did not disappear, as was feared or hoped for, but became a kind of designer or architect or landscaper as well as writer, building or laying out a structural or geographical space through which the reader might roam as though on a quest of her own, guided or not guided by its artist-maker. These were mostly discrete literary artworks, with a shelvable diskette or CD-ROM existence not unlike that of the book, such that if closure was sometimes a problem, enclosure was not.

Then, almost overnight it seemed, together with the new IBM Windows applications, the boom in laptop computers with expanded memory along with CD-ROMs and ZIP and JAZZ drives, the invention of Netscape and other browsers, the creation of HTML and Java and VRML and rapidly improving hypermedia, there came the sudden worldwide rush to the Web, a phenomenon from which we are all still reeling. The impact upon communication, expression, commerce, sex, politics, indeed all forms of human exchange, has been truly phenomenal, and one senses that that impact is only beginning to be felt.

IN TERMS OF NEW SERIOUS LITERATURE, the Web has not been very hospitable. It tends to be a noisy, restless, opportunistic, superficial, e-commerce-driven, chaotic realm, dominated by hacks, pitchmen, and pretenders, in which the quiet voice of literature cannot easily be heard or, if heard by chance, attended to for more than a moment or two. Literature is meditative and the Net is riven by ceaseless hype and chatter. Literature has a shape, and the Net is shapeless. The discrete object is gone, thereâs only this vast disorderly sprawl, about as appealing as a scatter of old magazines on a table in the dentistâs lounge. Literature is traditionally slow and low-tech and thoughtful, the Net is fast and high-tech and actional. As for hyperfiction, the old Golden Age webworks of text have largely vanished, and hypertext is now used more to access hypermedia as enhancements for more or less linear narratives — when itâs not launching the reader out into the mazy outer space of the World Wide Web, never to be seen again. Notions of architecture, mapping, design: mostly gone. Genuine interactivity, too; the reader is commonly obliged now to enter the media-rich but ineluctable flow as directed by the author or authors: In a sense, itâs back to the movies again, that most passive and imperious of forms.

And even the word, the very stuff of literature, and indeed of all human thought, is under assault, giving ground daily to image-surfing, hypermedia, the linked icon. Indeed, the word itself is increasingly reduced to icon or caption. Some speak hopefully of the binding of word and image, many, perhaps also hopefully, of the displacement of word by image. There is a genuine fear — or hope — that our old language of the intellect, systematic discourse, and poetic metaphor may very soon be as foreign and esoteric as ancient Sumerian cuneiform tablets.

And for the authors themselves, there are all these new tools to learn. Writing consumes one entirely. But learning these new applications also consumes one entirely, and they keep changing, sometimes so radically that whatâs been written in the old can no longer be read in the new. Many electronic writers now seem baffled and disillusioned by what author Jay David Bolter has called ”the anxiety of obsolescence” as their tools and formats, laboriously learned, are ceaselessly displaced by others, and they are further dismayed by the Webâs increased hostility toward text and the flight of readers into cyber-malls and chat rooms.

So, does this mean that literature is dying on the Web? On the contrary. If anything, true to the nature of silver ages, we are into a miniboom as electronic magazines and prizes proliferate, new electronic publishers emerge, and organizations spring up to develop online readerships and bring them into contact with the new writers. No, though most of the worldâs literati continue to shy away from this new, increasingly dominant medium, and so continue to drift farther and farther from the center, the new literary mainstream is being carved here. And if I am mistaken and it is not, then literature itself is adrift and slipping even farther into the backwaters. There is, as we know, a new generation of readers coming along, an audience trained from primary school on to read and write — and above all to think — in this new way, and they will be the audience that literary artists will seek to reach, else perhaps have none at all.

And will the new literature look like the old literature? No, it will not. Changing technologies continually reshape the very nature of the artistic enterprise. The dominant narrative forms of our times, the novel and the movie, for example, would not have been possible without the technologies that created, not so much the forms themselves as the new audiences toward whom artists directed their endeavors, some translating the classic modes into the new technologies, others exploring the new technologies for new forms appropriate to them. This emergent expressive environment provided by the computer and the World Wide Web is impatient with monomedia and simple self-enclosed sequences. Rhetoric, in this Age of the New Sophists, is still the route to power, but the hypertextual link and all the visual and aural media are now part of its grammar. Like composers, artists, and filmmakers before them, writers will learn to battle through the new tool-learning tasks, or to collaborate with other artists, designers, filmmakers, and composers, and the tools themselves will become easier to learn and to use and will interact more smoothly with other tools.

POETRY HAS INDEED PROSPERED in this new medium, even more than fiction. Or, to put it another way, since the genre distinctions are breaking down in this new medium: the narrative mode, being a literary gesture that typically moves from A to B — the ”nextness” of story — has had to cope with the paradoxically contrary nature of the multidirectional webworks of hyperfiction, while the lyrical mode, in which, typically, a single subject becomes the center of many peripheral meditations, has often found those webworks most congenial. With hypermedia, a whole new poetic movement has emerged, called kinetic poetry, or poetry that ”moves,” in which the text of a poem undergoes ceaseless transformations on the screen, emerging and disappearing, evolving into shapes and motions and patterns that ”imitate” the poem itself, interacting visually with other elements of the poem or aurally with overlaid sound files. Visual artists sometimes even insist on calling their own hypermedia works ”poems,” though they may contain few words or none at all, keeping poetic structures intact but displacing language with visual images.

Many of the more beautiful and ambitious works of kinetic poetry, such as ”Spy v. Spy” by Jay Dillemuth and Alex Cory, ”Captain, My Captain” by Judd Morrissey and Lori Talley, and ”After Lori” and ”Saccades” by Paul Long, are not yet available on the Web, but some sense of the form and its potential can be glimpsed in Australian Jenny Weight’s suite of sixteen short poems about Vietnam, which uses hyperlinks, kinetic text, music, artwork, photographs, newscasts, live poetry readings, recorded street sounds, animation, found objects, Shockwave graphics, and much more, in a kind of personal anthology of the formal and technical means currently possible (see idaspoetics.com). Other examples can be found at The Electronic Poetry Center at Buffalo, UbuWeb, Turbulence, Multimania, Eastgate Systems (see, for example, pioneer hyperpoet Rob Kendall’s ”Dispossession,” and Dia. These works can be quite beautiful, at least visually, even if kinesis does sometimes seem like a way of draining a poem of its meaning; this, of course, is the constant threat of hypermedia: to suck the substance out of a work of lettered art, reduce it to surface spectacle. But, then, nothing is ever mere surface, mere spectacle, is it?

IT WILL BE OBVIOUS BY NOW that I am still in love with the word, still faithfully wed to text, and especially literary text. Reading such text remains, for me, the most interactive thing that we as humans do, converting these little black squiggles on white backgrounds into vast landscapes, ancient battlegrounds, and distant galaxies, into events more vivid than those on the news or on the streets outside with characters we know better than we know our own families and friends. Thatâs what writers invented: this enlargement of our imaginative powers. And I continue to feel that, for all the wondrous and provocative invasions of text by sound and image, all the intimate layering of them and irresistible fusions, still, the most radical and distinctive literary contribution of the computer has been the multilinear hypertextual webwork of text spaces, or, as one might say, the intimate layering and fusion of imagined spatiality and temporality. In my workshops, I continue to insist upon text, often against the wills of students, eager to abandon the slow but demanding word and rush into sights and sounds.

But, then, maybe this is where I am stuck in the past and becoming dated, for one might well ask, Are not these Golden Age narrative webworks mere extensions of the dying book culture, as retrotech in their way as eBooks? Could it be that text itself is a worn-out tool of a dying human era, a necessary aid, perhaps, in a technically primitive world, but one that has always distanced the user from the world she or he lives in, a kind of thick inky scrim between sentient beings and their reality? Even alphabets, clever little tools in their time, are fettered now by the unlinked nature of the times of their origins, and are already giving way to new multilingual alphabets and pictograms called icons. In the beginning was the word — but maybe only for writers, for scribes, a class with special skills, brought into being by the Sumerians and perhaps no longer relevant to the electronic world we live in, or are about to. It may be that it will be the image, not the word, that will dominate all future cultural exchanges, including literature, if then it can still be called that. Text, so far anyway, can reflect upon itself more directly yet complexly than can the image, and so curb its own excesses, but we do not yet know how subtle the language of the image might be. We do know how forceful it can be. Silver ages, you will remember, are generally followed by iron ages, wherein the hammer is the hammer and the head the head.

But this is still the silver age, or perhaps even merely the tag end, as some would have it, of the dark ages, that sweet wordy time. Certainly, the world is full still of subversive and obstreperous writers, and they will not take being made redundant lying down. Text at the outset of this new millennium remains our traditional source of content, of meaning, imaginationâs primary trigger, and writers will continue to use it as their tool of choice, if not their only one, even if readers do not. Even as we of this time, astraddle the ages, continue to fuse text with all the hypermedia at our disposal, we also continue to hunger for the old reading experience, until either (the generations come, the generations go) it is forgotten and becomes a legend of the past, or this magical fusion of image, sound, and text, and perhaps of aroma and tactility as well, really happens, and the Golden Age, thought past, begins.

A pioneer of postmodern fiction, Robert Coover won the William Faulkner Award for his first novel, The Origin of the Brunists. His other works include the collection of short fiction, Pricksongs and Descants; a collection of plays, A Theological Position; and such novels as The Public Burning, Spanking the Maid, Gerald’s Party, Pinocchio in Venice, John’s Wife, Ghost Town and Briar Rose. His latest honor is the Dugannon Foundation’s REA award for his lifetime contribution to the short story. He teaches courses in electronic writing and mixed media at Brown University.