Narrative as Virtual Reality 2

Revisiting Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media
Erscheinungsjahr 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4214-1797-4
Verlag: Johns Hopkins University Press

Buch, Englisch, 304 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 496 g

Rethinking textuality, mimesis, and the cognitive processing of texts in light of new modes of artistic world construction.

Winner of the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies from the Modern Language Association of America

Is there a significant difference between engagement with a game and engagement with a movie or novel? Can interactivity contribute to immersion, or is there a trade-off between the immersive “world” aspect of texts and their interactive “game” dimension? As Marie-Laure Ryan demonstrates in Narrative as Virtual Reality 2, the questions raised by the new interactive technologies have their precursors and echoes in pre-electronic literary and artistic traditions.

Approaching the idea of virtual reality as a metaphor for total art, Ryan applies the concepts of immersion and interactivity to develop a phenomenology of narrative experience that encompasses reading, watching, and playing. The book weighs traditional literary narratives against the new textual genres made possible by the electronic revolution of the past thirty years, including hypertext, electronic poetry, interactive drama, digital installation art, computer games, and multi-user online worlds like Second Life and World of Warcraft.

In this completely revised edition, Ryan reflects on the developments that have taken place over the past fifteen years in terms of both theory and practice and focuses on the increase of narrativity in video games and its corresponding loss in experimental digital literature. Following the cognitive approaches that have rehabilitated immersion as the product of fundamental processes of world-construction and mental simulation, she details the many forms that interactivity has taken—or hopes to take—in digital texts, from determining the presentation of signs to affecting the level of story.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ryan, Marie-Laure

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturtheorie: Poetik und Literaturästhetik
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Wissenschafts- und Universitätsgeschichte
• Mathematik | Informatik EDV | Informatik Professionelle Anwendung
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Kulturwissenschaften
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften: Allgemeines Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, Formalen Wissenschaften & Technik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Figures and Tables
Preface
Introduction
Part I
1. The Two (and Thousand) Faces of the Virtual
2. Virtual Reality as Dream and as Technology
Part II
3. The Text as World
4. Varieties of Immersion
Part III
5. The Text as World versus the Text as Game
6. Texts without Worlds
7. The Many Forms of Interactivity
8. Hypertext
Part IV
9. Participatory Interactivity from Life Situations to Drama
10. Chasing the Dream of the Immersive, Interactive Narrative
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Ryan, Marie-Laure
Marie-Laure Ryan is a member of the Department of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and author of Narrative as Virtual Reality 2: Revisiting Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media from Johns Hopkins University Press.

Marie-Laure Ryan is an independent scholar and the coeditor of The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media.