Othermindedness

Series

• Studies in Literature and Science

Michael Joyce's new collection continues to examine the connections between the poles of art and instruction, writing and teaching in the form of what Joyce has called theoretical narratives, pieces that are both narratives of theory and texts in which theory often takes the form of narrative. His concerns include hypertext and interactive fiction, the geography of cyberspace, and interactive film, and Joyce here searches out the emergence of network culture in spaces ranging from the shifting nature of the library to MOOs and other virtual spaces to life along a river.

While in this collection Joyce continues to be one of our most lyrical, wide-ranging, and informed cultural critics and theorists of new media, his essays exhibit an evolving distrust of unconsidered claims for newness in the midst of what Joyce calls "the blizzard of the next," as well as a recurrent insistence upon grounding our experience of the emergence of network culture in the body.

Michael Joyce is Associate Professor of English, Vassar College. He is author of a number of hypertext fictions on the web and on disk, most notably Afternoon: A Story.

His previous books are Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics and Moral Tale and Meditations: Technological Parables and Refractions.

Praise / Awards

• "Michael's voice has, for many of us, become the embodiment of what it means to write and be written hypertextually: poetry, narrative, pedagogy, practice intertwined, each pulling at the other in productive and challenging ways. Othermindedness offers us a rich terrain for understanding our own work and for remaking that work in new and remarkable ways. . . . This is a book about interpersonal communication and interaction; this is a book about new ways of understanding communication technologies as more than mere extensions of our existing ways of work. Most importantly, this is a book about the growing pains and the self doubts of an emerging networked culture."
  ---Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award citation
  
• "Extending his original premise that the reader and author must collaborate, Joyce provides probing, amusing, inventive exploration---whether he is writing about his students' experiments with hypertext or about his forecasts to librarians on how one searches and gathers in this technological information age. He turns concrete anecdotes into allusion-rich speculations, plays with phrasing so that puns and parenthetical clarifications are themselves comments on fragmentation. And he achieves the opposite, using acute concrete metaphors to create ways of seeing intellectual/technological spaces. . . ."
  ---J. E. Gates, Jacksonville State University, Choice, March 2001
  
• "Joyce's poetic, hypertextual prose is often unsettling, demanding a type of reading that most readers are unaccustomed to. . . . Nonetheless, despite (actually, because of) the inevitable frustration and impatience that come with reading in a way one is not accustomed to reading, Otherrmindedness: The Emergence of Network Culture is a virtuoso performance and a provocative meditation on hypertext theory."
  ---Carlton Clark, Texas Woman's University, Rhetoric Review, Volume 20, Nos. 3/4
  
• Winner: 2000 Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award

• Winner: Computers and Composition (CC) 2000 Distinguished Book Award