Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics (Studies in Literature & Science)

In Of Two Minds, noted hypertext novelist and writing teacher Michael Joyce explores the new technologies, mediums, and modalities for teaching and writing, ranging from interactive multimedia to virtual reality. As author of Afternoon: A Story, which the New York Times Book Review termed "the most widely read, quoted, and critiqued of all hypertext narratives," and co-developer of Storyspace, an innovative hypertext software acclaimed for offering new kinds of artistic expression, he is uniquely well qualified to explore this stimulating topic. The essays comprise what Joyce calls "theoretical narratives," woven from e-mail messages, hypertext "nodes," and other kinds of electronic text that move nomadically from one occasion or perspective to another, between the poles of art and instruction, teaching and writing. The nomadic movement of ideas is made effortless by the electronic medium, which makes it easy to cross borders (or erase them) with the swipe of a mouse, and which therefore challenges our notions of intellectual and artistic borders. Joyce makes it clear that we are not just the natural heirs but, through our visions, the architects of new technologies that promise to enact our visions as much as change them. The collection summons writing from artists, poets, teachers, scientists, and feminist thinkers, and in so doing builds on notions of human possibility as a basis for the broadest kind of conversation in what Joyce deems our increasingly multiple, polymorphous, and polylogous culture. "Weaving between theoretical speculations, reports of actual classroom usage, polemical addresses, and a rich web of allusions, Of Two Minds strongly makes the case that hypertext creates a topography of textuality that requires new modes of thinking about texts." --N. Katherine Hayles, University of California, Los Angeles A volume in our Studies in Literature and Science series.

In the early 1990's The New York Times called Michael Joyce's novel afternoon  "the granddaddy of hypertext fictions," while The Toronto Globe and Mail said that it "is to the hypertext interactive novel what the Gutenberg bible is to publishing," and Der TAZ  in Berlin called him "Der Homer der Hypertexte."  afternoon has been anthologized in the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Fiction and translated into various languages. He since has published numerous hypertext fictions on the web and on disk, including "On the Birthday of the Stranger" in the inaugural edition of Evergreen Review online, as well as the fictions Twilight, A Symphony, and Twelve Blue.

His most recent print novel, Was: Annales Nomadique, a novel of internet, was published by Fiction Collective 2 in 2007. Another novel, Liam's Going was reissued in paperback by McPherson and Company in 2009.  His first novel, The War Outside Ireland, won the Great Lakes New Writers Award. In recent years he has been collaborating in multimedia work with LA visual artist Alexandra Grant but has also taken more and more to poetry, with poems and translations published in Agni online, Beloit  Poetry Journal, FENCE, FOLLY (LA), Gastronomica, nor/,  Metamorphoses, New Letters, Notre Dame Review, Parthenon West, Spoon River Review, New Review, OR (Otis Review), The Common, The Iowa Review and THE SHOp (Cork).  His book-length sequence of poems, Paris Views, was published by BlazeVOX in  2012.

His collaborative multimedia work includes Lost Hills Hokku, (2009) text for paintings and video by Alexandra Grant's one woman show, "Bodies," at Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles September 2010; and The Ladder Series, (2007) text for four paintings by Alexandra Grant for "Focus" one-woman show, Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles.

He lives along the Hudson River near Poughkeepsie where he is Professor of English and Media Studies at Vassar College.