Hilary P. Dannenberg

Abstract: Marie-Laure Ryan Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001 xiii + 399 $2395 paper Narrative as Virtual Reality offers the reader an impressive and multifarious panorama of theory, cultural history, and textual analysis While the state of the art of electronic narrative is one of the book's concerns, its historical breadth of vision and the multiplicity of narrative (and other) media that it investigates sharply distinguish it from other recent publications focusing more exclusively upon electronic media in the context of contemporary culture and postmodernism "Virtual reality" in the context of Ryan's study refers to the domain of art itself-be it Baroque architecture, the classic realist novel, or the interactive movie-all genres which receive discussion Ryan traces the changing narrative strategies that have characterized the development of art and the key shifts in its forms of engagement with the minds of audiences Ryan concludes that two major forms of response-immersion and interactivity-have fueled key paradigm changes in the history of narrative and human culture In immersion, the reader is completely absorbed in the domain evoked by the work of art and becomes oblivious to the here and now; the reader's consciousness is thus recentered in the fictional world Texts that promote an immersive response in the reader have a transparent textual interface: in order to experience the text as world, the textual level of mediation becomes a window onto another world By contrast, in interactive texts, the recipient engages playfully with the work of art and becomes conscious of the artistic discourse as textual surface: the work of art loses its transparent world-creating capacity and offers itself as a game As Ryan shows, in some of their manifestations, immersion and interactivity can be seen as opposing aesthetic forces-for example when we contrast the realist novel with postmodernist experimental fiction However, it is one of the most insightful and instructive contributions of Ryan's wide-ranging consideration of artistic forms and narrative genres that she shows how in fact these two different urges have powered art in many different ways, both complementary and contradictory Narrative as Virtual Reality offers a wide-ranging theoretical discussion in connection with a pluralistic and exciting range of textual examples Its account of cultural and literary history modulates between densely erudite theoretical discourse and Ryan's own explorations of a number of narrative texts which well illustrate the interplay of interactivity and immersion These discursive shifts are particularly successful due to the book's overall structure: its ten chapters are interspersed with seven "interludes" that describe individual works of literature At strategic points the reader is thus given the chance to enjoy readings of immersion and interactivity in practice in texts as diverse as the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, the interactive movie I'm Your Man, and Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler The central framework of Ryan's investigation is set out in two key theoretical sections that describe a poetics of immersion and interactivity As a prelude to this, an initial section discusses a further key concept, which, as Ryan shows, has been subject to a dizzying spectrum of semantic variations: the virtual Ryan's illumination of the many metamorphoses of the virtual is characteristic of her combined theoretical rigor, historical depth, and cultural breadth The virtual is traced from its Latin etymology through to more recent significations such as the concept of the "virtual machine" from the formative days of computer technology, and its contemporary semantic overlap with the concept of cyberspace in the popular imagination (Ryan also clears up this overlap by showing how virtual reality is a world-creating technology which simulates spatial environments, whereas the cyberspace of the internet is a network of links and jumps in "nonspace …

Abstract: Three decades of societal and cultural alignment of new media have yielded a host of innovations, trials, and problems, accompanied by versatile popular and academic discourse. New Media Studies crystallized internationally into an established academic discipline, and this begs the question: where do we stand now? Which new questions are emerging now that new media are being taken for granted, and which riddles are still unsolved? Is contemporary digital culture indeed all about 'you', the participating user, or do we still not really understand the digital machinery and how this constitutes us as 'you'? The contributors to the present book, all employed in teaching and researching new media and digital culture, assembled their 'digital material' into an anthology, covering issues ranging from desktop metaphors to Web 2.0 ecosystems, from touch screens to blogging and e-learning, from role-playing games and cybergothic music to wireless dreams. Together the contributions provide a showcase of current research in the field, from what may be called a 'digital-materialist' perspective.

Abstract: This article reflects on the current state of digital communication studies in the context of mass communication research. The objectives of the article are: 1) to characterize the enunciators and the contents of scientific conversations about digital communication; and 2) to sketch a map of possible interlocutors who might enrich this new research field. After quickly exploring the paradigms of mass communication studies, the article deals with the main theoretical conversations about digital communication. The second part of the article describes the transformations that the appearance of digital technology has generated in communication processes. The article concludes with an agenda of the main issues and partners that theoretical conversations about digital communication should include. The article analyzes the constitution of a new scientific field and describes the process that may, in the future, lead to the creation of a theory of digital communication.

Abstract: ion. For example, one of their categories is “Undesirable outcome” (1074), which seems to be at a level of abstraction above such categories as “Death of a loved one” and “Loss of a relationship” (1074; indeed, the second seems to be a case of the third which seems, in turn, to be a case of the first). But, insofar as they are concrete enough to count as prototypical, the categories they uncover are clearly in line with the preceding analysis. Thus, the eliciting conditions for sadness prominently include the two just mentioned, which are closely related to the prototype of happiness as romantic union. Other prototypes include “Discovering one is powerless” (1074), which is clearly related to the prototype of happiness as power. In relation to happiness itself, they isolate only three categories that are not overly abstract. These are “Receiving esteem, respect, praise,” “Being accepted, belonging,” and “Receiving love, liking, affection” (1075). The first is clearly connected with the prototype of happiness as power or authority. The third category is clearly related to the prototype of happiness as romantic union. The second category relates to both. Indeed, it relates to both in a way that bears on emplotment. Commonly, the conflicts that define the middle of a plot are resolved in such a way that the larger society comes together and there is an extension of acceptance and belonging in the end (e.g., through the reconciliation of parents and children in the romantic plot). In short, we seem to have some good prima facie evidence for positing two happiness prototypes. The point is not confined to modern America and Europe. Clearly, there were no broad scientific surveys or controlled experimental studies of emotion in premodern societies. However, there are highly regarded discussions and widely accepted ideas—such as the ancient Indic isolation of goals—that provide converging evidence. For example, Chikamatsu, widely thought of as one of the two greatest dramatists of Japan, wrote that, “The only happiness in this broad world” is “True love to true love” (234). The celebrated Malian Epic of Son-Jara states that “All people . . . seek to be men of power” (Sisòkò, I. 1277–78). Euripides’ Hecuba expresses both, lamenting the death of Astyanax: “if you had enjoyed youth and wedlock and the royal power that makes men gods, then you would have been happy” (200). These literary references lead to the second line of research. In order to consider cross-cultural prototypes in narrative, I set out to read a wide range of highly esteemed works of verbal art in unrelated literary traditions. I took up highly esteemed works as it seemed that they were most likely to express common narrative and emotional tendencies in a given culture or period. One crucial feature of a prototype-based account of

Abstract: Drawing on research in narrative theory and literary aesthetics, text and discourseprocessing, phenomenology and the experimental cognitive sciences,this paper outlines an embodied theory of presen ...

Abstract: This essay is the first of a two-part article examining the use of narrative in computer and video games, which provides an overview and discussion of the definitions and representation of stories,...