For Thee: A Response to Alice Bell

In an essay that responds to Alice Bell's book The Possible Worlds of Hypertext Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Stuart Moulthrop uses the lessons of hypertext as both an analogy and an explanation for why hypertext and its criticism will stay in a "niche" - and why, despite Bell's concern, that's not such a bad thing. As the response of an author to his critic, addressed to "thee," "implicitly dragging her into the niche with me," this review also dramatizes the very productivity of such specialized, nodal encounters.