Of Two Minds

Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics

Michael Joyce


What happens to the creative process when the writer/artist/teacher moves within the nonlinear environment of hypertext?

Does the introduction of hypertext represent a shift in human consciousness comparable to the shift from the oral tradition to print, as some theorists believe? Hypertext readers choose the order of what they read and, since "readings" can include graphics, animation, and video, they also choose the form as well. The reader creates and shapes meaning and narrative and dissolves distinctions between writer and reader, making hypertext a revolutionary artistic medium as well as a valuable tool for learning and information management.

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 modes 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.

Return to New Books subject areas

6 x 9, ca 234 pages

ISBN 0-472-09578-1

cloth 29.95E (tentative)

December