Janangelo and the Hypertext Collage

Janangelo, Joseph (1998); “Joseph Cornell and the Artistry of Composing Persuasive
Hypertexts” in CCC; 49.1

The onset of computer technology as placed students into the pre-figurative era where adults learn from young people and where change is so rapid that finding models aren’t readily available.

“Discussing hypertext in terms of a collage is understandable because both forms make use of readymade materials.” (27)

Writing with hypertext offers a reader a collage of ideas: “..hypertext scholars are intrigued by this complex matrix of intertextuality and postmodern monumentality, they also realize that, when it comes to written discourse, these same features can complicate acts of reading. One complication involves size.” (29). Reading a text with hypertexts imbedded as departure points can “..turn a reader into a wanderer” (30). Such “mutability and ambiguity have important consequences for composing and interpreting text” (31). The result is that readers (viewers) must “have a specific knowledge base in order to appreciate the meaning of the seemingly disparate texts he has linked” (35).

The result of thinking of Joseph Cornell’s collage-pieces as a metaphor for hypertext writing is two fold. The first is with the ways of composing persuasive, nonsequential texts (45) and the second is with pedagogical responsibilities and opportunities (45). Educators can work to assist students to navigate such written texts by reconsidering the links they design.


Three writers revisit Joseph Janangelo’s Joseph Cornell piece from 1998:

Wysocki, A.F. (2007); “It is Not Only Ours.” in CCC, 59.2/December.

Anne Frances Wysocki writes “This article models how writing teachers can help the people in their classes makes texts that fit the expectations of our academia while also helping writing teachers understand that and how some new compositional logics might be made to fit…when we build texts, the relation towad others that the texts shape should not go against what they expect; as readers, we are to expect composers to make their ideas fit us” (279).

Wysocki draws on the multiliteracies discussed by the New London Group (1996).

In addition, Wysocki writes, “It is not only that technologies for designing, producing, distributing, sharing and consuming texts make possible new compositions; it is that these compositions can give us new positions for seeing and for criticquing and reworking Available Designs” (282).

Of important note, here, is Anne Frances Wysocki’s discussion of Audience and Ethics. She writes, “How does one take audience and audience expectations into account in such composing, given the contexts surrounding the text’s production and reception, as Sonja Foss considers in her writing about how visual appeals in particular need to balance the new and the expected if they are to succeed? In an audience expects an academic text, and one’s purpose suggests that strict academic structures hinder one’s purposes, how to design and compose a text that addresses those expectations and justifies not meeting them? What ethos, what arrangements and other logics, and what emotional connections will help a composer construct a text that an unexpecting audience will not dismiss out of hand as stupid or incompetent simply because they do not get it?”

Brooke, C.G. (2007); “Joseph Janangelo and the Analogics of New Media” in CCC, 59.2/December.

Collin Brooke discusses the metaphor of the collage and, perhaps, that hypertext essays don’t accomplish what an academic essay requires, or perhaps the traditional essay, and the institutions that regard it have flaws that need to be considered. Janangelo’s essay was one that began a conversation of more literacies before composition studies found it more common to discuss them.


Rice, J. (2007); “Networked Boxes: The Logic of Too Much” in CCC, 59.2/December.

Jeff Rice asks an interesting question, “How, in the age of information overload, do writers account for an endless growth of ideas that are encountered on a daily basis and that are now foregrounded on the Web…the Web’s vastness has opened writing up to an enormous amount of information, connections, and applications. But how has this challenge been addressed in the teaching of writing? How has writing instruction accommodated the sense of “too much” to which Janangelo draws attention to in his essay?”(297).

Addressing “Boxed Writing” Jeff Rice notes, “…the accepted box logic of the typical composition course that stresses formula over exploration, thesis statement over discovery, card catalog-driven research over the collection and synthesis of ideas, is not actually an “in the box” pedagogy” (300). He argues that teaching new media literacy is actually in the box because it is the “cultural condition” that we live in.

Writing is “social” (304).