From Text to Hypertext I Irony and the Internal Limits of Text

What is a text? What are its limits? In the last thirty years, the field of literary studies has undergone a paradigmatic transformation under the name of theory of possible texts, which meant a subversion of the object and the emergence of a criticism that privileges the rhetorical culture over the commentary culture. In this framework, we tried to understand this new state of the question of literary theory analyzing its object, which seems to resist the idea of organic unity and whose limits are difficult to establish. We thus propose to conceptualize what we understand as textual topology. Our research has strategically divided in two the problem of text topology: external limits and internal limits. In this article, we will develope an analysis of the latter, trying to explain how certain textual features or paradigms (which we will call hypertextuals, based on the notion proposed in the field of computers: Landow; Rodriguez de las Heras; Vandendorpe) configure an object inhabited by infinite possibilities that constantly fracture its organic unit, constituting a special topology. To do this, we will focalise on one of these textual paradigms: the irony (De Man Concepto de ironia). A later work, that will be published in next number of this same journal, will focalise on the ellipsis.