Marie-Laure Ryan: Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (2001)
Filed under book | Tags: · computer games, fiction, hypertext, immersion, installation art, interactivity, literature, narrative, phenomenology, postmodern, reading, textuality, virtual reality
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
PDF (updated on 2013-6-28, some images missing)
Comment (0)Terry Harpold: Ex-foliations: Reading Machines and the Upgrade Path (2008)
Filed under book | Tags: · fiction, hypertext, literature, reading, screen, technology, text, theory
“Every reading is, strictly speaking, unrepeatable; something in it, of it, will vary. Recollections of reading accumulate in relation to this iterable specificity; each takes its predecessors as its foundation, each inflects them with its backward-looking futurity.” In Ex-foliations, Terry Harpold investigates paradoxes of reading’s backward glances in the theory and literature of the digital field.
In original analyses of Vannevar Bush’s Memex and Ted Nelson’s Xanadu, and in innovative readings of early hypertext fictions by Michael Joyce and Shelley Jackson, Harpold asserts that we should return to these landmarks of new media scholarship with newly focused attention on questions of media obsolescence, changing user interface designs, and the mutability of reading.
In these reading machines, Harpold proposes, we may detect traits of an unreadable surface—the real limit of the machines’ operations and of the reader’s memories—on which text and image are projected in the late age of print.
Publisher U of Minnesota Press, 2008
ISBN 0816651027, 9780816651023
368 pages
PDF (updated on 2013-1-23)
Comment (0)Sabrina Alcorn Baron, Brendan Dooley (eds.): The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe (2001)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1600s, censorship, europe, history, media culture, print, publishing, reading
The invention and spread of newspapers in the seventeenth century had a profound effect on early modern European culture and politics. The European pattern for the delivery and consumption of political information provided the model for the rest of the world. However, the transition to printed news was neither rapid nor easy and a greater circulation of news had widely varying effects.
Recent research has revealed much about the origins and development of news publishing in each of its European settings. This book is the first to bring this research together in comprehensive survey. The international contributors to this volume study all of the most important information markets in Europe.
Topics covered include:
* the relation between printed and manuscript news
* role of censorship mechanisms
* effects of politics on reading and publishing
* effects of reading on contemporary politics
What emerges from this research is a new view of political information as an enterprise, and of the products of information as commodities circulating far and wide.
Publisher Routledge, 2001
ISBN 0415203104, 9780415203104
310 pages
Keywords and phrases
corantos, Antwerp, Restoration Newspaper, Pory, Copenhagen, Venice, Marchamont Nedham, Spain, Dutch Republic, Habsburg, seventeenth century, Privy Council, Hamburg, Courante uyt Italien, England, newsbooks, censorship, Mercurius, Ben Jonson, France
PDF (updated on 2013-6-5)
Comment (1)