Michael Joyce

Michael Joyce is a prize-winning novelist as well as a teacher of writing but he is perhaps best known as the originator of an art form. The Toronto Globe and Mail said that his hypertext novel, afternoon, "is to the hypertext...interactive novel what the Gutenberg bible is to publishing." Afternoon has been called "the granddaddy of hypertext fictions...a legend" by Robert Coover writing in The New York Times, "an information age Odyssey" by Pamela McCorduck writing in the Whole Earth Review, and "an arresting, intricate, delicately contoured prose sculpture" by Richard Grant in the Washington Post Book World. It has been translated into three languages and anthologized in The Norton Anthology of Postmodern Fiction His most recent hypertext fictions, Twilight, A Symphony, on CD ROM, and Twelve Blue, available without charge on the world wide web, were both published in 1996 by Eastgate. He has lectured and published widely on issues relating to hypertext and writing, and is part of the TINAC collective of interactive artists. During recent years he has been a keynote or featured speaker at the future of the book conference sponsored by Xerox PARC (Grenoble) and Umberto Eco's Centro Internazionale di Studi Semiotici e Cognitivi in San Marino; the Unspeakable Practices II and III Celebrations of Vanguard Narratives at Brown University, and the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) Technology in the 90s series. He has been on the program of most hypertext meeting sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) since their inception in 1987, and the European Conference on Hypertext (ECHT '92) in Milan. He serves on the editorial boards for Works& Days and the Computers and Composition journal. In recent years he has been increasingly active in interactive and collaborative arts communities on the internet. With Jay Bolter he has offered European Union sponsored workshops in interactive fiction for filmmakers in Munich during 1997 and 1998. Joyce's essays on hypertext theory and pedagogy are central to those fields, and his collection of essays, Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics (1995) was published by the University of Michigan Press. He is currently Visiting Associate Professor of English and Director of the Center for Electronic Learning and Teaching at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY.

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