Is it really literarily "new"?

Cyberspace is certainly new, the computer era is certainly new, the entire medium is certainly new. But is the emerging literature being created with the new medium's hypertextuality "new?"

Here's poet Charles Bernstein's answer:

Or as poet Millie Niss whispers as you "wand" over her witty poem, The Dancing Rhinoceri of Bangladesh: "The surrealist did this without all this technology."

John Barth would see nothing "new" in it. In 1967, he published a controversial essay called "The Literature of Exhaustion" which read like a "manifesto of postmodernism." In it, he proposed that the conventional modes of literary representation had been "used up," their possibilities consumed through over-use. All is tired in literature; no new forms are left to be invented, he declared.

By definition, hypertextual writing inspires a non-linear narrative technique, a technique in itself that isn't literarily new. Novelists and poets have long experimented with ways of conquering the normal demands of narrative, from structure to marginalia and footnotes, writers such as Laurence Sterne, James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, Julio Cortazar, Italo Calvino and Cervantes, not to mention T.S. Eliot, William Burroughs and even William Gibson. "The structural interest offered by hypertext is as yet nothing dramatically different from what writers have been doing throughout the last century," believes critic Carrie McMillan.

In fact, a case can be made for the nonlinear, fragmented roots of hypertext to go back much further than that. Even before Gutenberg, texts were often collections of scrolls, sorted in no fixed sequence. Non-linear is the structure of The Book as it's called in cybertheory circles—the Bible—whose structure pioneered the idea of what makes all books, since Gutenberg's printing of the King James Version of it. Maybe the most famous example in our literature of a single story told in a nonlinear fashion is the Bible's story of Jesus, points out critic Edward Picot "The Gospels tell the story of Jesus from four different viewpoints, sometimes with quite substantial differences of style, detail and chronological sequence...They do not have the same unity as a conventional linear narrative: they have a different kind of unity instead, more ambiguous, more fragmented, and more challenging to the reader."

Does cyber-hypertexuality, then, offer anything unique, though, for the aspiring creative cyberwriter?

In "The End of the Book" Robert Coover says yes: "True freedom from the tyranny of the line is perceived as only really possible now at last with the advent of hypertext, written and read on the computer, where the line in fact does not exist unless one invents and implants it in the text."

Cybertheorist Paul Delaney says yes and no:

Hypertext can create a kind of 'zero degree' narrative, entirely liberated from the sequential imperatives of a standard plot. But does this achieve any more than those books of the 1960s that were issued unbound, so that the pages could be shuffled and read in any order?

The use of a computer, even if we are reading a piece of traditional literature such as a sonnet, implies a mediation which alters the final product. Access to poetry through a machine is totally different from opening a book, a magazine, a newspaper, or a copybook. The computer re-makes the text.

...for there is only good verse, bad verse, and chaos. Not understanding this sentence, or never understanding it as Eliot understood it, or not knowing that Eliot wrote it and not caring a whit—both its provisional meanings and its non-enduring emotions caught in a seductive, obscene (off-stage) embrace—is one of the many pleasures that cyberpoetry can provide.