Purpose and Motivation

I became concerned about my psychological health when I started having very violent dreams of killing women, or of women killing themselves. In these dreams, sometimes I am the killer, other times I am a victim of violence or witness to violent acts. Knowing of the complicated relationship I have had with my mother and how this has affected my subsequent relationships with women, I became curious about the source of these violent dreams.

Violence, then, as something to fear, as something to desire, as something to observe, becomes the organizing principle of this hypertext, this search -- not re-search, but search -- into the past, when Spenser lived during a time of great violence, not only in terms of his relationship to the feminine -- Queen Elizabeth -- but also in terms of his relationship to language, the self, and publication in an era of technological change.

This web text will therefore work to exploit this new medium so as to bring these various threads into some kind of order, an order beyond ("hyper" means beyond in the original Greek) the order of linear text, a perhaps higher order that only multilinearity can allow.

volume 2, issue 2
SN 191