Reader-response criticism has gained the growing prominence in literary theory during the 20th century. Computer technologies such as multimedia and hypertext applications have sparked an active critical debate not only about the future of the book format, but also about the future of literature as well as about the role of a reader. Hypertext fiction is the most prominent of proposed electronic literary forms. It alters concepts of the text, author and reader, enables forms of non-linear writing closer to the associative working of the mind, and makes possible reader interaction with the text on a level impossible in printed text. The various theories of reader response have been surveyed in the first chapter. It is argued that even within a "reader-based" orientation theorists may adopt different conceptions of readers' roles, purposes, texts, and contexts, suggesting that there is no single "reader-response theory". At the same time they (the theorists) suggest that the readers adopt a range of different roles. Many of them refer vaguely to a hypothetical, impersonal being known as "the reader". Many of the theorists specify personifications of "the reader": the mock reader (Gibson); the implied reader (Booth, Iser); the model reader (Eco), the super reader (Riffaterre); the narratee (Prince), the competent reader (Culler); the literate reader (Holland); or the informed reader in the interpretive community (Fish). The second chapter gives an analysis of different theories of hypertext (E. Aarseth, K. Hayles, D. Ciccoricco, G. Landow, H. Rustard, S. Sloane, etc.). The term hypertext, coined by T. Nelson, is the presentation as a linked network of nodes which readers are free to navigate in non-linear way. We conclude that hypertext fiction, network fiction, interactive fiction, locative narratives are by no means an exhaustive inventory of the forms of electronic literature, but they are sufficient to illustrate the diversity of the field, the complex relations that emerge between print and electronic literature and the wide spectrum of aesthetic strategies that digital literature employs. Electronic literature has already produced many works of high literary merit that deserve and demand the close attention and rigorous scrutiny critics have long practiced with the print literature. It requires new modes of analysis and new ways of teaching, interpreting, and playing, it demands to "think digital". We consider that reading the hypertext fiction is characterized by its non-linearity, intangibility, fragmentation, multiplicity, instability and perplexity.
