This article is about the hypertext author and scholar. For the North Carolina town councilman, see Michael A. Joyce.

Michael Joyce (b. 1945) is a professor of English at Vassar College. He is also an important author and critic of hypertext fiction and electronic literature.

Joyce's afternoon: a story, 1986, 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 software, deployed the ambiguity and dubious narrator characteristic of high modernism, 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. (For instance, a hard-to-find series of lexias presented a new set of facts about the narrator's actions which dramatically affected the reader's judgment of him.) His Twilight, a symphony: a hyperfiction (1996) was a second hypertext story.

Joyce's books include War outside Ireland: a novel (1982), Of two minds: hypertext pedagogy and poetics (1995), Othermindedness: the emergence of network culture (2000), and Moral tales and meditations: technological parables and refractions (2001).

See also

• Jay David Bolter
• Robert Coover
• J.Yellowlees Douglas
• Electronic Literature Organization
• N. Katherine Hayles
• Shelley Jackson
• George Landow
• Lev Manovich
• Stuart Moulthrop

External links

• Michael Joyce author page from Eastgate Systems
• Michael Joyce's web page from Vassar College
• An interview with Michael Joyce

1945 births | Living people | Literary critics

Literary critics | Postmodern theory | American academics | American academics | American writers | Electronic literature