Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Is there a significant difference in attitude between immersion in a game and immersion in a movie or a novel? What are the new possibilities for representation offered by the emerging technology of virtual reality? As Marie-Laure Ryan demonstrates in this study, 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, the text applies the concepts of immersion and interactivity to develop a phenomenology of reading.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• List of Figures and Tables (p. ix)
• Acknowledgments (p. xi)
• Introduction (p. 1)
• Part I Virtuality
• 1 The Two (and Thousand) Faces of the Virtual (p. 25)
• 2 Virtual Reality as Dream and as Technology (p. 48)
• Interlude: Virtual Realities of the Mind: Baudelaire, Huysmans, Coover (p. 75)
• Part II The Poetics of Immersion
• 3 The Text as World: Theories of Immersion (p. 89)
• Interlude: The Discipline of Immersion: Ignatius of Loyola (p. 115)
• 4 Presence of the Textual World: Spatial Immersion (p. 120)
• 5 Immersive Paradoxes: Temporal and Emotional Immersion (p. 140)
• Interlude: Virtual Narration as Allegory of Immersion (p. 163)
• Part III The Poetics of Interactivity
• 6 From Immersion to Interactivity: The Text as World versus the Text as Game (p. 175)
• Interlude: The Game-Reader and the World-Reader: Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (p. 200)
• 7 Hypertext: The Functions and Effects of Selective Interactivity (p. 204)
• Interlude: Adventures in Hypertext: Michael Joyce's Twelve Blue (p. 225)
• 8 Can Coherence Be Saved? Selective Interactivity and Narrativity (p. 242)
• Interlude: I'm Your Man: Anatomy of an Interactive Movie (p. 271)
• Part IV Reconciling Immersion and Interactivity
• 9 Participatory Interactivity from Life Situations to Drama (p. 283)
• 10 Participatory Interactivity in Electronic Media (p. 306)
• Interlude: Dream of the Interactive Immersive Book: Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age (p. 332)
• Conclusion: Literature in the Media Landscape (p. 347)
• Notes (p. 357)
• Works Cited (p. 375)
• Index (p. 389)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

What is the difference between reading Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler? Very simply, according to Ryan (an independent scholar), reading the former requires immersion, getting lost in the novel, whereas reading the latter is a bit like a game, requiring the reader to interact with the text. Using these two models of reading, Ryan launches into a detailed, exhaustive (and exhausting) discussion of the ways that these reading strategies complement and conflict with each other in mining the spatio-temporal dimensions of virtual reality and narrative. In the midst of her theoretical musings about computer games, virtual reality, and digital installation art, Ryan provides brief literary interludes that focus her theory on texts from Baudelaire to postmodern sci-fi writer Neal Stephenson. Reduced to its bare bones, the argument is simplistic--both novel reading and virtual reality require immersion and interactivity--and could have been kept to a long article. Moreover, arcane phrases such as the "interactivity of hypertext merely allegorizes the aesthetic productivity of a certain form of imagination, without taking genuine advantage of the unlimited combinatorial resources of the electronic medium" make it difficult either to immerse oneself in the book or to interact with it. Graduate students and faculty. H. L. Carrigan Jr. independent scholar