Product Description

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 mod es of thinking about texts." --N. Katherine Hayles, University of California, Los Angeles
A volume in our Studies in Literature and Science series.
Michael Joyce is Randolph Distinguished Visiting Professor of English, Vassar College.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3244933 in Books
• Published on: 1995-05-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Customer Reviews

Grandaddy of Hypertext
_Of Two Minds_ is an ambitious attempt to delineate ways in which hypertext can be taught and the ways in which it affects reading/writing and our relationship to reading/writing. Michael Joyce, a professor of English at Vassar College, is the author of the first hypertext novel (Afternoon, a Story) and worked with the programmer of the most commonly used hyper-fiction program "Storyspace." He is, then, one of the singularly most qualified voices on the topic of hypertext(ual) pedagogy. Joyce elucidates what is a still-emerging and vastly complicated field.

A good critique of the written language
Micheal Joyce does a good job explaining the fundamentals of hypertext in his book. He provides a clear delineation between what the differences re between exploratory and constructive hypertext. Considering I found this book at one of the 80% publishers list price sales, it proved his point that books are merely fleeting objects soon to be replaced. At most time sthe book is fairly straightforward, but during some of interstitials, the paragraphs required multiple readings to understand what he was saying. I hope to get some mileage out of his argument on the Highschool poliy debate topic this year:eduation. I guess I should probably read Landow now too.