Marie-Laure Ryan: Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (2001)

Is there a significant difference in attitude between immersion in a game and immersion in a movie or novel? What are the new possibilities for representation offered by the emerging technology of virtual reality? As Marie—Laure Ryan demonstrates in Narrative as Virtual Reality, the questions raised by new, interactive technologies have their precursors and echoes in pre—electronic literary and artistic traditions. Formerly a culture of immersive ideals — getting lost in a good book, for example — we are becoming, Ryan claims, a culture more concerned with interactivity. Approaching the idea of virtual reality as a metaphor for total art, Narrative as Virtual Reality applies the concepts of immersion and interactivity to develop a phenomenology of reading.

Ryan’s analysis encompasses both traditional literary narratives and the new textual genres made possible by the electronic revolution of the past few years, such as hypertext, interactive movies and drama, digital installation art, and computer role—playing games. Interspersed among the book’s chapters are several “interludes” that focus exclusively on either key literary texts that foreshadow what we now call “virtual reality,” including those of Baudelaire, Huysmans, Ignatius de Loyola, Calvino, and science—fiction author Neal Stephenson, or recent efforts to produce interactive art forms, like the hypertext “novel” Twelve Blue, by Michael Joyce, and I’m Your Man, an interactive movie. As Ryan considers the fate of traditional narrative patterns in digital culture, she revisits one of the central issues in modern literary theory — the opposition between a presumably passive reading that is taken over by the world a text represents and an active, deconstructive reading that imaginatively participates in the text’s creation.

Publisher Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001
ISBN 0801864879, 9780801864872
399 pages

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Leonardo Music Journal, vols. 9-14 (1999-2004)

LMJ 9: “Power and Responsibility: Politics, Identity and Technology in Music” (1999)
Contributors include: Nicolas Collins, Krystyna Bobrowski, Sergi Jordá. William Duckworth, Mark Trayle, Chris Brown, Justin Bennett, Lowell Cross, Daniel Goode, Fred Ho, Rajmil Fischman, David Dunn, René van Peer, William Osborne, Frederic Rzewski, David Cope, Roger Alsop, Ann Warde, Dante Tanzi, Greg Schiemer, Suguru Goto, Peter Manning, David Ryan, Sasan Rahmatian, John Bischoff, Guy van Belle. Plus notes by CD Contributors. Includes CD: “Power and Responsibility: Converted to Streaming Between Machines,” curated by Guy van Belle.

LMJ 10: “Southern Cones: Music out of Africa and South America” (2000)
Contributors include: Coriún Aharonián, Lucio Edilberto Cuellar Camargo, Carlos Palombini, Daniel Velasco, O’dyke Nzewi, George Lewis, Lukas Ligeti, Artemis Moroni, Jônatas Manzolli, Fernando Von Zuben and Ricardo Gudwin, Damián Keller, Neil McLachlan. Plus notes by CD Contributors. Includes CD: “Southern Cones: Music out of Africa and South America,” curated by Jürgen Bräuninger.

LMJ 11: “Not Necessarily ‘English Music’: Britain’s Second ‘Golden Age'” (2001)
After the first installment of Cool Britannia beguiled the 1960s with its peculiar conflation of Pop, Art, Fashion and Politics, musical experimentation flourished in the U.K. Styles of improvisation, minimalism, electronic music, performance art, political music and “amateur” music grew out of British art schools, universities and urban villages; styles neither as self-important as those of Europe nor as blithely technocratic as those of North America — a peculiarly “English Music” (and Scottish and Welsh). Includes Two-CD Set: “Not Necessarily ‘English Music,'” curated by David Toop.

LMJ 12: “Pleasure” (2002)
From its naughty lyric content to the pounding physicality of its sound, Pop music is unabashedly driven by the pleasure principle. “Serious” music, however, is usually perceived as more refined, genteel, or to put it another way, repressed. And the avant-garde has traditionally found itself in the peculiar position of accompanying bohemian, hedonistic lifestyles with defiantly itchy and uncomfortable music. But are pleasure and thoughtful invention necessarily at odds? Can there be no “bump and mind”? … LMJ 12 includes articles and personal reflections on the role of pleasure in all genres of music. Includes CD: “From Gdansk till Dawn: Contemporary Experimental Music from Eastern Europe,” curated by Christian Scheib and Susanna Niedermayr.

LMJ 13: “Groove, Pit and Wave: Recording, Transmission and Music” (2003)
Sound is encoded in grooves on vinyl, particles on tape and pits in plastic; it travels as acoustic pressure, electromagnetic waves and pulses of light. The rise of the DJ in the last two decades has signaled the arrival of the medium as the instrument — the crowning achievement of a generation for whom tapping the remote control is as instinctive as tapping two sticks together. Turntables, CD players, radios, tape recorders (and their digital emulations) are played, not merely heard; scratching, groove noise, CD glitches, tape hiss and radio interference are the sound of music, not sound effects. John Cage’s 1960 “Cartridge Music” has yet to enter the charts, but its sounds are growing more familiar. In LMJ13 authors contribute their thoughts on the role of recording and/or transmission in the creation, performance and distribution of music: Includes CD: “Splitting Bits, Closing Loops: Recording, Transmission and Music,” curated by Philip Sherburne.

LMJ 14: “Composers inside Electronics: Music after David Tudor” (2004)
Inspired by David Tudor and others, the experimental music community in the 1970s adopted a new working method based on seat-of-the-pants electronic engineering. The circuit — whether homemade, self-hacked or store-bought but scrutinized to death — became the score. A generation later, aspects of the Tudor aesthetic have spread well beyond the avant-garde: hip-hop, house and other forms of dance music and electronica share a similar obsession with the quirks intrinsic to specific pieces of audio gear. In this special volume of Leonardo Music Journal, authors consider all aspects of the work of David Tudor, the influence of Tudor’s ideas on their own work and/or the role of technological idiosyncrasies in their composition, performance or production. Includes CD: “David Tudor: Live Electronic Music,” curated by Ron Kuivila.

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Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture – 1st free issue (2009)

We commence publication of Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture with a special issue on what we believe is a matter of considerable interest. It begins with a question: ‘Do recent developments in the media – convergence, interactivity, Web 2.0 in short, mean that we need to reassess how we think about the media, how we research into it and how we write and teach about it?’ The guest editor, Paul Taylor, has assembled a very serious and lively exploration of the notion of Media Studies 2.0 which we hope, and fully expect, will lead to further discussion in these pages and elsewhere.

Now to move on to our overall publishing policy: this will be a eneralist journal. It is our intention to publish the best work from the widest possible range, by subject matter and by approach: theoretical, empirical and historical of current research in communication and culture. Sometimes, as here, issues will be themed, others will be more general so that in the round, over time, our pages will address all interests. Our subject matter will be international, as will our contributors and we welcome submissions from both better and lesser known academics and departments. We will return to important topics with the intention of establishing informed, scholarly  conversations on matters of note. As in the best fiction, our ournal will have multiple storylines, and like good Cubists we will look at our subject from every possible angle.

Contents:

Editorial
Authors: Anthony McNicholas, Tarik Sabry, Mascha Brichta, Alessandro D’Arma, Daniel Day, Janne Halttu, Sofia Johansson, Salvo Scifo, Burcu Sumer and Xin Xin

Editorial introduction – Optimism, pessimism and the myth of technological neutrality
Authors: Paul A. Taylor

Media Studies 2.0: upgrading and open-sourcing the discipline
Authors: William Merrin

Critical Media Studies 2.0: an interactive upgrade
Authors: Mark Andrejevic

Beyond mediation: thinking the computer otherwise
Authors: David J. Gunkel

Sounds like teen spirit: iTunes U, podcasting and a sonic education
Authors: Tara Brabazon

Critical theory 2.0 and im/materiality: the bug in the machinic flows
Authors: Dr Paul A. Taylor

Audience Studies 2.0. On the theory, politics and method of qualitative audience research
Authors: Joke Hermes

Straw men or cyborgs?
Authors: Professor Jonathan Dovey and Emeritus Professor Martin Lister

Media Studies 2.0: a response
Authors: David Gauntlett

Review
Authors: Tero Karppi

Print ISSN: 1757-2681

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