Digital Fictions: Storytelling in a Material World (New Directions in Computers & Composition Studies)

When researchers in computer-mediated communications discuss digital textuality, they rarely venture beyond the now commonplace notion that computer textuality embodies contemporary post-structuralist theories. Moreover, when latterday Luddites criticize computer texts because they are not easily read in the tub, their attention to materiality is likewise blunt, addressing particular novelties of reading cybertexts, but not discriminating among particular forms and the different practices of reading and writing each form engenders. This book, written for students and faculty of contemporary literature and composition theories, is the first to move from a general consideration of how computers are changing literacy to a specific consideration of how computers are altering one particular set of literature practices: reading and writing fiction.

Suffused through the sensibility of a creative writer, Digital Fictions includes an historical overview of writing stories on computers, conducts interviews with the makers of hypertext fictions (including Stuart Moulthrop, Michael Joyce, and Carolyn Guyer), offers close readings of digital fictions, and makes careful analyses of the meaning-making activities of both readers and writers of this emergent genre. Embedded in a perpsective both feminist and semiotic, Digital Fictions explores and distinguishes between four distinct iterations of text-based digital fiction. Text adventures, Carnegie Mellon University's Oz Project hypertext fictions, and MUDs. Ultimately, the author revises the rhetorical triangle and proposes a new rhetorical theory, one that attends to the materials, processes, and locations of stories told on-line.