Hypertext and the scholarly archive: intertexts, paratexts and metatexts at work

Abstract

With the Web, hypertext has become the paradigmatic rhetorical structure of a global and distributed archive. This paper argues that the scholarly archive is going though a process of hypertextualization that is not adequately accounted for in theories on hypertext. A methodological approach based on Gerard Genettes theory of transtextuality is proposed for a study of the hypertextualized archive. This involves a rejection of the reductionist opposition of hypertext and the fixed linear text, in favor of a study of the intertexts, paratexts and metatexts that work at the interface between texts and archive. I refer to this as second-order textuality.