Abstract: In a rare essay, Thomas Pynchon, the famously reclusive author, talks about the ‘do-it-yourself hypertextualist’, who fits into his discourse on paranoia. This paper will start to explore the questions of paranoia in both literary criticism and hypertext theory. It will focus on the paranoia inherent within one-to-one links from both general, authoritative systems, and the network of personal reader response using examples from literature including Thomas Pynchon and Vladimir Nabokov.
Simon Rowberry (2011), ”Literary Criticism and Hypertext or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Paranoia?” in Proceedings of the Narrative and Hypertext Workship ACM Hypertext 2011. http://nht.ecs.soton.ac.uk/2011/papers/7-srowberry.pdf