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

The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. — xvi, 400 p. — (Parallax: Re-visions of Culture and Society). — ISBN 0-8018-6487-9, 978-0-8018-6487-2.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.List of Figures and Tables
AcknowledgmentsVirtuality
The Two (and Thousand) Faces of the Virtual
Virtual Reality as Dream and as Technology
Interlude: Virtual Realities of the Mind: Baudelaire, Huysmans, Coover
The Poetics of Immersion
The Text as World: Theories of Immersion
Interlude: The Discipline of Immersion: Ignatius of Loyola
Presence of the Textual World: Spatial Immersion
Immersive Paradoxes: Temporal and Emotional Immersion
Interlude: Virtual Narration as Allegory of Immersion
The Poetics of Interactivity
From Immersion to Interactivity: The Text as World versus the Text as Game
Interlude: The Game-Reader and the World-Reader: Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler
Hypertext: The Functions and E√ects of Selective Interactivity
Interlude: Adventures in Hypertext: Michael Joyce’s Twelve Blue
Can Coherence Be Saved? Selective Interactivity and Narrativity
Interlude: I’m Your Man: Anatomy of an Interactive Movie
Reconciling Immersion and Interactivity
Participatory Interactivity from Life Situations to Drama
Participatory Interactivity in Electronic Media
Interlude: Dream of the Interactive Immersive Book: Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age
Conclusion: Literature in the Media Landscape
Notes
Works Cited
IndexTrue PDF