Michael Joyce
Overview
Vassar College
Vassar College is a private, coeducational liberal arts college in the town of Poughkeepsie, New York, in the United States. The Vassar campus comprises over and more than 100 buildings, including four National Historic Landmarks, ranging in style from Collegiate Gothic to International,...
, NY, USA. He is also an important author and critic of electronic literature
Electronic literature
Electronic literature is a literary genre consisting of works of literature that originate within digital environments.-Definitions:N. Katherine Hayles discusses the topic in the online article...
.
Joyce's afternoon: a story, 1987, was among the first literary hypertexts to present itself as undeniably serious literature, and experimented with the short-story form in novel ways. It was created with the then-new Storyspace
Storyspace
Storyspace was the first software program specifically developed for creating, editing, and reading hypertext fiction. It was developed in the 1980s by Jay David Bolter and Michael Joyce, who presented it to the first international meeting on Hypertext at Chapel Hill in October 1987...
software, deployed the ambiguity and dubious narrator characteristic of high modernism
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
, along with some suspense and romance elements, in a story whose meaning could change dramatically depending on the path taken through its lexias on each reading.
Quotations
There is no simple way to say this.
"Afternoon, a story|afternoon, a story" (1990)
I want to say I may have seen my son die this morning.
"afternoon, a story" (1990)
"Hypertext|Hypertext is a representation of the text which escapes and surprises by turns," I wrote. Given the pure unaccountability (it is literally impossible to read all the possible variations of a richly linked hypertext) a hyperfiction writer is always attuned to "how the reader will interpret the literature presented" since its presentation shifts and flows in its composition as well.
Interview with Michael Joyce in Pif (January 2000)