Footnote 1 and 1A

1. A footnote, too, is a feature of printed texts representing digression or parenthetical material. In hypertexts footnotes are not needed because in one sense a hypertext is nothing more than footnotes inside of footnotes inside of footnotes, etc. A hypertext, then, is a collection of footnotes that take turns being the main text (see Landow, 1992).

1a. It gets a bit awkward to embed footnotes inside of footnotes in a printed text but I'll do it anyway here to the make a point. By the way (or should I add another footnote?), footnotes made me think of one of my favorite novels, entitled simply Book, by Robert Grudin (1992). It pokes fun at academics and it also inspired my playfulness here because in one part of the book the footnotes become characters organizing a conspiracy to take over the storyline from the characters in the narrative and from the author. This wouldn't be the first time I've read texts where the footnotes were more interesting than the main text.

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Reading Online, www.readingonline.org
Posted May 1997
Published by the International Reading Association, Inc.   ISSN 1096-1232