Of two minds: hypertext pedagogy and poetics

Abstract

In Of Two Minds, noted hypertext novelist and writing teacher Michael Joyce explores new technologies, mediums, and modalities for teaching and writing, ranging from interactive multimedia to virtual reality. As author of Afternoon: A Story, which 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 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 poles of art and instruction, teaching and writing. The nomadic movement of ideas is made effortless by electronic medium, which makes it easy to cross borders (or erase them) with swipe of a mouse, and which therefore challenges our notions of intellectual and artistic borders.Joyce makes it clear that we are not just natural heirs but, through our visions, 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 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 case that hypertext creates a topography of textuality that requires new mod es of thinking about texts. --N. Katherine Hayles, University of California, Los AngelesA volume in our Studies in Literature and Science series.Michael Joyce is Randolph Distinguished Visiting Professor of English, Vassar College.