The Review of Contemporary Fiction

From Text to Hypertext: Decentering the Subject in Fiction, Film, the Visual Arts and Electronic Media by Silvio Gaggi
Steve Tomasula

Silvio Gaggi. From Text to Hypertext: Decentering the Subject in Fiction, Film, the Visual Arts and Electronic Media. Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. 169 pp. Paper: $14.95.

A shift in representation of the self is the topic of Silvio Gaggi’s lucid From Text to Hypertext. Specifically, Gaggi examines static images, printed literary texts, films, and hypertexts to demonstrate that in many art and literary works, the Cartesian self has been replaced by a much more contingent, less self-directed, less central entity: the human subject.
His baseline is Jan van Eyck’s The Wedding of Arnolfini, a fifteenth-century painting that valorizes the self through a language of perspective, gesture, and other signs. Against this witness Gaggi contrasts the shattered viewpoints of Picasso’s cubist work and Cindy Sherman’s “movie stills,” self-portraits in which Sherman takes on, in chameleon fashion, the various female personae of B-movie stereotypes. The chapter on literature outlines the subject as a product of discourse by reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, and Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler. Calvino’s work especially makes Gaggi’s case in its subversion of textual authority. By contrast, less pointed examples, e.g., the modernist works, or as in the chapter on film, fairly conventional commercial movies, seem less useful. Still, as in Gaggi’s discussion of hypertext, the attention to form and how various stances toward subjectivity are embedded in form provide a refreshing approach to the ontological implications of aesthetics. His analysis of spatial quality (be it the space of perspective, camera movement, or eye movement through a text) is situated within the wider world and informed most by Baudrillard, Jameson, and Lacan (especially Lacan’s mirror phase). Gaggi leads readers through all of this with a thoughtful clarity and ends his argument with the balance of a humanist, searching for a way to reconcile the deconstruction of the self with those who ask: “On behalf of what should we reject totalitarianism?” [Steve Tomasula]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction From Text to Hypertext: Decentering the Subject in Fiction, Film, the Visual Arts and Electronic Media by Silvio Gaggi Steve Tomasula Silvio Gaggi. From Text to Hypertext: Decentering the Subject in Fiction, Film, the Visual Arts and Electronic Media. Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. 169 pp. Paper: $14.95. A shift in representation of the self is the topic of Silvio Gaggi’s lucid From Text to Hypertext. Specifically, Gaggi examines static images, printed literary texts, films, and hypertexts to demonstrate that in many art and literary works, the Cartesian self has been replaced by a much more contingent, less self-directed, less central entity: the human subject. His baseline is Jan van Eyck’s The Wedding of Arnolfini, a fifteenth-century painting that valorizes the self through a language of perspective, gesture, and other signs. Against this witness Gaggi contrasts the shattered viewpoints of Picasso’s cubist work and Cindy Sherman’s “movie stills,” self-portraits in which Sherman takes on, in chameleon fashion, the various female personae of B-movie stereotypes. The chapter on literature outlines the subject as a product of discourse by reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, and Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler. Calvino’s work especially makes Gaggi’s case in its subversion of textual authority. By contrast, less pointed examples, e.g., the modernist works, or as in the chapter on film, fairly conventional commercial movies, seem less useful. Still, as in Gaggi’s discussion of hypertext, the attention to form and how various stances toward subjectivity are embedded in form provide a refreshing approach to the ontological implications of aesthetics. His analysis of spatial quality (be it the space of perspective, camera movement, or eye movement through a text) is situated within the wider world and informed most by Baudrillard, Jameson, and Lacan (especially Lacan’s mirror phase). Gaggi leads readers through all of this with a thoughtful clarity and ends his argument with the balance of a humanist, searching for a way to reconcile the deconstruction of the self with those who ask: “On behalf of what should we reject totalitarianism?” [Steve Tomasula]

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